savannah

If you could see your whole life laid out before you, there__ be no reason to live it, right?

She rocked her hips into him and gasped. __o you have a sleeping cabin on this boat?_ His teeth brushed her ear. __es._ __o you have protection?_ Her question didn__ register through the haze of his hunger for her. __annons, a cutlass, and a few pistols._ She chuckled and kissed him again. __ow about condoms?

He finally had a reason to live, just in time to die.

Keegan rested his forearm on the wheel. __f the spell is fading, you could__e grown old with this woman. She never had to know you were the Quartermaster on the Sea Dog when it sank in 1795.___ll true._ Colton glanced over his shoulder toward the bow. __ut every man she__ ever known has lied to her. I didn__ want to be another one.

When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.

Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being "false," "untrue," yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction.

All that is left to bring you pain, are the memories. If you face those, you__l be free. You can__ spend the rest of your life hiding from yourself; always afraid that your memories will incapacitate you, and they will if you continue to bury them.

[Quoting Miss Harty:]"People come here from all over the country and fall in love with Savannah. Then they move here and pretty soon they__e telling us how much more lively and prosperous Savannah could be if we only knew what we had and how to take advantage of it. I call these people __ucci carpetbaggers.

I know._ He leaned in and brushed his knuckles across her cheek. __nd you can try and pretend it__ okay. That you__e strong and tough and you don__ need anyone. That you didn__ need her. But that__ all bullshit. I know it, and you know it.__avannah stared at Cole.__ou__e so pushy. I told you my story. Why can__ you leave it alone?___ave you ever dealt with it?__he__ spent so many years holding it all inside.____ here right now, aren__ I? I obviously dealt with my past._____ not talking about surviving it. Yeah, you survived it. But you haven__ let go of it._ He rubbed her arm. __hat she did to you mattered. It wasn__ fair.__e was wrong. She was fine. It didn__ matter. She had always shown everyone how strong she was.__how me how you feel, Peaches.__er bottom lip trembled. She got up, walked to the window to look outside, staring at the darkness, not really seeing anything but the years falling away, stripping away the cool, confident woman she was now, revealing the scared little girl she once was. She__ vowed to never go back to that place, to never revisit those feelings again, yet here she stood.Cole wrapped his arms around her. She stiffened.__t__ okay to be vulnerable, Savannah, to let someone see you scared._____ not scared. Not anymore.

She leaned against him, listening to his strong heartbeat as they cuddled together.Maybe he didn__ say all the right things, and maybe he didn__ do it all in the right way, but he was hers, and she was his, and they__ figure it all out together. Because she knew now that both of them were in this for the long haul, and that he__ be there for her no matter what.And that__ what counted the most.

What gave it away? When she loaded me bound and gagged into the back of her truck? Or when she actually said. "I'm ready to kill you and throw your body inn the swamp?"Hey for a while there, it looked like you were going to talk your way out of it. I didn't want to interfere.

..., imagine a loamy earth that starts with genocide, then adds a mix of further disease, wars, hurricanes, murder, great fires, dueling, insurrection and slavery, just to name a few of the many instances of tragedy. What dark seed would take root in such a disturbed and twisted soil?

I began to doubt that I would ever know the truth of what transpired, or who those people really were. But all that changed one rainy August afternoon, when I was surprised by a dead man who had answers.