Maya

“He used to believe that to forgive was to allow an offense to go unpunished. Now he finally understood that forgiveness was not about the past, but the future.”
― Sherry Thomas, His at Night

“A gentleman might have stopped then. She had climaxed, and she was still a virgin, and he was probably a beast for wanting to make love to her fully, but he simply couldn't...not.

She was his.

But not, he was coming to realize, quite as much as he was hers.”
― Julia Quinn, What Happens in London

“But really there was no hurry. It is time to love, he had said downstairs. And time was not always just one second long or even one minute or one hour. Those were artificial divisions, imposed by humankind. Time was infinite. And it was time to love...

...Even infinity had an end. They had loved. And somehow having loved was quite as beautiful as loving. For of course there was no real end to it. Infinity might have an end, but love did not.”
― Mary Balogh, The Secret Mistress

“He was a god above her, powerful, beautiful, larger than life. The light brought out the latent gold of his hair. The shadows contoured the perfect form of his body. Light and shadows converged in his eyes, bright lust, dark anger, and something else. Something else entirely. She recognized it because she’d seen it in the mirror so many times: a bleak, austere loneliness.”
― Sherry Thomas, His at Night