“This was maybe the first time she’d done it when she’d felt the true intimacy of it. The first time she’d done it because she wanted to express her feelings for a guy in some new way she hadn’t before. The first time it meant something.The fact was, sex with a man she cared for was making all other sex pale in comparison. No wonder sex with Mike had been the best of her life from the very start—caring for him had been…destiny.Destiny in Destiny.”

“He hadn’t been her first lover or the first boy to give her an orgasm. He hadn’t even been the first she’d loved. He’d been the first to turn her inside out with something as simple as a smile. The first to make her doubt herself. He’d taken her deeper than anyone ever had, and yet she hadn’t drowned. ”

“She wanted him. Not in the sweet way of poetry, though there was that music in the symmetry of his body, in the careful meshing of bone and sinew and flesh that made him.Her want was raw. Physical. She felt it in the palms of her hands and the flesh of her lips and the heaviness of her breasts.In her life, she’d been hungry, and thirsty. She’d needed sleep. She had never, in her life, needed to touch a man.”

“Her life was beginning to make sense again, although she couldn’t say she was enjoying it. But her mind was clear, and her heart was not constantly as heavy. Only when she thought about him. But she knew that in time, she’d survive it. She had done it before and would again. Eventually the heart repairs.”

“But it seems she’d wanted children after all, because when she was told she’d been accidentally sterilized she could feel all the light leaking out of her.”

“She had to kill him. She had to kill Beckett the next time she saw him or all she’d done to become an exquisite monster would be for nothing.”