What can I say? I have a thing for women who carry heavy books and know how to use them.

Sometimes she was absentminded. Sometimes it was far better to be absent from reality than present for its harshest truths.

It’s one thing to flirt with someone you’ve never met. But these? These are actual feelings. I’m not sure what they mean or what to do with them.

Sir Mark Turner,” he said. “I speak with the tongues of a thousand angels. Butterflies follow me wherever I go. Birds sing when I take a breath.

The road to hell was surely paved with cacao.

There were no knights, no castles, no magic. But there was laughter, and there was love, and while Judith still had breath in her body, she would make sure they had enough. Her life was already its own once upon a time. There was enough joy in the story, enough sorrow mixed in. It might not be the sort of tale that mothers told their children but it was still a good one. Not everything hurt. It would all turn out.

She wanted him to be right. She needed him to be wrong. And while that sounded as if she were confused, confusion implied uncertainty. And Margaret was dead certain that he was both the last man on earth that she should kiss, and the only one she dreamed of holding.

I think that’s when I understood that you only ruined my life because my life needed ruining. Because the life you rejected demanded that I spend all my time telling my daughter to be less and my son to be more.

If I had married, there is much I would not have learned of myself. This has been hard and painful and horrible. But I’ve learned that I’m stronger than hard, better than pain, and that with enough luck, horrible can go away.

Men touch their horses to calm them,” she said distantly. “They caress their falcons to remind them that they are bound. Touch smacks of ownership, and I am weary of being a possession.