“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“He looked down at his empty glass. "One of the other ways in which I am different from my father," he said. "I am not interested in marrying where I do not love."I spoke in a jesting voice. "And of all the women in the eight provinces, you have not been able to find one you could love?"Now he looked at me again, and his face was completely serious. "That's the problem," he said. "There is one.”