“Focus on someone else’s problems for a change, I instructed myself. You need the practice. From now on you’ll have to live in a world you didn’t make up. Horrible thought.”

“Do you still do the clubs?”Jake shakes his head. “You do the clubsbecause you can’t find what you need at home. I’ve got everything I need. I’ve got the answer to needs I didn’t even know I had.”

“I thought again how odd it was to be on formal terms with someone you had once permitted to lick your ears.”

“I don’t recall you playing much tennis. As for the gymnastics…"His sexy growl of a laugh seemed to snag Elliot in the guts. "Yeah, you do have some beautiful moves as I recall. They didn’t require a lot of footwork.”

“And I thought maybe I didn't need to worry about my heart anymore because it had stopped beating a couple of seconds earlier, and I was still sitting there living and breathing-though admittedly I wasn't feeling much of anything.”

“When you live with a potentially life-threatening condition you get used to the thought of dying. You accept it, you push on. The thing that scared me was the picture of dying slowly and painfully, the loss of independence and identity to illness.”

“He scooped up Victoria practically before she hit the ground, well within the five-second rule. If she'd been a potato chip, he could have still eaten her. Not something I particularly wanted to contemplate.”