“It might have felt easier if she'd been able to say that she moved across the room to him in a trance, as if he were a vampire exerting some kind of mind control. That would have been a cop-out, though. Not to mention a lie. She was exquisitely aware of every movement she made as she uncurled her legs, rose from her chair and walked slowly and carefully around the end of the coffee table towards him. She felt the wide hem of her yoga pants sway around her ankles, felt the nap of the blue-and-green area rug and then the cool smoothness of the wooden floorboards beneath her feet. She felt the way the thick sofa cushions gave beneath her as she sat beside him and the pull of gravity when his heavier weight made a deeper depression that her body rolled naturally into...And then she felt everything.”

“When you've lived as long as I have," he said, eyes heavy-lidded but definitely on her, "you learn to appreciate new sensations. They are rare in an immortal's life."She found she'd moved toward him. He hooked her arm around her waist, pulling her closer until she straddled him as he sat on a ledge below the waterline, her legs wrapped around his waist.He settled her firmly against him.Sucking in a breath, she said, "Sex isn't new to you," and rocked her heat over the exquisite hardness of him. Good didn't begin to describe how it felt. How he felt."No. But you are.""Never had a hunter before?" She grinned, nibbling on his lower lip.But he didn't smile. "I've never had Elena before." The words were husky, his eyes so intent she felt owned.”

“Her room felt wonderful to her, as usual. She looked around with satisfaction… She imagined to herself that she would always live this way, even after she had grown up and moved away from her family. She planned to have exactly the same room wherever she was, because this room was her. No matter what happened out there in the rest of the world, she felt totally comfortable once she got into this room and closed the door.”

“He felt that she wanted the soul out of his body and not him. All his strength and energy she drew into herself through some channel which united them. She did not want to meet him so that there were two of them man and woman together. She wanted to draw all of him into her. It urged him to an intensity like madness which fascinated him as drug-taking might. He was discussing Michael Angelo. It felt to her as if she were fingering the very quivering tissue the very protoplasm of life as she heard him. It gave her deepest satisfaction. And in the end it frightened her. There he lay in the white intensity of his search and his voice gradually filled her with fear so level it was almost inhuman as if in a trance.”

“Frederick?Had she really spoken? Certainly she'd tried, but her voice had failed to materialize and all she heard was the sound of her nightgown ripping as Frederick pulled it over her head and threw it aside. He was kneeling now between her ankles, pushing at her, forcing her knees apart and then her arms until she was entirely splayed on the bed beneath him. Nothing was said. Not a word. Ede felt his hand between her legs, forcing the way for the rest of him. Stop, she wanted to tell him. Stop. I don't understand what you're doing. But nothing - still nothing was said. He seemed to be raging inside her, moving his hips in a circular fashion, all the weight of his upper body help above her, resting on his arms, his hands pushing down into the mattress. Stop! But he didn't. Don't! But he did. Nothing. Not one word. The only sound he made was a choking noise in his throat at the end, as tough he might be going to strangle. But when he rolled away from her onto his back, she felt the shudder of his first free breath and she heard him sigh. It was over. Tonight. It was done. Ede could not bare the thought of seeing him, or of being seen. Still without speaking, she rose from the bed and through the dark, found her way to the bathroom. She had brought the torn nightgown wit her, but when she turned on the light and saw it, she threw it down in the corner. Ruined. Spoiled. Everything. When at last, she returned to the bed, Fredrick was sound asleep beneath the covers - and nothing - nothing - nothing was said.”

“There was a dumb misery about him that irritated her; there was a manly staying of his hand that made her heart beat faster. She felt her agitation rising, and she said to herself that she was angry in the way a woman is angry when she has been in the wrong.”