Quotes from Sherry Thomas

He imagined Holmes in her comfortable, four-poster bed at Hôtel Papillon in Paris. He imagined climbing into that bed, holding her tight, herwarmth spreading along his skin and into his sinews. The vision kept him going, dragging Mr. Marbleton along.

love is more like beef brought over from Argentina on refrigerated ships: It might stay fresh for a while under carefully controlled conditions, but sooner or later its qualities will begin to degrade. Love is by and large a perishable good and it is lamentable that young people are asked to make irrevocable, till-death-do-we-part decisions in the midst of a short-lived euphoria.

He had never been naked in a room with two women present, and certainly not two women whose sole focus was undressing a different man—he almost laughed as he came out from behind the screen.

The panic was sudden and complete. One minute Stuart was calmly discussing the proposed Customs and Inland Revenue Act with the Chancellor Exchequer, the next minute every last bit of his logic and rationality had deserted him. What if she'd met Michael and left already? What if she did not want to be found? The false sense of security that came from knowing where she was evaporated in a second.

She left the bed, pulled up a chair nearby, and resumed her knitting. He grinned with that same glee and put on a grown-up expression only when she looked up. But she'd seen his delight, and for a moment, he thought he again saw that smile in her eyes. His heart floated.

I am going to kill you - eagerly and with great satisfaction. Perhaps I am speaking figuratively; perhaps not. You will find out. Likely too late.

She glanced down at the muffin, as if debating whether to drench it with even more butter. The term Maximum Tolerable Chins popped into Mrs. Watson's head—it had come up the first time they sat down at the table together, the benchmark for whether Miss Holmes ate as she wished or gave in to the lamentable necessity to curb her appetite. With visible regret Miss Holmes set down her butter knife.

If all I have to do is remain awake to be considered romantic, than I can promise you a great deal of romance in our marriage.

Of course. Now she saw the error of her ways. She had been so consumed by the Vigenère cipher that she—horrors—hadn't been eating properly. A quick glance at the mirror told her that she was down to only one point three chins. No wonder her brain was so slow and unwieldy, like a steam engine on the last shovel of coal. Two more madeleines and she felt like a new woman.

Lord Bancroft had demanded that she source each fact and justify every opinion, while he played devil's advocate and asked why she didn't believe in the exact opposite of what she did.

Moreover, he was the sort of fortunate man who could eat what he pleased without having to worry about exceeding Maximum Tolerable Chins. In fact, Charlotte suspected that the more he ate, the leaner he became.

Now let me hear some details about dogs and lake." He gave her an account of the night. She listened attentively, though her knitting needles never stopped clicking. He loved that gentle, rhythmic sound. Although . . . perhaps that was simply because it waseasier to admit that he loved the sound rather than that he loved the woman.

Charlotte sat before her vanity, pinning up her hair and counting her chins.

But if the Wall kept proving itself useless, why did more of it get built?" Yu's voice dips even lower. "Because it seemed an obvious solution. It made both the emperor and the people think something was being done. And we have all, at some point, confused doing something—anything—with actually solving the problem.

Miss Holmes eyed a third slice of Madeira cake, but did not reach for it—possibly because she was approaching Maximum Tolerable Chins, the point at which she began regulating further helpings of cakes and puddings.

Charlotte exhaled—and wished that she had Bernadine's distaste for cake. Not always, of course, but for brief and intense spells that made it easier to give up extra servings in times of impending Maximum Tolerable Chins.

I miss hot cocoa with a burning passion," Charlotte sighed. "Every time I approach Maximum Tolerable Chins, I make solemn resolutions to be more moderate in my cake intake. And then a year passes and I'm at Maximum Tolerable Chins again.

She had always known her own mind and been competent at everything she did. And he had always taken great pride in her—when she'd been the feather in his cap, the envy of his colleagues, a woman who, despite the elevated circumstances into which she had been born, had found in him everything she needed. Except that had never been true, had it? She'd always needed more. And now she had it.

Hasn't it always been like this?' asked Charlotte. 'Haven't they always been games that empires play with one another?' 'Maybe,' answered Lord Ingram. 'But it can take a queen-and-country sort like me a while to work that out.

Perhaps he should have brought her something. Flowers. Or cake, if she had managed to reverse Maximum Tolerable Chins.

Stuart did not know why, but he was vulnerable to Madame Durant's food in a way that defied all logic. While his guests reacted favorably to the courses—Marsden in particular was ecstatic—Stuart was in the middle of seismic shocks, a piece of himself coming undone with each mouthful.

Fantasies were like prisoners, less likely to stage a revolt if allowed judicious amounts of supervised exercise.

So he thought of her often: when he could not sleep, when he was too tired to think of anything else, when he dreaded going home after weeks upon weeks wishing for quiet and solitude. All she had to do was lay a hand on his arm, her touch warm with understanding and care, and he would be all right, his cynicism soothed, his loneliness subdued, his nightmares forgotten.

He'd always associated her return with an extravagant happiness, the kind promised by fairy tales to keep children from despairing before life's indiscriminate hardships. But he'd believed it, moon-dust and starlight and all. It was not to be. They did not live happily ever after. The end.