What I Did for a Duke (Pennyroyal Green, #5)

by Julie Anne Long

But then irony, when delivered cold and shaved very, very fine, could sound like amusement.

And what was love if not a certain pleasantly deluded familiarity built up over years? If not a set of personal attributes set fire by imagination, the way, for an instance, one can look up at a night sky and see not just a random scattering of bright stars, but an enormous Starry Plough?

Directness often disguised as much as it revealed, and was a marvelous defense.

He didn’t dislike kittens. But life was too short to continue this conversation.

“Ah, but that isn’t the fault of the painting. It’s the prejudice of the viewer. For instance, isn’t the fault of your dress that when you turn it looks like a pond rippling beneath a full moon at midnight. Or that you resemble a naiad rising from the depths in it. It is the opinion of this particular viewer.”

But speaking with him reminded her of the first time she’d taken a sip of coffee. A bitter, foreign black brew, that grew more appealing, more rich and complex, the more necessary, the more she sipped.

“A proper kiss, Miss Eversea, should turn you inside out. It should . . . touch places in you that you didn’t know existed, set them ablaze, until your entire being is hungry and wild. It should . . . hold a moment, I want to explain this as clearly as possible . . .” He tipped his head back and paused to consider, as though he were envisioning this and wanted to relate every detail correctly. “It should slice right down through you like a cutlass with a pleasure so devastating it’s very nearly pain.”

“It should make you do battle for control of your senses and your will. It should make you want to do things you’d never dreamed you’d want to do, and in that moment all of those things will make perfect sense. And it should herald, or at least promise, the most intense physical pleasure you’ve ever known, regardless of whether that promise is ever, ever fulfilled. It should, in fact . . .” he paused for effect “. . . haunt you for the rest of your life.”

“Very clever people often assume no one else is as clever as they are. Which isn’t very clever of them, when you think about it.”

When one is satisfied with how the world appears, there is no need to look any deeper or farther. Peeking below the surface of things, one often discovers things one would rather not see, whether it is worms tilled up by the plow or wads of dust beneath a bed.

Except that she’d had a taste of winter, and winter, as it turned out, was incendiary.

He would ask nothing else from life if he would be allowed to protect and cherish her for the rest of his.

Like the measles, love is most dangerous when it comes late in life.

Because poetry was a barrier against raw emotions. It distilled them into bearable music, allowed one to accommodate them a little at a time.

Everything has a rhythm, Moncrieffe couldn’t help but think, watching. The sea, our breathing, our anguish, our love. We couldn’t endure the force of any of it all at once. It has to ebb and flow.