Private Arrangements Quotes

“Tenderness, that most alien and disconcerting of emotions, swelled and billowed in her. She picked up a cherry and stared down at the soft, bright-red fruit. “I love you.”
The last time she'd declared her love he'd thrown it right back in her face. She waited uncertainly for his response. She didn't even have to wait a second. He leaned over and kissed her on the mouth. “I love you more.”

- Gigi and Camden”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“He smiled at her. And it hit her like a mallet to the temple, the realization that she was in love with him. Stupidly, dreadfully in love with him.
Overnight, she'd become a fool.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“«She sat at the bow of a pleasure craft a stone's throw away, under the shade of a white parasol, a diligent tourist out to reap all the beauty and charm Copenhagen had to offer. She studied him with a distressed concentration, as if she couldn't quite remember who he was. As if she didn't want to. He looked different. His hair reached down to his nape, and he'd sported a full beard for the past two years. Their eyes met. She bolted upright from the chair. The parasol fell from her hand, clanking against the deck. She stared at him, her face pale, her gaze haunted. He'd never seen her like this, not even on the day he left her. She was stunned, her composure flayed, her vulnerability visible for miles. As her boat glided past him, she picked up her skirts and ran along the port rail, her eyes never leaving his. She stumbled over a line in her path and fell hard. His heart clenched in alarm, but she barely noticed, scrambling to her feet. She kept running until she was at the stern and could not move another inch closer to him (…) Gigi didn't move from her rigid pose at the rail, but she suddenly looked worn down, as if she'd been standing there, in that same spot, for all the eighteen hundred and some days since she'd last seen him. She still loved him. The thought echoed wildly in his head, making him hot and dizzy. She still loved him.»”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“That's right. Carrington didn't want to marry the likes of me. He had to be dragged kicking and screaming
to the negotiation table.”
“Did you enjoy the dragging?” He glanced down at her.
“Yes, I rather did,” she confessed. “It was amusing threatening to strip his house bare to the last plank on the floor and the last spoon in the kitchen.”
“My parents are convinced of your grief.” She heard the smile in his voice. “They said tears streamed
down your face at his funeral.”
“For nearly three years of hard work down the drain, I cried like a bereaved mother.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“Because being in love does not give you any excuse to be less than honorable, Lady
Tremaine.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“She touched him, placing her hand over his curled fingers, straightening them so that they were palm to palm, then she interlaced her fingers with his. Her fingertips were icy. A silent, dangerous thrill coursed through him. He wanted to pull her atop him and show her what awaited a foolish young woman who slipped into a man's bedroom in the dead of the night after having devoured him all evening with those dark, intense eyes of hers, setting his blood to simmer over three long hours.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“That was how he would go on tormenting her, after his physical departure from her life. A baroque plan, byzantine even, a plan that both pleased and shamed him.
He awaited only the night, this one grotesque, terrible night.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“He stopped and looked at her. “Your laughter is the same,” he said. “I used to think you all sophisticated and worldly, until you laughed. You still laugh like a little girl getting tickled, all hiccupy and breathless.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“He gazed at her until he could no longer stand the asphyxiation in his chest. He didn't know what he'd been thinking. Somehow he had thought—had hoped, in the baser chambers of his heart—that she might appear wan and wretched beneath an impassive facade. That she yet pined for him. That she was still in love with him, despite all evidence to the contrary. This woman did not need him.
... He tried to forget that he'd gawked at her like a hungry mutt with its front paws upon the windowsill of a delicatessen.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“There was no such thing as a marriage with one happy spouse. Both must be or neither.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“Gigi se olía una historia de Romeo y Julieta, una historia cuyo atractivo se le escapaba. La señorita Capuleto debería haberse casado con el hombre que sus padres eligieron para ella y luego haber tenido una aventura ardiente, pero muy discreta con el señor Montesco. No sólo habría seguido viva, sino que al cabo de un tiempo se habría dado cuenta de que Romeo era un joven imberbe y aburrido con poco que ofrecerle salvo bonitos tópicos. "Es el oriente, y Julieta es el sol". Por favor.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“Someone loved this girl, this utterly useless girl, loved her enough to go on wooing her, even though she was being paraded before all of Europe for takers. A moment of stark despair descended upon her that she would never know such love, that she would go through life sustained only by her facade of invincibility. Then she came to her senses. Love was for fools. Gigi Rowland was many things, but she was never a fool.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“He walked to the grandfather clock and pretended to check the time on his watch, when he wanted to grab the poker next to the grate and smash everything in the room. The children they were going to have. The life they were going to share. Everything slashed and burned in a vicious assault by reality. And her, oblivious to his pain, throwing away their happiness as if it were last week's bread.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“She'd never thought of herself quite that way. She was more an idiosyncratic ignorer of established boundaries than a glutton for the new and the uncharted. But perhaps they were one and the same, each one implying the other.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“He admired her surety. She knew her own worth and did not pretend otherwise for those who judged her on her parentage. But by refusing to tolerate fools and play nice, she'd condemned herself to a solitary path, both in defeat and in victory.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“- É aquele estupido marido que tenho. - disse para o velho cão. - Em vez de me dar uma trancada,bate no raio do piano. Vamos lá dizer-lhe para se calar.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“The story of what happened next spread like a well-fed gut.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“As she left, he began playing something as soft and haunting as the last roses of summer. She recognized it in two bars: Liebesträume. He and Mrs. Rowland had played it together that first night of their acquaintance. Even Gigi, incompetent musician that she was, could pick out that melody on the piano with one hand.

Dream of Love. All that she ever had with him.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements

“Somehow he couldn't believe that this was it, that their story would end with such wretchedness, as if Hansel and Gretel had become the witch's dinner after all, or Sleeping Beauty's prince a pile of gnawed bones in the Enchanted Forest.”
― Sherry Thomas, Private Arrangements