“I don’t believe I’m hearing this!’ she declared. ‘You’d been positively insulting about the fact that I knew nothing about Sicily—and just because I wanted to fill in a few gaps in my knowledge you make it sound like I had some kind of master-plan to ensnare you!’‘You didn’t need a master-plan, Kate,’ he told her starkly. ‘Your eyes ensnared me from the first moment I looked into them.”

“You look like my every fantasy come to life,’ he whispered, his voice deepening.‘How?’ she whispered back.‘Wicked. Abandoned. And…’She heard his hesitation, was intrigued by it. ‘And what?’‘Here,’ he admitted. ‘Now. On my bed after too long. Waiting for me to make love to you over and over again.”

“She shook her head, but it was too late, and he was pulling her into his arms and bending his head to hers and she supposed that she could have stopped him. Should have stopped him. But no power in the world could have prevented her lips from parting in a sharp little gasp of remembered pleasure as he drove his mouth down like a man who had been starved of kisses.”

“The feeling which rocked him took him completely off-guard, and her own corresponding gasps of pleasure as she spasmed around him made him tip his head back in a disbelieving kind of wonder as he came and came and came, his seed spilling uselessly into the condom.And then he rolled off her and gazed unseeingly at the ceiling.He hadn’t known it could feel quite like that.”

“Because Christmas did something to the world at large and to individuals in particular. It crystallized all your hopes and fears. It made you yearn and wish and dream. And no matter how hard you tried—it made you realize all the things you were missing in life.”

“Her big green eyes drove all conventional greetings clean out of his mind. Oh, what the hell? he thought savagely, and bent his head to kiss her.‘G-Giovanni!’ The suitcase fell uselessly from her hand and her fingertips went straight up to his shoulders, biting into the sensually scented leather with an abandon which gathered momentum with each thrust of his tongue as he kissed her with shameless abandon.”

“I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,I see my father strolling outunder the ochre sandstone arch, thered tiles glinting like bentplates of blood behind his head, Isee my mother with a few light books at her hipstanding at the pillar made of tiny bricks with thewrought-iron gate still open behind her, itssword-tips black in the May air,they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they areinnocent, they would never hurt anybody.I want to go up to them and say Stop,don't do it--she's the wrong woman,he's the wrong man, you are going to do thingsyou cannot imagine you would ever do,you are going to do bad things to children,you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,you are going to want to die. I want to goup to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,her pitiful beautiful untouched body,his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,his pitiful beautiful untouched body,but I don't do it. I want to live. Itake them up like the male and femalepaper dolls and bang them togetherat the hips like chips of flint as if tostrike sparks from them, I sayDo what you are going to do, and I will tell about it”