When Richard created the Purple Gentian, the talent for ancient languages that had stunned his schoolmasters at Eton had come to his aid once again. While Sir Percy had pretended to be a fop, Richard...
You don’t have any apples to offer while you’re at it, do you? she asked sourly.Satan tempting Eve in the garden? Not a terribly flattering role for me, is it? And you’re overdressed for the part.Amy’...
He smiled – a real smile. Damn. It was easier to deal with him when he was being thoroughly vile. Look, I’m sorry for being so rude earlier today. Your presence came as something of a shock and I reac...
Josephine!A stentorian bellow shook the candles in their sconces.Unconsciously, Amy grabbed Richard’s arm, looking about anxiously for the source of the roar. About the room, people went on chatting a...
Amy read Ovid and Virgil and Aristophanes and Homer. She read dry histories and scandalous love poetry (her governesses, who had little Latin and less Greek, naïvely assumed that anything in a classic...
Quite definitely a Bingley
It hurt to kill a dream, like tearing petals off a rose in full bloom.
If not hatred, put in her brother-in-law as the path broadened so that they could walk all abreast, what of love?Out of the corner of her eye, Mary saw her sister and brother-in-law exchange a sickeni...
Right now, I couldn't have cared less if someone had waltzed across the room in a large flower costume with a sign saying GET YOUR BLACK TULIPS HERE. Every nerve in my body was on man-alert, screaming...
When I was in Ireland, Letty blurted out, Vaughn was there, too.A hanging offense, to be sure, Mary drawled, in her very best imitation of Vaughn.The furrows in Letty's brow dug a little deeper, but s...
Inside, the festivities would continue, probably well into the night, with flirtation and merriment and gratuitous use of mistletoe. It was an inexpressibly wearying thought.
Jane’s been captured? Lady Henrietta surged forward like the statue on the prow of a ship.She’s gone in, Jack corrected shortly. Voluntarily.And you let her? Lady Henrietta’s eyes were as wide as they...
Colin rubbed his neck with his hand, regarding me like a hopeful puppy dog. Are you sure you wouldn't prefer just to fling something at me and get it over with? I leaned back against the cushioned bac...
There is, I have heard, a little thing called sunrise, in which the sun reverses the process we all viewed the night before. You might assume such a thing as mythical as those beasts that guard the co...
Well? inquired Jane. What do think?I think, he said deliberately, that if you have dragged me out to this inhospitable corner of the earth on nothing more than a bout of romantic whimsy, I shall be en...
If you'd like to sit here and fume about Dempster or whatever else it is that's eating at you, I said, warming to my theme, feel free to go right ahead. I'll just head off home and spend the evening w...
Amy wondered if Bonaparte could declare war on Miss Gwen alone without breaking his peace with England
I never sat down and said, 'I'm going to write historical fiction with strong romantic elements.' It was just the way the stories went.
They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next.
Do you have something to say? I prompted. Or do you just enjoy propping up the wall?Colin considered me for a moment longer. Aunt Arabella likes you.He sounded unflatteringly perplexed.There is a smal...