“As she took a deep breath, all she smelled was him, the scent going in her nose and blooming all over her body.Bastard, she thought. Irresistible bastard”

“He pushed harder, deeper into her, his thrusts taking on a restrained violence as if he needed to give her as much of him as she could take.He took on an almost desperate rhythm, digging his fingers into her hips. She was rising again, chasing after him. At the height of it, the man above her disappeared. All that was left were the sensations he pulled from deep within her, the heady, spiced scent of him and the laboured pant of his breath in her ear.”

“If he licked her there, she'd rob a bank for him. When she felt his tongue glide across her throat, she quivered all over. Mick tightensed his hold on her, and the bastard did it again.”

“Now look: Droplets of oil were dotted across the front of her best dress, over the mound of her stomach. She was clumsy and fat-stomached and she didn't even have the sense to wear an apron while she was cooking. Also she had paid way too much for this dress, sixty-four dollars at Hecht's, which would scandalize Ira if he knew. How could she have been so greedy? She dabbed at her nose with the back of her hand. Took a deep breath. Well. Anyhow.”

“She took a deep breath and it was her eighteenth birthday; it was Jess’s wedding and a summer evening at the pool; it was all those hundreds of times he’d been propped against her dorm building. And it was now, and she wanted to be this sophisticated, Audrey Hepburn-esque girl who gave him a coy smile and sauntered toward him, hips swinging. But this was Tam, and she wasn’t sophisticated for crap.”

“She fell into a deep pool of sticky water, which eventually closed over her head. She saw nothing and heard nothing but a faint booming sound, which was the sound of the sea rolling over her head. While all her tormentors thought that she was dead, she was not dead, but curled up at the bottom of the sea.”