“Helen had to blink a couple of times before she could stop staring and felt her face warm with embarrassment. There was nowhere to look that that wasn't filled with either man pretty or man manly, so she decided she was better looking at the kitchen floor.”

“Tipping her head, she stared into his tawny, hazel eyes, so intense, so burning-hot and all-consuming. Had she ever had a man look at her like that? Like she was all? Like she was everything? The center of his universe? Hell, screw the center … Law was looking at her like she was his universe.”

“And then she closed her eyes, and they could no longer touch her. She no longer embraced what they threatened. Linh was there, and when she reached for his hand, her own had become stiff and brittle, her arms become branches, and from her kees to her groin to her belly to her breasts came a covering, an armor of gnarled bark, and her hair, when she reached for it, had th easpect of leaves. She opened her eyes, alive, and she turned to look deeply and without fear into her boy soldier's face......the leader came and knelt down to look at Helen, and her mouth so full of liquid she gagged, spitting out Buddha and fragments of stone. The man picked up the small medallion and stared at her in wonder.”

“So if it wasn't fear or embarrassment,then it had to have been pride spurring her abrupt departure...and her parting words. At least,it better have been,because whether Bronwyn knew it or not, he was the last man she would ever know or touch.”

“That's when I started thinking about my sister.I thought about the time when she and her friends painted my fingernails, and how that was okay because my brother wasn't there. And the time she let me use her dolls to make up plays or let me watch whatever I wanted to watch on TV. And when she started becoming a "young lady," and no one was allowed to look at her because she thought she was fat. And how she really wasn't fat. And how she was actually very pretty. And how different her face looked when she realized boys thought she was pretty. And how different her face looked the first time she really like a boy who was not on a poster on her wall. And how her face looked when she realized she was in love with that boy. And then I wondered how her face would look when she came out from behind those doors.”

“She looked so irresistibly beautiful as she said those brave words that no man alive could have steel his heart against her.”