Wendy Belle wasn't the type of model foreign princes married. Yes, tall and graceful, but she didn't radiate a Grace Kelly-like cold beauty. Her lips were too sensuous for that, her eyes too mysterious. Her face was beautiful and perfect in its own w...
I'm sorry you don't like coming back here," her mother often said, to cap whatever petty dust-up they'd had. How could Emily explain: it wasn't her mother or Kersey she'd disowned, but her earlier self, that strange, ungrateful girl who strove to be ...
He kissed her, lay next to her on his bed, pulled her to him. Their foreheads pressed flat against one another, the admiration in their eyes intricately adjoined as one enchanted gaze, he said, "Stay." "Yes," she said. She knew what he meant. Stay wi...
He took the necklace out of the box and carefully fastened it around her neck. Just like he'd imagined himself doing when he bought it. That might even be why he bought it - so he'd have this moment, under her hair. He ran his fingertips along the ch...
What are you doing?” Nine Eleven asked, noticing Seth trying to look around him. He followed Seth's gaze. “Oh.” He turned back around and handed Seth a wry smile. “So what are you going to do about her, Seth? Create a love spell that will ben...
He saw himself in her eyes, suspended in two shining drops of bright water, himself dark and tiny, in fine detail, the lines about his mouth, everything there, as if her eyes were two miraculous bits of violet amber that might capture and hold him in...
ROSA MET ME at the door with a shotgun. Strictly speaking, not aimed at me, but you don’t really have to aim a sawed-off shotgun. She swung it toward me. “You, get in there.” She turned her attention to the crowd. “The rest of you will take a...
What is certain is that he [the baby] has too much attention from the one person who is entirely at his disposal. The intimacy between mother and child is not sustaining and healthy. The child learns to exploit his mother's accessibility, badgering h...
Somehow, Sydney had an internal clock that told her when time was up. I think it was part of her inherent ability to keep track of a hundred things at once. Not me. In these moments, my thoughts were usually focused on getting her shirt off and wheth...
Get me your manager.” Dove held her head high and tried to seem older and more self-assured. The teenager barely registered her request. “Do it now. My friend here is about to crap his pants. Do you want to smell it?” Dove slapped her hands dow...
The bride waits here," she said, running her hands along her hair, taking in her image but seeming to drift away. "This is the moment you think about what you're doing. Who you're choosing. Who you will love. If it's right, Eddie, this can be such a ...
The Place would already have started the leisurely, enjoyable process of digesting her into just one more piece of local gore-lore, half ghost story and half morality play, half urban myth and half just the way life goes. It would eat her memory whol...
He wished he could show her the memory of the very first time he’d laid eyes upon her. A random moment, his window to her world, and yet it had pierced his excuse for a soul as if it were destiny. As if she were his destiny. A thousand times he’d...
I think you’re the only person I know who gets excited over these dead things.” Freya returned his smile with her own grin and let the crossbow in her hands rest against her hip. “If you don’t think they’re even the teensiest bit fascinatin...
This time I read the title of the painting: Girl Interrupted at Her Music. Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen, as her life had been, snatched and fixed on canvas: one moment made to stand still ...
Miss Mitchell had a lovely voice, it was true, but Miss Mitchell speaking Italian was something celestial. Her ruby mouth opening and closing, the delicate way she almost sang the words, her tongue peeking out to wet her lips from time to time...Prof...
Why do want to find him so bad?’ I ask after a while, but she’s not listening. I watch her a bit longer. ‘Why do you want to find him so bad?’ I ask again. She blinks and comes out of her dream. She flicks the band on her wrist. ‘I just do....
Then Cassie told her story. The feeling was like gathering up everything she's ever done or felt or known up to that moment and tying it into a ball and pitching it with all her might as far away as she could, and then watching to see what would happ...
What have the nibblers ever done for you?" The breeze ruffled her hair, pushing it back from her face, giving him a clear shot of her eyes. They were asking for an answer. Needing to know if she could count on him. "They saved your life," he said. An...
The variations of the Duchess's judgment spared no one, except her husband. He alone had never been in love with her, in him she had always felt an iron character, indifferent to the caprices that she displayed, contemptuous of her beauty, violent, o...
He kissed the cord running between her shoulder and neck, his teeth grazing the skin. Clamping her thighs together, she struggled to breathe through the wave of desire. Biology dictated the amount of time it took for women to become aroused, nearly t...