“He raked his fingers through his hair. "She doesn't need me."Ralston smirked. "You are laboring under that mistaken impression that it is their job to need us. In my experience it is almost always the other way around.”

“He smiled, setting his forehead to hers. "you are very bad for me. I am trying to turn over a new leaf--I am trying to be more gentlemanly." "But what if I want you to stay a rake?" she teased, her fingers trailing down his neck and chest, fingering the buttons on his waistcoat. "A libertine, even?" she slipped one fastening from its seat and he grabbed her errant hand, bringing it to his lips for a swift kiss. "Callie," he said, his voice thick with warning as she set her free hand to the second button on his coat. "What if I want the rogue, Gabriel?" the question was soft and sweet. "What are you saying?"She kissed across the firm square line of his jaw and whispered to him, shyness in her shaking voice, "Take me to bed, Gabriel. Give me a taste of scandal.”

“And as the bullet ripped through his flesh, Ralston was consumed by a single thought: I never told her that I loved her.”

“Ralston looked down his long, elegant nose at the vile creature at his feet, and said, “You just impugned the honor of my future marchioness. Choose your seconds. I will see you at dawn.”Leaving Oxford sputtering on the ground, Ralston spun on one elegant heel to face Benedick. “When I am done with him, I am coming for your sister. And, if you intend to keep me from her, you had better have an army at your side.”

“I forbid you from frequenting taverns, public houses, or other establishments of vice.”She snorted in amusement. “Establishments of vice? That’s a rather puritanical view of things, isn’t it? I assure you, I was quite safe.”“You were with Ralston!” he said, as though she were simpleminded.“He was perfectly respectable,” she said, the words coming out before she remembered that the carriage ride home was anything but respectable.“Imagine—my sister and the Marquess of Ralston together. And he turns out to be the respectable one,” Benedick said wryly, sending heat flaring on Callie’s cheeks, but not for the reason he thought. “No more taverns.”

“She’d so believed he could—that decades marked by disdain for emotion could have been nothing more than a faint memory in his checkered past. That she could love him enough to prove to him that the world was worth his caring, his trust. That she could turn him into the man of whom she had dreamed for so long.That was perhaps the hardest truth of all—that Ralston, the man she’d pined over for a decade, had never been real. He’d never been the strong and silent Odysseus; he’d never been aloof Darcy; never Antony, powerful and passionate. He had only ever been Ralston, arrogant and flawed and altogether flesh and blood.”

“Brilliant blue gazes met. “I swear before you and God that I will. But if something should happen, and this morning should go awry, promise me you’ll take care of her. Promise me you’ll tell her…” Ralston paused.“Tell her what?”Ralston took a deep breath, the words bringing a tightening in his chest. “Promise me you’ll tell her that I was an idiot. That the money didn’t matter. That, last night, faced with the terrifying possibility that I had lost her…I realized that she was the most important thing I had ever had…because of my arrogance and my unwillingness to accept what has been in my heart for too long…” He trailed off. “What the hell have I done?”“It appears that you’ve gone and fallen in love.”