“I’ve thought of a reason,” Kit MacNeill said”

“Do you gamble, Captain MacNeill?”“Never, sir.”“No?” the marquis looked surprised. “Thought you soldiers were all inveterate gamblers.”“Only with our lives, sir. Never had anything else I could afford to lose.”

“Has he ever even said he loved you?""He's been telling me for years," she said softly, "I just wasn't listening”

“The sound of the surf mingled with the wind rushing in his ears, and still it did not drown out the sound of her voice: “Can you think of any reason why I should not stay?”A thousand. None of them good enough.”

“He wanted her. Her. Nothing could take that away from her. Ever. He wanted her, not the status he thought her purloined name could bring him”

“They locked him in the stockade for four days. No other prisoners occupied the other cells that ran the length of the room. He was alone, and that was fine with him. He needed to think, and that was best done in a place where he wouldn’t see Ginesse Braxton—Ginesse, not Mildred—because she did things to his thought processes, such as dammed them up completely.She acted and he reacted: viscerally, irrepressibly, and ruinously.She fell in the water; he dove in after her. She laughed; he smiled. She mentioned the beauty of the sunset; he saw colors in it he hadn’t ever noticed. She peeked at him from under her gold-tipped lashes; he grew hard as Damascus steel. Pomfrey said something derogatory; he wanted to kill the sonofabitch with his bare hands.Things like that.”

“She'd stood by that creed. No softness, because the world wasn't soft; lots of laughter, because if you were in on the joke, the joke couldn't be on you; And no wanting what you couldn't take, because the world never gave.Or so she'd thought.”