The Highwayman (Victorian Rebels, #1)

by Kerrigan Byrne

Love is quite like reading, I expect. Once you know how, you can’t ever imagine not doing it.”

Namely that when he loved, he did it nothing short of absolutely. Obsessively, even.

Dougan experienced a pang of love so intense and ferocious it felt as though it didn’t belong in this holy room.

For surely a creature so dynamic and powerful could do nothing chained in such a small cage but hate and whither and eventually die.

“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance.” The man quoted Confucius?

Fear and fascination proved to be powerful tools of seduction,

Farah enjoyed London at night. Mingling with the beau monde at Covent Garden, or attending lectures, concerts, and after-parties with the rather transitory crowd of novelists who came to England just long enough to get depressed and move back to Paris to write about it.

The city was ever split by an excess of wealth and poverty, of civilized progression and criminal erosion, and that weighed heavily on Farah’s mind tonight in the form of Gemma Warlow.

Words like family and children had disintegrated when she was very young, and she’d never quite been able to resurrect them without her heart breaking. Though something deep inside her clenched and ached at the idea of a child of her own. A family.

Except for the lightning in his eyes, and the way he’d reached toward her. Like a man in the desert reaches for a mirage.

How could warmth touch your heart when it wasn’t even allowed near your skin?

Only fear is stronger than love … and even then only if you allow it to be.

If only he hadn’t so many wounds. Some that no stitch could reach deep enough to repair and so they remained open and bleeding, festering until they poisoned the body with their putrid filth.

He liked to watch her. To scrutinize her when she had no idea she was being observed. He loved how her expression lit with the unguarded curiosity he knew she’d been born with. The way she reached for things that intrigued her, needing to touch with her hands and not just her gaze. The way she ran her fingers over her discoveries with an almost carnal relish as though, in her own innocent way, she found a sensuous delight from the entire world.

That maybe, through some Olympian feat, he’d appeared on this earth in his mature, powerful body, birthed by a potent, mystical darkness.

“How fitting that the color of blood is the one you prefer the most.”

There were too many people down there in the city. Too much color and noise, pleasure and pain, need and want and movement. Chaos in its purest form. So many suffered bereft of care. So many lived without a name. So many died, everyone died.

The economy would expand. Telegraphs would improve. Technology advance. And the world would become a small and manageable place, nothing but a ball trapped in the hands of greedy men like him until they closed their fists and crushed it.

She moved closer when she should flee. She soothed when she should scold. It had always been thus.

Where was his chill? Where was his armor of ice and calm? Why couldn’t he control this tempestuous firestorm of possession and fear and anger and despair?

Here they were again. A cold storm. A stone wall. A wounded boy. A lonely girl.

It was like returning to a home that had been destroyed and rebuilt.

She’d learn this man he’d become, renovate with her love what could be improved upon, and accept and adapt to what she could not repair.

The fingers that made a fist.”

“What if I broke her?” Dorian seethed, advancing on Murdoch. “What if I hurt her in my sleep, or worse? What if I lost my temper? What if I lose my mind?” “What if ye let go of yer past and she made ye happy?” Murdoch retorted. “What if she gave ye peace? Maybe a little hope?”

Diversion only took one so far. The mind was a powerful tool, but altogether useless when it came to matters of the heart.

Love and fear are the two strongest emotions known to the heart of man.

Argent regarded him with those trademark cold, shrewd eyes that seemed less like he saw you as a human, and more like a creature he’d like to dissect.

Beneath the cold logic and cruel calculation of every villain lay slumbering a mindless beast of wrath, greed, and lust.

“As long as you’re alive, you can choose to live. To be happy, even if it means starting over.”

He was once again that starving boy, trapped between his hunger and his fear.

They had a few things in common, her husband and the moon. They dominated the night. Created shadows and, yet, illuminated the darkness.

“You survived,” she said adamantly. “You survived when others didn’t. You had no other means with which to keep yourself alive. In order to stop the persecution, you had to become a man with a black heart.