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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
K.J. Charles
Read between
September 28 - October 2, 2023
oh, that there’s glory in the world, and some of it is here too.
It made me feel like the sort of person who cares.”
Caring. Kind, strong, funny, bloody good in bed, and entirely, utterly, the wrong man at the worst time.
“I face the past every time I look in a mirror. The past defaces me.”
“I don’t know, Luke. I don’t know how you might come to terms with things because it seems to me that you have set yourself not to, and I cannot see that it’s making you happy.”
It was important to be understood. That wasn’t something Rufus had ever considered before—he was himself, and other people were themselves, and one just got on with it.
Rufus wasn’t sure of any of that: he wasn’t used to considering finer feelings. He just knew that sometimes he didn’t understand, and it was those moments when he most wanted to pull Luke to him and tell him
laughing in the garden, Luke shone like the sun.
What is it you want to find that’s worth everything you’re throwing away?”
Come and see me later and we’ll discuss it.
“I’m sorry we didn’t do better. Me, Ma, all the Doomsdays. I’m sorry I didn’t see more, and I’m sorry your father hurt you and we let him.
but whatever trouble you’re in, whatever you need to get out of it, all the Doomsdays are standing ready to help. Because I don’t care what you did: nobody touches you on the Marsh while I’ve got my strength. Hear me?”
He’d hurt people he loved in far too many ways, and the sorry truth was, he’d done it deliberately. Not that his aim had been to hurt Rufus, but he’d behaved in a way that could only ever have had that result, so the distinction was academic.
He wasn’t afraid of trusting Rufus with a secret, and he wished he’d realised that earlier;
“You might as well say you should have stood a foot to the left. It doesn’t work that way.”
You’ll fall in love once and once only, and God help you if it’s a mistake because you’ll be stuck with it.
Strong passions, whether for people or gold or vengeance, could lead to terrible decisions.
but it would be more than architectural preferences.
but people should realise when things are not theirs to forgive.”
I’ve hurt people I love because of someone I loathed,
“I can change its consequences.
am angry. I’m so angry, about all of it, about what people did and didn’t do, about the whole wretched mess. It’s sat on my life like a toad and I’m sick of it. I’ve been angry since I stopped being afraid, and I wanted to find the money because at least that would be some sort of exchange, and somebody owes me something for this!”
We all need that last charity; none of us look good on a close accounting.
That’s a merciful good-hearted man, that one. Why shouldn’t he be kind to you?”
“That right? Funny how what he wants sounds an awful lot like what’s good for you.”
“Don’t ask me not to care. Don’t ask me not to act when you’re in pain. You asked me for my protection when we first met and I promised you’d have it. I don’t go back on my word.”
Because you’re looking after everyone in this house and you ought to have someone thinking of you.”
Said he never wanted it opened again.”
Luke shut his eyes, wondering if he had anything left to get wrong.
a reminder that there was no weakness in his kindness,
“Christ. My Doomsday. End of my world.”
for himself and Rufus, for a future without the ambition that had driven him all his adult life, for all the misery this damned money had caused and everything it couldn’t buy.
Aunt Sybil says he’s hard to love but it’s not true. What’s hard is making him see it when you do, because he’s already decided you don’t.”
“Because I loved you before, and I wanted you before. But also yes, because you told me the truth. I think you’ve been telling the truth all along, even when you were trying not to.”
wrapping himself around Rufus in the way he did, ivy on oak, and Rufus kissed him until Luke was no longer shaking and his body was warm in Rufus’s grasp.
“Do you think Lord Stone laughed when you did it to him?”
I love you, Rufus, unspeakably. I know I hurt you, and I’ll always be sorry, but I’m not going to forget how badly I hurt myself doing it either. I felt like I’d pulled my heart from my chest. I want you to love me, and me never to make either of us feel like that again, and if I have that, I’ve got everything.”
Everything could wait. Because Rufus, unquestionable earl of Oxney, was outside laughing in the sun, and Luke’s place was gloriously, perhaps a little unethically, but quite irreversibly at his side.
