“Decadent, rich chocolate; thick, silken, sweet cream; and the coolest breath of satin stroked over quivering skin... He was near...”

“You want me, Bella. Why are we playing this game?”Your voice is equal parts gravel and silk and I feel the question against my skin, pouring into my blood like an injection of heated desire.”

“Why don't you come with me and you can judge for yourself?" Challenge hung between them for a few minutes, then Rahve shrugged and rose from his seat. Cord was startled for about a heartbeat of time. He stood and grabbed his jacket off the back of his chair. "Have dinner with us."Rahve's smile was contemptuous."She doesn't know what you are, does she?""She knows everything she needs to know.”

“How can you love me if you don’t even know me?” He lifted my arms around his neck and placed his hands on the small of my back.“I know you, Jade. You’re witty and stubborn, like when you wanted to get rid of me at the bar in San Diego. And you’re sweet and caring, like when you talked to my mother at the hospital. And you can drink like a sailor. ” He chuckled. “And you hardly ever blush, but when you do it’s like the sunshine.” Then, he whispered in my ear with a husky voice, “And you make love with your soul.”Peter gave my earlobe a quick nibble. “I couldn’t care less about energy. It might have brought us together, but I only care about you. I want to spend the rest of my days with you; no matter if it’ll be ten or ten thousand.”Despite myself, I felt my eyes burn from tears I wasn’t ready to shed.Still, I couldn’t say it.“Peter...” I kissed him with all the tenderness I found in my heart and said, “the tub is about tospill.”“Oh, shit.” He jerked away from me, turned the water off and unplugged the tub, then huggedme again with wet hands. “All we need is time, Jade. You’ll see this love is real.”

“Josephy visited several leading Manhattan bookstores and sadly discovered the explanation [from his agent] to be generally correct; books about Indians were shelved in the back of the stores alongside books about natural history, dinosaurs, plants, birds, and animals rather than being placed alongside biographies and histories of Americans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, and other great world cultures. Puzzled, Josephy began asking bookstore managers for a justification of this marketing tactic and was informed that Indian books had “just always been placed there.” The longer he pondered booksellers’ indifference toward Indians, the more annoyed Josephy became with the realization that bookstore marketing tactics were simply a reflection of the pervasive thinking throughout the United States in 1961: Americans believed Indians to be a vanished people. “Thinking about it made me angry,” Josephy wrote in his autobiography, “and I vowed that someday, some way, I would do something about this ignorant insult.”

“Shock stung her into a quivering mass of pleasure when he captured one of her hands and fed it down to the velvet-smooth thickness of his penis, then urged her to stroke it between her legs.”

“His fingers painted my skin with ruby red patterns of desire. In Keahi’s kiss I could taste the red burn of chili encrusted in the rich sweetness of melted chocolate. I breathed in his scent and it spoke to me of vanilla. The ink of my malu tattoo began to burn, searing markings of fiery joy.”