She understood now why so many members of her kind died so young. It was possible to squeeze an entire lifetime of living into a single day: to live more, to more, in the span of twenty-four hours than most did in eighty years. Shape-shifters lived i...
The lengths to which you’re prepared to go to please a housekeeper make me wonder about the servant situation in Scotland. Good help must be thin on the ground.” Vale widened his eyes and took a drink. “She’s more to me than a housekeeper,”...
I knew what it felt like to have no say in who you were as a sexual being. It didn’t just strip away your dignity. It stripped away everything you were: your identity, your self-respect, your pleasure. Because it was all about the pleasure of the o...
I was just waiting for you to want me as much as I wanted you.” His words were quiet but carried one hell of an impact. “I knew we were going to be together; it was just a matter of time. I kept hoping that you would figure it out. But for a smar...
Then his lips were on mine and I lost myself, overwhelmed by the surge of Trey’s emotions as they flooded through me. I kissed him back wanting to forget my fear of being discovered of putting him in danger and focus only on how good it felt being ...
Each word was shaped with certainty, and I felt, more strongly than ever before in my life, that I had at last found my true path. I knew the story would change as I told it. No one can tell as tory without transforming it in some way; it is part of ...
I never feel so much myself as when I'm in a hot bath. I lay in that tub on the seventeenth floor of this hotel for-women-only, high up over the jazz and push of New York, for near onto an hour, and I felt myself growing pure again. I don't believe i...
-the apartment had been directly in the sight line of a Serb sniper across the river. Teta-Jozefina was a devout Catholic, but she somehow managed to believe in essential human goodness, despite all the abundant evidence to the contrary surrounding h...
Something snapped into my thinking then. Told is something that has been, something that is, and something that will be. Told was a noun and a verb. He was an active author. He was Told, he is Told, and he will be Told forever. Only we were in a time...
Inexplicably, I felt drops of icy sweat dripping up my back. I am aware that icy and sweat are contradictory by their very nature and should not be able to coexist in the same freakish bead of ICK WHAT IS THAT falling up my back. I am also aware thin...
I suspect he's sweet on Sophie and doesn't like to see her work too hard.' Tessa was glad to hear it. She'd felt awful about her reaction to Sophie's scar, and the thought that Sophie had a male admirer - and a handsome one like that- eased her consc...
While he was waiting, leaning on the counter at a coffee place, he remembered the dream he'd had the night before about Antonio Jones, who had been dead for several years now. As before, he asked himself what Jones could have died of, and the one ans...
how irrelevant the belief in God can be to religious experience—so irrelevant that the emotional structure of religious experiences can be transplanted to completely godless contexts with little of the impact lost—and when he had also, almost as ...
When she had him along, the world looked different, and she liked the way she saw things she'd never seen before. . . But she noticed other things, too -- the way she herself felt acutely visible with the baby in her arms, and the way some people's f...
Do you know where Jason is?” she asked Dmitri when they exited the morgue. Dmitri pressed the car remote to unlock the flame red Ferrari parked in the employees-only lot. “Tired of your Bluebell already?” A tendril of champagne circled around h...
I do feel that I’ve managed to make something I could maybe call my world…over time…little by little. And when I’m inside it, to some extent, I feel kind of relieved. But the very fact I felt I had to make such a world probably means that I�...
She raised her head when she heard my step, and her gaze met my own, over the matron's dipping shoulder, and her eyes grew bright. I knew then how hard it had been to keep, not just from Millbank but from her. I felt that little quickening. It was ju...
By the time they were pulling into the parking lot of the A&P, the mood was fading, the moment gone. Amy could feel it go. Perhaps it was nothing more than the two doughnuts expanding in her stomach full of milk, but Amy felt a heaviness begin, a fam...
Do you ever wonder whether people would like you more or less if they could see inside you? I mean, I’ve always felt like the Katherines dump me right when they start to see what I look like from the inside—well, except K-19. But I always wonder ...
These principles laid down as in variable rules: that one must pay a card sharper, but need not pay a tailor; that one must never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman; that one must never cheat any one, but one may a husband; that one must n...
When she turned to accept her crown from Gwyndolyn, Feraan saw that her face was flushed from drink and excitement. Her pale hair cascaded over her shoulders, shining like glittering moonlight. She was warm and soft, and he knew that because he had f...