With so many willing, complex women in the world, he had little respect for men who fixated on girlishness. Innocence was, by definition, an absence of experience – character – knowledge. To desire that absence seemed rather deviant.
I trust only you and the dark always to look at me so honestly.
I’m here,” he said into her ear, as the tears came faster. “Emma, I’m here with you now. Listen to me: I will always be here.“Always, she thought. He said “always,” but he had forgotten to say finally. Finally you are here. Thank God, finally at last.
Modesty, if you consider it, is the most unforgivable sort of falsehood: it’s a lie that does damage to no one but yourself.
She had told herself she should be reassured by his squeamishness; a man who balked at scars would not give her new ones. Now she suddenly wondered if she’d had it wrong. A man without scars would always underestimate their value. He would not see them as marks of courage.
Now, when he sat at the piano, he did not play music for the company the notes provided him. He played the music so she might hear it, and come a little closer to him as she listened.
If a woman could win love with her body, the world would have no bastards.
Miss Masters was not content with threatening to hire away his staff, oh no. First, she had to perfume it.
She knew his secret: for all his wandering, his independence and his unorthodox ways, he took his responsibilities very seriously. He even borrowed others’ responsibilities, making them his own simply because he thought this sort of service was owed to those whom he loved.
Alex understood such discipline. He knew the rarity of it, and the cost. And on the rare occasions when he happened to touch her, he did wonder what else she might have been, if she had not been so determined to be typical.
How could any woman’s skin be so soft? It was as if the world had never touched her.