I'm not entirely sure why I write.

How could she go on without him? And, at the same time, how could she go on knowing that every moment of their time together had meant so little to him.

This new world was already turning her into a cabbagehead, and she’d only been a part of it for an evening.

It didn’t matter the quality of the writing – Callie’s fantasies about her fictional heroes were entirely democratic.

Men are not nearly as evolved as women are, nor as intelligent, evidently.

Even as she’d come to know the real Ralston – the Ralston who was not cut from heroic cloth – Callie had failed to see the truth. And, instead of seeing her own heartbreak coming, she had fallen in love, not with her fantasy, but with this new, flawed Ralston.

I do not traditionally speak ill of women, but your governess is a cabbagehead.

But there, in that remarkable room, surrounded by a laughing, rollicking, unseeing collection of London’s brightest and wickedest, Pippa’s knowledge of anatomy expanded. It seemed there was such a thing as a broken heart.

I’ve loved him for a decade. And I had him for one day before I made a complete and utter mess of things. Or he did. I’m still not sure about that.

She winced, knowing what was to come, “Calpurnia.” She closed her eyes again, embarrassed by the extravagant name – a name with which no one but a helplessly romantic mother with an unhealthy obsession with Shakespeare would have considered saddling a child.