“Arthur takes a seat beside her. The colored lights bounce off his eyeglasses and Louisa loses all interest in time-travel technology. The future and the past disappear. All she feels is the tension between two bodies. How his head had been in her lap. How her hand had been wrapped inside his. The tension leaks down her throat. The belly. The muscle. And something forged. A weld. A softness. A vagueness that is rather quickly being sharpened into a point aimed directly at Louisa's heart.”

“Simon,” she whispered, vaguely surprised that she had just used his first name, for she had never used it even in the privacy of her thoughts. Moistening her dry lips, she tried once more, and to her astonishment, she did it again. “Simon…”“Yes?” A new tension had entered his long, hard body, and at the same time, his hand moved over the shape of her skull in the softest caress possible.“Please… take me to my room.”Hunt tilted her head back gently and regarded her with a sudden faint smile playing on his lips. “Sweetheart, I would take you to Timbuktu if you asked.”

“And when he'd hurried out as soon as Jane had been taken from the room, Louisa had mumbled something derogatory about the entire male sex.He hadn't taken offense. How could he?Molly was screaming her blasted head off and enduring hours and hours of pain, all to bring forth a child without her husband. At that moment, he had the utmost respect for women and nothing but contempt for himself and his kind.”

“All she could think of was how pure and unblemished, how soft and pink his baby skin had been. How his wonderful body, small and pristine, used to feel in her arms, how she'd kiss every inch of him, marveling at his beauty. When she was a new mom, she'd felt like she couldn't pull her eyes away. Now she cast her eyes back at her catalog quickly, not wanting to look at her own son, at what he'd seen fit to do to his beautiful body.....Not a big deal, Mom, he said reading her mind...Lot's of people have tattoos.”

“After soft kisses, they pressed their hands together palm to palm. The tingling scattered all over Livia's body, warming her. "Do you feel that?" she whispered with a smile. His lips moved in his silent count. Blake wrapped his fingers around her hand. She copied the movement. Their hands together now resembled a heart-not a cartoon rendering of the shape, but a real human heart. He touched her lips with his and murmured, "I've been feeling it since you first smiled at me.”

“Step by step she lived over every instant of the time she had been with Robert... She recalled his words, his looks. How few and meager they had been for her hungry heart! ... She wondered when he would come back. He had not said he would come back. She had been with him had heard his voice and touched his hand. But some way he had seemed nearer to her off there in Mexico.”