The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue (Montague Siblings, #1)

by Mackenzi Lee

Lucky for me as well, or else we might never have met, and then what would have been the point of my life?

Like a summoned demon, my father appears suddenly in the doorway to the dining room.

Well, this is turning a bit not good.

The great tragic love story of Percy and me is neither great nor truly a love story, and is tragic only for its single-sidedness.

A small shift in the gravity between us and suddenly all my stars are out of alignment, planets knocked from their orbits, and I’m left stumbling, without map or heading, through the bewildering territory of being in love with your best friend.

“France on the horizon, Captain,” I say. “Steel thyself, mate,” he replies.

I have lived most of my life as a devotee of the philosophy that a man should not see two sevens in one day,

It may be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, though it should be noted I have not had a very hard life.

Cheers to being no good at parties.” “I’m usually very good at parties. I think it’s the party’s fault.”

I’m sorry, am I boring you?” “No, I stopped listening a while ago.”

Perhaps fashion is just a reinforcement of a lady’s chastity, in hopes that the interested party may lose interest and abandon any deflowering attempts simply for all the clothing in the way.

the silence between us a very loud thing.

Perhaps this is what the Grand Tour is meant to do—show me the way other people live, in lives that are not like my own. It’s a strange feeling, realizing that other people you don’t know have their own full lives that don’t touch yours.

things can be more beautiful for having been broken.”

There are bodies buried beneath the flagstones of my parents’ estate, and some graves never green.

No secret so carefully guarded isn’t worth knowing.

God bless the book people for their boundless knowledge absorbed from having words instead of friends.

exhaustion is a houseguest that has rather overstayed its welcome.

“Ladies haven’t the luxury of being squeamish about blood,” she replies, and Percy and I go fantastically red in unison.

“To beauty, youth, and happiness.” He laughs. “Do we qualify for any of those of late?”

Love may be a grand thing, but goddamn if it doesn’t take up more than its fair share of space inside a man.

We’ve been here before. This is a silence we’ve shared.

And so it is that we come to be hostages to pirates.

From my first sighting, I fall in immediate and passionate love with Venice.

“What’s the use of temptations if we don’t yield to them?” “That’ll be chiseled upon your tombstone.”

And we are looking at each other, just looking, and I swear there are whole lifetimes lived in those small, shared seconds.

“As goes Henry Montague, so goes the nation.”

We are not broken things, neither of us. We are cracked pottery mended with lacquer and flakes of gold, whole as we are, complete unto each other. Complete and worthy and so very loved.

and there is sky all the way to the horizon. And what a sky it is.