“I nodded, pretending to be a hundred times more courageous than I felt.But that was the thing about courage. Sometimes you had to fake it to feel it.”

“I read once that courage is not the absence of fear, but the decision that something is more important than that fear.”

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the decision that something is more important than fear.”

“Okay, try this on for size, Tall, Dark and Handsome. I won't be born for almost seven hundred hundred years. How's that strike you?”

“Our faces were overly close, and in that moment something more passed between us. I’d never felt this kind of thing with a guy – such a connection. I knew, in my head, that we were practically strangers; but this thing – whatever it was – made me feel known. Seen. Acknowledged and appreciated and admired.”

“We are well," Hugh said, looking me over with more intensity than seemed proper. "And you?""I'm well, thank you," I said, lying through my teeth. I'd been better the day I took to my bed with measles.”

“And what of your children?" I gestured to the others at the table. "The only thing that divides us from that laborer who toils far beneath the surface of the earth in our fathers' mines is the blood that runs through our veins.""Or half our blood," Vivian said with a sniff."Vivian,"Mr Kensington warned.I didn't flinch. "Half my blood, then," I said with a prim nod back at Vivian. "But if I cut open my wrist alongside yours, would it not appear as the very same red? Despite your effort to be a blueblood, sister, you are as red-blooded as I.”