“When someone else's safety and acceptance in society is on the line, your personal discomfort comes in a very distant second.”

“He knew he tended toward gloom. It made him consider blood poisoning and heart attacks when someone else might see a touch of indigestion. Those carefully considered worst-case scenarios made him a good doctor, but they also made him feel like a dark little raincloud.When Lydia Charingford was around, though, he felt like a smiling dark little raincloud.”

““You don’t expect love.” She shook her head in confusion. “This is the second time you’ve said that. Is this going to be like one of those dreadful novels where you warn me not to fall in love with you, and if I do, then you’ll turn into Bluebeard and try to lop my head off? You’re handsome. You have all your teeth.” She looked into his eyes and lightly touched her hand to his cheek. He grew very still. “I can offer you no promises. If you’re any good in bed, I might fall in love with you. If that is going to be anathema…” “No,” he said swiftly. He looked away from her, and when he spoke again, there was a slight rasp to his words. “No. That would be perfectly…unobjectionable.””

“Maybe that’s what I have been looking for. When storms and rockslides threaten, I am looking for someone who will hold on to me and not let go.”

“Do not pollute my perfectly acceptable figurative speech with irrelevant facts!”

“When his eyes rested on her, he stopped. He’d been smiling before, in a friendly fashion. But what lit his face when he saw her was more than a smile, more than a grin. It was as if someone had thrown aside the curtains of a sickroom on a glorious morning, to let sunlight spill into every darkened corner.”

“Jenny: But surely Lord Blakely could not abandon his estates for so long.Gareth: No. Lord Blakely could not. Not unless he had someone he could trust to run his estates in his absence. And Lord Blakely...Well, Lord Blakely did not trust anyone.Jenny: Lord Blakely is talking about himself in the third person, past tense. Its disturbing.”