If you expect to never make a mistake with the people you love, you’ll only disappoint yourself. Over and over.

He’d shut the door on the subject of loss, thrown all the bolts, and shoved a heavy table up against it for good measure.

Don’t dare fancy you’ll be the man to teach me the pleasures of tenderness.” Tenderness was a rat whose neck she wrung with her own hands before hurling it over the hedge to rot with feelings.

She said no, and he didn’t assume she only needed the right sort of persuasion. He credited her with knowing her own mind. I vow it’s a pity he hasn’t any money. A lady would be lucky to be kept by such a man.

A lock of her hair escaped its pin and rode out on the wind, one more insubordinate part of her reaching for him.

In its place welled up that same dismay she’d known on her first viewing, some ten months past, of a naked man. Whose idea of good design was this? Why those awkward angles, and what could be the necessity for all that hair? If one believed, as the Bible and the Greek myths had it, that man had been created first and woman after, then one must conclude there had been some dramatic improvement in the process following that amateurish first attempt.

I’d think a man who has sinful thoughts, yet conducts himself decently, is a better exemplar of virtue than a man who’s never tested by such thoughts at all.

There was little point in mourning a thing you’d never had, and so she didn’t mourn, most days.

She’d been lovely the first time he’d spied her, distant and disapproving in church. She was lovely each time he peeled away her clothing, and when she lay in his arms, and when her features went dim and unfocused as he lost himself. But she was never lovelier than when she spoke this way, all afire with the knowledge of wrongs to be righted and good to be done.

He shook his head, the corner of his mouth ticking up. “My way this time, remember? No ordering me about. I place an embargo on the word harder.