A Lady Awakened Quotes

“In its place welled up that same dismay she'd known on her first viewing, some ten months past, of a naked man. Whose idea of good design was this? Why those awkward angles, and what could be the necessity for all that hair? If one believed, as the Bible and the Greek myths had it, that man had been created first and woman after, then one must conclude there had been some dramatic improvement in the process following that amateurish first attempt.”
― Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened

“Good.” He drank in her nakedness, fervent as a man downing ale after three days in the desert. His eyes, gleaming with unholy intention, came to rest on hers. “Now fuck me.”

The command knocked her back like a handful of dust in the face. But only for a moment. He was the one tied up. She folded her arms again. “If you want my cooperation you had better address me more politely than that.”

“Fuck me.” Like the world’s wickedest elocution pupil he articulated the words, lips and tongue and teeth put to such nefarious use. “Fuck me until I thrash and shout beneath you.”
― Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened

“Wicked, to be sure.” He repeated the word as though tasting it, his gaze now following her finger's progress. “Perhaps you'd better punish me.”


Good Lord, what next? “Punish you, indeed.” She advanced her finger just to the base of his erection and stopped. “Suppose I were to walk out of this room and leave you here alone until you remembered your decency. Would that be punishment enough?”


He smiled as though he were teaching her chess and she'd just made a clever move. “Maybe.” His eyes came to her face, and wandered in leisurely, thorough fashion down her body and back to her still finger. “Or maybe you ought to touch yourself. Pleasure yourself, and force me to watch.”


“Now I know beyond question that you've confused me with someone else.” Aplomb had company: his every shameless utterance was waking strange--or not so strange--sensations that spiraled from her core on out. “And I doubt you would take it as punishment, quite.”


"Darling, I would take it as torture.” Again he twisted against his bonds, so much power at her mercy. “Because you'd taunt me with it, wouldn't you? You'd place yourself where I could nearly reach you. And you'd say things to inflame me, but never touch me at all. I'd have to lie here helpless, watching you give yourself what you won't take from me.” He sucked in a breath. “Start now, if you would.”
― Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened

“The Widow Russell apparently took her at-home retirement so far as the abstain from receiving guests in the formal parlors: Theo was shown to a pink-papered upstairs room where she sat in an armchair whose chintz upholstery featured roses twining daintily on a white ground. She was head-to-toe in black, of course, and for a moment he had the very odd impression of a spider lurking in a rose bouquet.”
― Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened

“She’d been lovely the first time he’d spied her, distant and disapproving in church. She was lovely each time he peeled away her clothing, and when she lay in his arms, and when her features went dim and unfocused as he lost himself. But she was never lovelier than when she spoke this way, all afire with the knowledge of wrongs to be righted and good to be done.”
― Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened

“Every inch the terrible uncloaked fairy, at last.”
― Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened

“Gradually he covered his chiseled self, sitting in the armchair at last to pull on his boots. When that was done he came to the bedside and sank all the way down on his knees. His arms folded atop the mattress. His chin sank onto his arms. He looked at her, wordlessly. His eyes wore the raw marks of too little sleep. His hair bent in odd directions. He needed to shave. Her hand, without awaiting her permission, strayed from the mattress and settled against his cheek, to know what that texture was like. He turned his head and pressed his lips into her palm. Soft, unutterably soft, his kiss, where her skin tingled from the coarse touch of his tiny beard-bristles. Eyes closed, he stayed just so for several seconds, as though breathing in her hand’s particular scent.”
― Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened

“What had the Romans been thinking, with their Venus? Love ought to have been a man, tall and broad and glistening as he broke the surface, not to drift about on an insipid clamshell as the painters had it, but to stride under his own power out of the waves up onto land, the ocean’s bounty made manifest for every woman in a fifty-mile radius.”
― Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened

“A smile flickered over his lips, but found no purchase”
― Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened

“Seven and a half.” He breathed the words next to her ear.

Her eyes snapped open, all coffee-colored impatience. “You’re supposed to go lower, to meet me. Six and a half, you should say.”

“Eight,” he murmured into her shoulder. “And I’ll go lower, to meet you, any time you like.” He flicked his tongue across her spine and caught the little shock that went charging up from her tailbone to the base of her skull. When he lifted his head to look in the mirror, her cheeks were red and her chin was down, all fierce attention leveled on his watch.

Eight minutes it was, then. He kissed her, and kissed and kissed and kissed her until he knew that narrow path of skin, and the knobbly scaffolding underneath, the way he knew the lines on his own palm. He knew her scent, and he knew her taste, and he knew which vertebra put a catch in her breath when he brushed it with his lips. He could learn her whole body by mouth, if she would but let him, and distract her all out of her mind.”
― Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened

“Damnation, but she did make him feel like a king. She made him feel as though he’d always been one, muddling along just waiting for her to kiss him out of some enchantment into his birthright.”
― Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened

“No profit in tender thoughts of Mrs. Russell. If he were foolish enough to fall in love—and Lord knows he was foolish enough for most uses—his would be a solitary plunge. He would blink up at her, as from the bottom of a well into which only he had been careless enough to tumble, while she peered down at him with a disapproving face, because she liked a man to be dependable and he could not be relied upon even to watch where he set his feet.”
― Cecilia Grant, A Lady Awakened