An Impossible Impostor (Veronica Speedwell, #7)

by Deanna Raybourn

It was astonishing, I mused, how often people claimed to be honest when they were simply making a virtue of excessive rudeness.

“It is appalling,” I breathed. “I must have it.”

Lol

“Hello, wife.”

NO

Too late, I understood the magnitude of a woman’s vulnerability in marriage, how every particle of her happiness depends upon her choosing well. And I had chosen unwisely.

I had observed before that if the rest of the world’s folk were made of mud, Stoker and I were quicksilver, able to catch one another’s thoughts as easily as a swallowtail may be netted on the wing. We did not require one another, for neither of us was deficient. But we enhanced one another, we bettered one another.

What, I began to wonder, was the point of allowing a gentleman access to one’s bed and heart if he could not interpret a lady’s most irrational moods?

“I was so mired in misery that I could not see my way. Days, weeks, months, bled into one another. I cannot recall them. Not a single moment stands out in my memory as different from the rest. It was an endless twilight. Nothing seemed to matter. Until the day you burst into my workrooms and turned my life entirely upside down.”

You madden me. You distract me. You enrage me. I cannot think of any person of my acquaintance who has so often and so thoroughly driven me to the brink of endurance. And yet you saved me. Whatever that melancholy state, it has been banished, and I know it is because I wake every day knowing that you are there.”

But you, sir, are her past. I am her present and future. Your arrival here does not threaten that.”

“I would give them half the earth if it stopped them harming a hair of your head,”

may live ninety years and never will I understand how the workings of your mind can so closely intuit mine.”

Division from Stoker, in any form, was like an amputation of the soul, and I would do anything to bridge the abyss between us.