Estara

“That should cool matters down considerably," Aunt Arianne said, not sounding as if she'd been recently attacked by anything more than mild curiosity.”
― Andrea K. Höst, The Pyramids of London

“If she had been a normal female, she would have swooned. But she was not normal, never had been.

“Good grief, you are impossibly handsome,” she said breathlessly. “I vow, I have never experienced the like. For an instant, my brain stopped altogether. I must say, my lord, you do clean up well. But next time, I wish you would call out a warning before you come into view, and give me a chance to brace myself for the onslaught.”

Something dark flickered in his eyes. Then a corner of his hard mouth quirked up. “Miss Adams, you have an interesting — a unique — way with a compliment.”

The trace of a smile disoriented her further. “It is a unique experience,” she said. “I never knew my brain to shut off before, not while I was full awake. I wonder if the phenomenon has been scientifically documented and what physiological explanation has been proposed.”
― Loretta Chase, The Mad Earl's Bride

“Listening to him, Beatrice experienced the afternoon all over again, but this time there was no real danger. There was a boy who'd had a terrific idea that went a little off the rails and a girl who was a good sport and just the kind of sidekick you'd like to have along. Beatrice heard herself laugh when Benedick described her shooting off a man's hat, but it hadn't seemed that funny when it actually happened.

There was a sunniness in his words that somehow even disguised his appearance, erasing the boy shaking with exhaustion, flattening all his mercurial layers into one outfit of razzle-dazzle. But the razzle-dazzle was also real. That was the most baffling part of all. He was this, too.

She let him do it, not only because she came out looking all right in his story, not a clock-throwing ruin of a girl, but also because Benedick's talking about her as if she were already one of them made her one of them.

Words.

What a tricky, tangled science.”
― McKelle George, Speak Easy, Speak Love

“I mean, I kind of feel alphas are the romance equivalent of an impulse buy. It looks great in the shop but then you get home and it’s like where am I going to put this thing? It doesn’t go with my furnishings and it keeps trying to kiss me punishingly.”
― Alexis Hall