Quotes from Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Life is full of drowning people, ready and willing to drown you, too.

There were people out there who might live or die because of me, futures good or bad might be realized because of my choices. What right did I even have to be the one making them?

Home isn't a place. Home is the people who love you most, the people who will always love you, forever and ever, no matter what.

Nash. Grayson. Jameson. Xander." He said their names one at a time. "You were the clay, and I was the sculptor, and it has been the joy and honor of my life to make you better men than I will ever be. Men who may curse my name but will never forget it.

Xander smiled, and something about it made me want to cry. "Do you think it's okay," he said, sounding younger than I'd ever heard him, "that I loved playing those Saturday morning games? Loved growing up here? Loved the great and terrible Tobias Hawthorne?

Sometimes, having friends who were like family was a good thing, and sometimes, it was like having an endless supply of very nosy, very irritating siblings.

You hacked the FBI?" I said incredulously. "And Interpol," Sloane replied brightly. "And you'll never guess what I found.

Little-known fact about cheerleaders: They keep schedules that would make grown marines cry.

If I had a nickel for every time I almost died, I would have been driving to school in a Ferrari and flying off to Bora-Bora on the weekends.

I love you. I would die to protect you. I would make you hate me to keep you safe because damn it, Avery-some things are too precious to gamble.

Hawthornes aren't supposed to break, his voice whispered in my memory. Especially me.

I'd promised Grayson secrecy, but this was Hawthorne House. Most of the occupants were far too clever for their own good—or anyone else's.

Henry had a rare gift for sounding reasonable no matter what he was saying.

You don't have to kiss me now. You don't have to love me now, Heiress. But when you're ready...When you're ready, if you're ever ready, if it's going to be me - just flip that disk. Heads, I kiss you. Tails, you kiss me. And either way, it means something.

There was nothing left. Nothing of him, and nothing of me.

What the elf, Avery? What the everlasting mothing-foxing elf is going on there?

Blend in. don't make waves. Don't look up.' That was the mantra I lived by. But not today.

We're all liars sometimes.

Do you know what I thought when you tried to kill me? The first time? I thought, How can somebody want me dead when no one knows I'm alive?

There are a lot of ways to castrate a bull," I said, my words deliberate and slow. "You can band the balls off, so they shrivel up and die. Or you can take a knife, and slide it just so." I demonstrated with my free hand. "I grew up on a ranch. I know a lot about castrating bulls.

Hands reached past me to turn on the faucet. I should have jumped. I should have panicked. But somehow, my body relaxed into the person behind me.

But now all I could think about was that, yes, Harry used to scowl when I outmaneuvered him on the chess board, but his eyes had gleamed. He'd called me princess and horrible girl, and I'd called him old man.

I'd sold my soul to get out of detention.

If one thing was perfectly, crystalline clear, it was that I could take care of myself. I just kept coming and coming and coming. I was what I was.