More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
She should, she thought, be accustomed to impossible choices. If nothing else, her life ought to have taught her that. But it had not.
his gaze did not waver. There was something luminous in his conviction, more powerful even than his tired eyes or haggard complexion, and she allowed herself—for a few fleeting, stolen seconds—to find him beautiful.
“So you want to play their game? But make it yours?” “Ours.” The word tasted like a kiss, like the heat of her mouth under his.
“Nobody is as they were,” she said. “That is what life is.”
He shrugged. “Morgencald is mine. And I belong to Morgencald. It is who I am.” “You are not your name.”
She was beautiful. Though he was not callow enough to say it.
“I will never forget him. But”—he smiled at her, fingers brushing the back of one of her gloves—“I am beginning to realise I did not die with him.”
He wasn’t sure he’d ever felt quite this naked. But he’d also never wanted a woman’s attention more.
It had never occurred to him to question beauty before. He’d always assumed it was obvious, fine eyes or a trim figure, rosebud lips or hair of whatever colour was currently fashionable. But it wasn’t. It was details. The way you could wait forever for the dimple to appear beside someone’s mouth, unable to imagine ever growing tired of seeing it.
And thank God she didn’t know. The blood and the mud and the rain and the guns. The indignity of dying. The banality of killing. Life measured in twenty-second intervals.
...
The hazy sweetness of being cared for.
Nevertheless, she liked how she looked—how the garment shaped her, the way it seemed both soft and strong—and that was not a gift she took for granted.
She nodded, still giggling. And for an unguarded moment she let herself forget everything that made their situation impossible and allowed herself simply to be with him.
“Well,” he went on softly, “is a child of the body or … the heart? The mind? I am of my father’s blood, and he did everything he could to shape me in his image, but I…I have never felt like his son. I have increasingly come to understand I would not wish to.” “You are by far the better man.” “Few would think so. But from you”—he cast her a smile, sunbright and heedless—“it is praise worth having.”
they will have a life together
Oh, why had he not forgotten her? It would be better—for both of them—if he could. And yet part of her did not want him to. Had never wanted to forget him either.
“All the same, I have been unforgivably impertinent. I suppose I thought if I could once jump off a cliff, I could today at least find the courage to tell a woman that I desired her. Except a cliff is not a person, and I am not insensible to the inequities of rank. You … you deserved better.”
så fantastiskt skrivet att jag inte ved vad jag ska ta mig till
“I would marry you tomorrow if I thought you would have me.” In that moment she knew, starkly, that he meant every word, and it terrified her. “You … you’re mad.” That made him laugh. “I know madness, and this is not it. A word from you, a glance, and I would lay all I have—all I am, or at the very least what’s left of me—at your feet. And someday, when you are ready to hear me, and to trust me, I shall, and then you can have me, or not, as it pleases you.”
After all, had things been different—had she been born to the life she was meant for instead of the one she was given—she would never have met him in the first place.
wow
how to fit against him, where to nestle her hips against his, and anchor her shaking hands upon his shoulders.
Not when her will was at war with her wanting and everything was collapsing down to this one instant of connection.
“Sometimes,” he murmured, “and I can’t believe I’m saying this, for I am usually the one who needs to be told to stop thinking, it is enough to live in one moment, and let the rest take care of themselves.”
Her name on his lips.
She was caught like a deer between the river and the hounds, her only choices to say no and drown or say yes and be torn apart.
He … he really did think she was beautiful.
“I am not a joke,” she told him. “And I am not a mistake. I was born Lord Marleigh, but I am Viola Carroll. Do you understand? I am Viola Carroll.” “I…I…” He pushed himself to a sitting position, staring at her in a way she had hoped he would never stare at her. And his silence was a bloody thing. “I don’t understand.”
In France …” She paused and yet couldn’t seem to catch her breath. “I met a husband and wife, they took me in after I was injured. He was like me. The world…the world saw him the wrong way.”
🖤
Except now she was here there was only pain—hers old and deep and aching, his new and whiplash raw, turned against her like the guns at Waterloo.
“You were my closest friend. The best part of my life. The best part of me. You were…my joy, my hope, my faith in better things. All this time, I thought I’d left you. And it was you, who left me.”
But still. Louise was not truly to blame. Then again, nor was Viola, nor Gracewood, nor anybody. And perhaps that was the hardest truth of all.
So many fears had broken their backs upon the softness of his smile. And beneath his trembling fingertips: her skin, at last, uncaged.
Not for the first time, nor the tenth, nor the hundredth, Viola felt a twinge in her stomach talking to Little Bartholomew. It was foolish, of course, to miss what she could never have. And ungrateful to feel that lack most keenly when presented with the nearest substitute.
🖤
the inevitability of two people who had loved and hurt each other beyond reckoning.
“I’m sorry.” Lady Lillimere’s tone softened. “I’m being a little beastly to you, aren’t I? It’s just you look so pretty when you’re confused, I can’t help myself.”
I SAW GAY, SO I SAID GAY
“I’m a wild woman, found in the Forest of Arden and only partially re-civilised.” “How fortunate for me. I happen to prefer my women a little wild.”
🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈🏳️🌈
It was more than she’d have dared hope for or dream of. And it was anguish all the same. Ruin in kindness.
You don’t know how it feels for me to live in a body that has never felt my own. You’ve not seen the days when I can barely stand myself.
Kneeling in a garden and digging for imaginary gold with a child would ruin both her dress and her gloves, but in that moment there was little Viola wanted to do more. She settled herself beside Little Bartholomew and began surveying the ground.
“Were I a pirate,” Little Bartholomew observed, “I should make all of my precious stones look like ordinary stones. That way nobody would steal them from me, and I should be the richest pirate on the seven seas.”
No doubt he was flattering her, telling her she was an excellent player. Damn right she was. She will fleece you, old man.
This was what he had expected. Revulsion disguised as pity turned into uncertainty.
There was, Gracewood realised, a cold power in this. In turning one’s own weakness into a kind of weapon.
Not that there was any particular deficiency in the lady herself. But the woman who presently occupied his time was not the one who occupied his thoughts.
But this one woman—his oldest, dearest friend in the world—left him tongue-tied.
Having spent so many years dwelling on yesterday, it would be the height of folly to dwell instead on tomorrow, when there was so much joy to find in today.
“If he was not already dead,” Viola said softly, “I would wish him so.” “My sweetest friend.” His fingers tightened around hers. “When we are next at Morgencald we shall spit on his grave together.”
“And in the meantime, I shall arrange for her to see dissections and buy her books about monsters.”
“You’ll find a way. You have the rest of your lives to learn to be brother and sister.”
