Griff held out his empty hand. “Pauline, I’m here asking you – begging you, if it comes to that – to take my hand. Just take my hand, and promise before God you will never let it go. I will vow the same. Can we arrange for that to happen, someday soon? In a church?” After a moment, he added in a quiet voice, “Please?
It’s so curious, isn’t it? How if you’re denied something again and again, eventually you start telling yourself you didn’t want it in the first place.
And no matter how strenuously she pinned it, dark, heavy curls worked loose on all sides, like tentacles. Of course, it was an entrancing, strangely erotic octopus. Ransom worried this might be how fetishes developed.
There are all kinds of courage in the world, and most of it takes place far from battlefields.
There were parts of her spun from floss and held together with hope – and those bits were fragile indeed.
There was rock-hard, there was hard-as-steel, and then there was the solidity of Rafe’s current erection – which so thoroughly surpassed all his previous experience, he suspected it might be of interest to science.
He couldn’t escape it. She’d begun re-calibrating his senses the moment she came through that library door. His peripheral vision was now trained for flashes of golden hair: his ears, trained for her melodic laugh. He found himself following the drifting scent of her soap and dusting powder, like a dog panting after the butcher’s wife.
Hunger, after all, is a more potent seasoning than salt.
I’m attached to you, you idiot. You’re my best friend, and my brother by blood. No one who loves you expects you to be perfect. If by some miracle you managed it, we wouldn’t recognize you.
Never mind the curtains, you milk-livered, flap-mouthed dotard.
It’s only wasted time if you don’t learn from it.
What you don’t realize is that the world does not need more perfection. It needs more compassion and empathy.
Izzy felt as though she’d wandered into the third act of a play. She had no idea what was going on, but it was unbearably dramatic.
You laid black powder charges. To move a flock of sheep.” Pulling her hand from his grip, she studied the craters in the road. “Sir, I remain unconvinced of your sanity. But there’s no question you are male.
Perhaps... Perhaps he could make her happy. Not with the Granville money or his social cachet, but just by being the man he was, at his core. Sometimes, when he looked deep into those blue eyes, it felt like anything was possible.
Doubt not my love,” he repeated, with a chorus of knights to bolster him. “If men would seek to part us, death itself would be a veil too thin. For lo, though I wander the earth for my king, you remain – now and ever – queen of my heart.
Sometimes the devil you knew was easier to face than the devil who’d pressed you to a bedpost and rolled your nipple under his thumb.
The tears came, and she surrendered to them. There was no one to hear, and no one to see. She cried until her eyes were dry and her heart was empty. The foolishness of it all. She’d wasted so many years allowing the value he placed on her to dictate the way she regarded herself.
If you’ll only let me hold you, I won’t let you go.
He spoke the words that were most difficult of all. “Love me.