The Secret Pearl Quotes

“Why have you done all this for me?" She turned her head to look at him. "Tell me the truth."

He shook his head slowly.

"I don't think I could have been more terrified of the devil than I was of you," she said, "when it was happening and in my thoughts and nightmares afterward. And when you came home to Willoughby and I realized that the Duke of Ridgeway was you, I thought I would die from the horror of it."

His face was expressionless. "I know," he said.

"I was afraid of your hands more than anything," she said. "They are beautiful hands."

He said nothing.

"When did it all change?" she asked. She turned completely toward him and closed the distance between them. "You will not say the words yourself. But they are the same words as the ones on my lips, aren't they?"

She watched him swallow.

"For the rest of my life I will regret saying them," she said. "But I believe I would regret far more not saying them."

"Fleur," he said, and reached out a staying hand.

"I love you," she said.

"No."

"I love you."

"It is just that we have spent a few days together," he said, "and talked a great deal and got to know each other. It is just that I have been able to help you a little and you are feeling grateful to me."

"I love you," she said.

"Fleur."

She reached up to touch his scar. "I am glad I did not know you before this happened," she said. "I do not believe I would have been able to stand the pain."

"Fleur," he said, taking her wrist in his hand.

"Are you crying?" she said. She lifted both arms and wrapped them about his neck and laid her cheek against his shoulder. "Don't, my love. I did not mean to lay a burden on you. I don't mean to do so. I only want you to know that you are loved and always will be."

"Fleur," he said, his voice husky from his tears, "I have nothing to offer you, my love. I have nothing to give you. My loyalty is given elsewhere. I didn't want this to happen. I don't want it to happen. You will meet someone else. When I am gone you will forget and you will be happy."

She lifted her head and looked into his face. She wiped away one of his tears with one finger. "I am not asking anything in return," she said. "I just want to give you something, Adam. A free gift. My love. Not a burden, but a gift. To take with you when you go, even though we will never see each other again."

He framed her face with his hands and gazed down into it. "I so very nearly did not recognize you," he said. "You were so wretchedly thin, Fleur, and pale. Your lips were dry and cracked, your hair dull and lifeless. But I did know you for all that. I think I would still be in London searching for you if you had not gone to that agency. But it's too late, love. Six years too late.”
― Mary Balogh, The Secret Pearl

“But he was not Matthew. He was everything that Matthew was not. He was safety and comfort and warmth. He was home. He was everything in the world that was hope and sunshine. He took a step toward her and opened his arms to her, and she was in those arms without ever knowing how the distance between them had closed.”
― Mary Balogh, The Secret Pearl

“because once one’s experience was enlarged, one could no longer be satisfied with the narrower experience.”
― Mary Balogh, The Secret Pearl

“She wanted so badly to believe him. She sat on the edge of her bed and closed her eyes. And she realized what had been happening to her over the past weeks. He had been turning—so gradually that she had scarcely noticed the transition—from her nightmare into her dream. Because”
― Mary Balogh, The Secret Pearl

“He watched her go, wondering if life ever offered happiness in more than very small, very brief doses. T”
― Mary Balogh, The Secret Pearl

“If I loved you, Fleur,” he said, “and knew that you loved me, I would turn heaven and earth upside down to find you if you disappeared.”

Her eyes followed his scar up from his chin to his mouth, up his cheek to his eye. And she looked into his eyes.

“No,” she said. “No one loves that much. It is a myth. Love can be pleasant and gentle. It can be selfish and cruel. But it is not the all-consuming passion of poetry. Love cannot move mountains, nor would it wish to do so. I don’t blame Daniel. Love is not like that.”

“And yet,” he said, and his dark eyes burned into hers, “if I loved you, Fleur, I would move mountains with my bare hands if they kept me from you.”

She laughed a little uncertainly. “If,” she said. “Make-believe is a children’s game. It is very easy to live with ifs. But real life is different.”
― Mary Balogh, The Secret Pearl

“Wept for the death of an ardent and immature love that had been unable to bring any comfort or peace to the beloved. And wept for the woman he had taken to wife with such high ideals—the woman who had just killed herself rather than face a final illness with only his arms to comfort her. Wept for his own frailty and infidelity. For his own humanness. He”
― Mary Balogh, The Secret Pearl

“And yet he had taken her to that inn wanting to soothe himself with feminine compassion and warmth. Her very silence and self-possession had inflamed him, angered him. He had wanted her to reach out to him as no one had reached out for more years than he could recall, and she had looked at him with steady acceptance of what she must do to earn her living. He cursed softly and turned from the”
― Mary Balogh, The Secret Pearl