“Was he a good kisser, Ms. Lane?” Barrons asked, watching me carefully.I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand at the memory. “It was like being owned.”Some women like that.”Not me.”Perhaps it depends on the man doing the owning.”I doubt it. I couldn’t breathe with him kissing me.”One day you may kiss a man you can’t breathe without, and find breath is of little consequence.”Right, and one day my prince might come.”I doubt he’ll be a prince, Ms. Lane. Men rarely are.”

“Was he a good kisser, Ms. Lane?” Barrons asked, watching me carefully.I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand at the memory. “It was like being owned.”Some women like that.”Not me.”Perhaps it depends on the man doing the owning.”I doubt it. I couldn’t breathe with him kissing me.”One day you may kiss a man you can’t breathe without, and find breath is of little consequence.”Right, and one day my prince might come.”I doubt he’ll be a prince, Ms. Lane. Men rarely are.”

“Sit," Chloe said, dashing after him and tugging firmly at his sleeve. "Let's hear the rest of it. You can kill him later."~Chloe to Dageus.”

“It's often only in the lies we refuse to speak that any truth can be heard at all.”

“Now it's not just my lip you'll be needing to kiss if you're wishing to make amends with me, Irish.”

“Tuatha De do not walk the human realm alone. Actually, they don't walk alone much anywhere. Only the occasional rogue Fae will do so.""Like yourself?""Yes Most of my kind have no fondness for solitude. Those who walk alone are not to be trusted.""Really," she said dryly. "Except for me," he amended, with a faint, insouciant grin.”

“How dare the embodiment of her worst nightmare come packaged as her hottest fantasy?”

“...When a man first awakens, it sometimes takes several moments before he starts thinking clearly.""And here I thought it took several years, perhaps a lifetime for the average man's intellect to kick in.”

“But he didn't need to seek visual confirmation of what he'd just heard to know she had. And the truth was, he couldn't blame her. He'd not have let her die, either. He'd have moved mountains. He'd have battled God or Devil for his wife's life. She'd betrayed him. He smiled faintly.”

“It's hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows she the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it.”

“I can't find a man I want, and I'm beginning to think the problem is me. Maybe I expect too much. Maybe I'm holding out for something that doesn't even exist." She'd voiced her secret fear. Maybe grand passion was just a dream. With all the kissing she'd done in the past few months, she'd not once been overcome with desire. Her parents certainly hadn't had any great passion between them. Come to think of it, she wasn't sure she'd ever seen grand passion outside of a movie theater or a book.”

“Sighing dismally, she acknowledged that some things just weren't humanly possible - not even Martha Stewart could fold fitted sheets.”