“I forced a smile. It was the one I'd been practicing all morning. It felt tight at the edges and brittle everywhere in between.”

“Derek picked the spot? Had he been hoping I'd be blinded by the morning sun and stumble off the edge?”

“Sam: I felt like things were getting away from me. I'd found heaven and grabbed it as tightly as I could, but it was unravelling, an insubstancial thread sliding between my fingers, too fine to hold.”

“Isn't it supposed to be like this?" He smiled. "The glory of first love, and all that. It's incredible, isn't it, the difference between reading about something, seeing it in the pictures, and experiencing it?""Very different," I agreed. "More forceful than I'd imagined.”

“I tended to be hard on the egos of a certain kind of men. The ones who normally swept women off their feet had never moved me much, because I'd always felt that if they swept me off my feet they'd practiced on a lot of women before me, and would practice more with women after me. I'd rarely been wrong on that. ~Anita Blake”

“This whole time, I'd been so busy pusing him away, telling him watever was between us wasn't real. And now I'd realized the depth of what he felt for me- what I felt for him- he was gone.”