Quotes from Mary Balogh

It's all over now, Henry, he murmured soothingly. You are safe, my love.

I care to marry only a gentleman who loves me.

The need to cry was almost a pain.

And while she had held him and opened to him and called his name, because he was Marius and the man she loved, he had merely been using her as almost any man would use a woman who was so obviously available.

She had felt only angry until this moment—blindly, furiously angry. But now she felt unaccountably hurt too, and empty, and bereft.

He had even suggested that they get married without further delay. She often wondered what would have happened with their lives if she had said yes.

I want you to know—and I swear by all that I once held honorable that I tell the truth—that I loved you when we came here together . . . I loved you, Becky, with the whole of my being.

She felt annoyed that he of all people was to be the witness to her failure.

One thing at least was beginning to clarify itself in Elizabeth's mind. Their separation had not been brought about by his lack of love or by cruelty. Somehow there had been a massive misunderstanding. For six years each of them had believed the other at fault. Each had carried the pain and the bitterness all that time.

She remembered—oh, she could not stop remembering.

But it was into his eyes she looked, and having once done so, she could not look away again.

Love him she might, but she was not foolish or degraded enough to want to resume a relationship in which she had been treated with such contempt.

Perhaps he owed her an apology. But he did not want to apologize. For she represented all that had always most irritated him about the ladies who had crossed his path down the years. The entitlement. The assumption of superiority and power

And probably Sunday evenings too.

Of course, it was all a wild dream, anyway. She could never enter into high society again.

Would she never learn not to trust any man—at least not with her emotions?

Good-bye, Henry, he said. You are young. You will forget this episode soon and be happy again as you were when I met you. I am sorry that I have saddened you, my love.

They always quarreled bitterly when they were alone together—or they made love.

Did he think she was quite mad? What woman, having once lived through the experience of marriage and been granted the blessed release of her husband's demise, would ever freely subject herself to a life of such degradation again?

Sometimes his eyes could look dreamy. It was when he drooped his eyelids over them as he was doing now. It was a familiar, long-remembered look. His size, his nearness, his body heat, the smell of his cologne no longer seemed threatening. They became like a shelter around her, wrapping her in the sensual pleasure of the present moment, shielding her from everything that threatened from the outside.

She thought for one moment that he was going to kiss her and longed for the touch of his lips.

It is not easy to be a woman, is it? Especially a spinster.

He had suffered as much as she. She closed her eyes and laid her forehead in one shaking hand. What a revolutionary thought! She had accustomed herself for so long to the idea that he was a heartless wretch. Had he just been her own very dear Robert all the time?

nearest their window was horribly visible