“Who of us would have ended up where we are if someone hadn't had the good sense to interfere with us?”

“She clutched the train ticket tighter and waited for the sense of escape to come over her as it had a dozen times before, that heady sensation of having just scooted through the clanging gate, of eluding the thrown net. It didn't come. She was running again, but she wasn't escaping. She'd been chased to ground a long, long time ago.”

“I love you,” she whispered, gazing up into his pale gray eyes.He smiled crookedly, for a moment looking at her with a dazzled air. He had, she realized sadly, no experience hearing those words. He didn’t know how to react. “I figured as much.”This time, she didn’t hit him.”

“If you forget your lines, you had better mumble with conviction.”

“I love you, Ginesse. Don't you see? You are my Zerzura. You are my undiscovered country, both my heart's destination and journey. Gold and temples, jewels and gems don't hold one bit of your enticement. You are my Solomon's mine, my uncharted empire. You are the only home I need to know, the only journey I want to take, the only treasure I would die to claim. You are exotic and familiar, opiate and tonic, hard conscience and sweet temptation. And now I have no more words to give you, Ginesse. I only have my heart, and you already own that.”

“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.”

“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.”