At which Charion Pratt blushed girlishly, to her own furious embarrassment, yet the eye she cast upon the little coxcomb was not unlike that which a certain toad had once cast upon her: for there is never anything but apparent paradox in the choices ...
Without looking at him, Sera could feel Andrew brooding and watching her. Something was about to happen, is happening. She was bothered by his lips, his cheeks, his nose. Bothered by the veins on his arms, by the way his skin might feel. Bothered by ...
Not crazy in a 'let's paint the kitchen bright red!' sort of way. But crazy in a 'gas oven, toothpaste sandwich, I am God' sort of way. Gone were the days when she would stand on the deck lighting lemon-scented candles without then having to eat the ...
Find happiness where you can," she said softly. "It's not just the great big whammo things. Look for the beauty of life in the small things, and you'll be the happiest person alive.
I do not want to discourage you, but if you really feel something for Larsson TIGER, try to forget him! He is not the right man for you. In fact, he is not a right man for any woman in this world." She stands and walks to the bathroom saying, "Larsso...
Artistic integrity is not a guest whom one may choose not to invite to a gala. She must be the first you invite, the first you seat, the first you serve food and wine, the one who calls the orchestra's tunes, the one who is offered her choice of danc...
Jasmine believes in a prophecy that says she is destined to love a man named Josh Toby. Okay, fine. He could believe that. Hell, he had friends who believed carbohydrates were the work of the devil. True love made sense at least.
Well, I don't care," said Bird out loud, said Bird, who cared so much that she couldn't bear to touch the hurt. "I don't care. I ran away from Summer, and I will make my own castle. I will be my own queen.
She started thinking about all the euphemisms for death, all the anxious taboos that had always fascinated her. It was too bad you could never have an intelligent discussion on the subject. People were either too young or too old, or else they didn't...
Nobody around here had ever seen a lady beekeeper till her. She liked to tell everybody that women made the best beekeepers, 'cause they have a special ability built into them to love creatures that sting. It comes from years of loving children and h...
...and she would wonder if one can truly stop the inevitable. Was it as Ada had suggested, that we can choose our own endings, joy over sorrow? Or does the cruel world just give and take, give and take, while we flounder through the wilderness?
Then what’s this?” She raised her glass of expensive wine, used it to indicate their plush surroundings. His gaze followed her indication around the dim-lit, upmarket Italian restaurant. “Dinner in comfort.” “With a side order of persuasion...
He had to get inside. It was essential that he know everything, the routes she took, her schedule, and the lay of the land. The silver moon glowed overhead, mocking him. Somewhere in the trees an owl hooted its laughter at his failure. Randy--from Sp...
Seated at the table, high in her firmament of gin, she looked critically at her brother and his wife, remembering some real or imagined injustice of her youth, for with any proximity the constellations of some families generate among themselves an as...
The language of Cat's generation was far harder than that of her own, and more pithily correct: in their terms, he was a hunk. But why, she wondered, should anybody actually want a hunk, when non-hunks were so much more interesting?
Other times, I look at my scars and see something else: a girl who was trying to cope with something horrible that she should never have had to live through at all. My scars show pain and suffering, but they also show my will to survive. They're part...
He knew today that his life was forever changed in that one moment and he was clueless as to why or how it was. Never in his life had he ever felt that quick response to anyone. Breathless and unable to look away from her, like if he did she would di...
Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a s...
She was a little thing, too, inciting that basic compulsion in him as a man to protect her in so hectic a place as post-war Israel. Even so, his actions were borne out of an entirely different instinct, altogether: to fool her and anyone within a dar...
Amina would not know herself until years later, when she understood what it was to long for someone, to ache for their smell and taste on you, to imagine the weight of their hips pinning yours so precisely that you crane up to meet your own invisible...
Her gaze dims as her nostalgia for Palermo overcomes her. Those smells of seaweed dried by the sun, of capers, of ripe figs, she will never find them anywhere else; those burnt and scented shores, those waves slowly breaking, jasmine petals flaking i...
