Courtney Milan

Her lips found his and a stab of exquisite desire shot through him. This is what he's been waiting for all this time. Not a stolen embrace. A gift, freely given. One that he would keep forever in some small part of his soul.

I__ tell you to fetch a match, but you have always had your own spark.

His past followed him around as faithfully as his shadow.

I keep everything hidden because there's nothing about my true self that anyone likes. I'm not difficult, Sebastian. I'm the easiest person around. I don't belong, and I spend all my time pretending I do. Sometimes I get weary of it, and that makes me angry.It's not fair to the people around me when I lose my temper. I say awful things when I'm angry. But it's not fair to me, either, that I was made this way.

He wasn't good with this sort of thing - with the back-and-forth dance between man and woman. He wasn't even sure if they were dancing, or if she was merely being polite.

When someone else's safety and acceptance in society is on the line, your personal discomfort comes in a very distant second.

She wagged a finger at him. __ou__e mispronouncing that word._ __our pardon?_ He groped, trying to remember what he__ said. __uffragette? How does one pronounce it, then?_ __uffragette,_ she said, __s pronounced with an exclamation point at the end. Like this: __uzzah! Suffragettes!

I hated you,_ she continued, __ecause you have done nothing more than abide by rules that every gentlewoman follows every day of her life. Yet for this prosaic feat, you are feted and cosseted as if you were a hero._ She felt nothing as she spoke, but still her voice shook. Her hands were trembling, too. __ hate that if a woman missteps once, she is condemned forever, and yet the men who follow you can tie a simple ribbon to their hats after years of debauchery, and pass themselves off as upright pillars of society.

A man must claim responsibility for his own temptation, and not pin it on the woman who arouses him. It__ a gown, Sir Mark. Not even one of my more daring ones.

What would one do if one were forced to choose between saving an innocent child__ life or engaging in unchaste behavior? This is, after all, the choice that some unfortunate women are put to__ell their bodies, or see their children starve.

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

One mustn__ justify day-to-day morality with extraordinary circumstances. Otherwise, we would all feel free to rape and murder at the drop of a cat.

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.

He knew taht many of his compatriots avoided marriage at all costs. They saw matrimony as an annoyance, a wife as another person who would nag and prod. But when he repeated his vows, he heard "as long as we both shall life" and he hoped.

She looked like a woman talking about astronomical parallax, and that made her brilliantly beautiful.

If a man ever lets you know that he sees marriage as a trap, and women as nothing but scheming connivers, you are by no means to marry him. Any man that sees your entire sex in so harsh a light has nothing to offer you.

This is why people are so hard to understand. I cannot even estimate their gravitational pull.

Friendship was a concept men bandied about to save face when they were rejected.