Amy was mentally packing for a midnight flight to the mail coach to Dover (plan C), when Jane’s gentle voice cut through the listing of ovine pedigrees.Such a pity about the tapestries, was all she sa...
There was nothing the least bit radical about her. In fact, she was the most conventional creature alive. She believed in true love, and loyalty to one's monarch, and death before dishonor. It was jus...
There was a curiously ferocious quality to their lovemaking, as if it were a competition to see which of them could elicit the greater response from the other. It was as though they were trying to sco...
The urge to turn his back until his stepmother went away was strong, but the urge to talk about Jane was stronger. You were her chaperone? Jack said, the words half lost on the wind.Chaperone, second...
That's a good point, I suppose,' he said in that way people have when you've just said something that's so off the mark it might as well be in Sanskrit, but they like you, so they want to make somethi...
She feigned a sip of her wine. It was claret, not port. It was, she thought, very like Nicolas to travel with his own cellar into a region famed for its wines. I shall always think of you as a friend....
Richard! On Hortense’s lips, the name was soft and exotic, Reeshard.She demanded of him in French, When did you return?Richard bowed over Mme Bonaparte’s hand before kissing her daughter’s. I returned...
Patience is only a virtue when there is something worth waiting for.
Jane leaned her head against a rough bit of brickwork. She couldn’t say that she hadn’t been warned. She’d known what Jack was before they began working together.But she hadn’t known all the other thi...
It's the exile's dilemma. The home they yearn for is never the home to which they return. If they return.
It would be, like all of Pammy's parties, hot and crowded and filled with impossibly glamorous people with hip bones so sharp they could qualify as concealed weapons.
It was the usual sort of academic battle: footnotes at ten paces, bolstered by snide articles in academic journals and lots of sniping about methodology, a thrust and parry of source and countersource...
Her mother would be appalled, but she wouldn't say anything. She would just telegraph her distress with tightened lips and raised brows. She was good at that. Clemmie's mother's brows were better than...
He glanced at the woman in purple, who was smirking fondly at Jack’s father in a way that filled Jack with darkest foreboding. We wanted to surprise you.Jack looked from his father to the woman in pur...
He appreciated her as a companion; he admired her as a comrade; he wanted her as a lover. All innocuous enough each on its own. Put together . . . Christ. What a coil.
What is love?Jane had asked Nicolas, when he had professed that emotion, unasked. It hadn’t been coyness. It had been a genuine question.She knew what the poets said of love; she knew what great men a...
Unfortunately, I knew exactly what I was suffering from. LIPID (Last Idiot Person I Dated) syndrome: a largely undiagnosed but pervasive disease that afflicts single women. My roommates and I had come...
This was what the poets couldn't put in their poetry, she thought dumbly, the rush of desire so fierce and pure it made one shake, all on the force of a word.
Richard found his quarry in the library.‘Selwick!’ The Honourable Miles Dorrington flung aside the news sheet he had been reading, leapt up from his chair and pounded his friend on the back. He then h...
Patience, she said in her best governess voice, is only a virtue when there is something worth waiting for.