Quotes from Mary Balogh

And who did you think I was, Diana Ingram? You were my fantasy lover, she said. And I realize with every ounce of foresight in my body that I will be teased about this for the rest of my life. By me? he said, looking down at her, one eyebrow raised. Me tease the woman I love? You malign me, Diana. I have one question, though. How do I compare with my competition?

You are a remarkably attractive woman, Elizabeth, and six years has been a long time. I should not say no to an invitation to your bed.

He hated himself with a depth of hatred he had never felt for anyone else.

All children are mad daredevils. I suppose we become too staid and dull as we grow up.

But it increased the pain tenfold to wonder if he did still retain some of his love for her. It seemed so cruel that they now lived close to each other, meeting with fair frequency, and both free, yet that they could never mean anything to each other.

Oh, but I do," Henrietta said earnestly. "' Twill come between us, Anna, and I have so enjoyed having a friend.

He wanted desperately to love her, to be able to make her happy, to be a family with her and their children. He wanted the dream—home, wife, children, love, happiness. Not fleetingly—gone almost before he could grasp it, darkness at its heart—but forever.

It is perhaps unwise to allow one person to influence one's decisions . . . People can disappoint us, you know.

He looked windblown and out of breath and ... virile. What a horrid, shocking word. Where had that thought come from?

one must not give in to defeat after just one try, or even, perhaps, after twenty.

Good-bye, Elizabeth, he said. I wish things might have been different for you and me.

How could he doom her to spend the rest of her days with him?

was made up of choices, all of which, even the smallest, made all the difference to the rest of one's life.

Then I thought that once my year of mourning was over and I put off my blacks, I would also put off the worst of my grief. And perhaps that has happened. But sometimes I think that grief is preferable to emptiness. At least grief is something. I have come to realize, I suppose, that they are not just dead. They are gone. There is nothing there where they were.

Get angry, Elizabeth. Curse him. Yell. But don't keep on grieving like this. Please, love.

She willed herself to show no emotion. She steeled herself for the kiss on the hand that she half expected. She came near to crumbling when he kissed her instead, very gently, on the lips. Had he not gone immediately, in fact, without even stopping to look into her face again, he would have seen the tears spring to her eyes; he would have heard the sobs that felt as if they would tear her ribs apart. But he had gone.

The memory of his treachery would harden her against her own heart.

I had to forget you, force you from my thoughts and my heart. I could not have stayed sane else.

And so she placed her hand in his and he gripped it firmly. She was touching him again after six long years. For a moment she forgot time and occasion. It could be no one else's hand: warm, broad, capable. She had once thought she could put her whole life in it and be safe.

He loves you, you may be sure.

What are you doing here? she asked. It seems that you ask me that every time we meet, he said, and I always have the same answer. I wish to talk to you.

And so this was the end. The end of a friendship that had brightened his life through most of his adulthood. Not the end of his love. Now that he was conscious of it again, that would live on, perhaps for the rest of his life.

They had talked and talked, planning and dreaming of a future that was not meant to be.

Damn him! Damn Robert Denning, Marquess of Hetherington. How could she be expected to sleep peacefully knowing that he was under the same roof? Was he sleeping dreamlessly? Or was he restless too, troubled perhaps by his conscience? He did not appear to have one, but perhaps it troubled him in his sleep. The thought was somehow comforting.