Sherry Thomas

“To the beginning of the rest of our lives.- Leo”

“The next minute he realized what had happened to him, but not before she’d caught him staring.For a decade, I was fixated by her beauty. I wrote an entire article on the evolutionary significance of beauty as a rebuke to myself, that I, who understood the concepts so well, nevertheless could not escape the magnetic pull of one particular woman’s beauty.She knew. With surgical precision, she had peeled back his layers of defenses, until his heart lay bare before her, all its shame and yearning exposed.He could have lived with this if only he’d kept his secret whole and buried. But she knew. She knew.”

“The success of my rule does not rely on my ability to recite obscure Latin verse.”

“Just that I have loved you, even when I was nothing and no one to you, when you didn’t know my name and barely knew my face.- Leo”

“That the loss of a man, even if he had been the love of her life, was not the end of a woman's existence.”

“Some lovers were fortunate enough to grow old together. They’d grown old apart. She did not think him any less handsome. She only wished that she’d been there when the first line on his face had appeared, so that she could have stroked and kissed and cherished it.”

“The prince set her down and dismissed his valet. The latter left with a bow and closed the door. Leaning against the wall, the prince pulled off his stockings. As he walked toward the amethyst tub, he yanked his shirt over his head.He was lean and tightly sinewed. Her little bird heart thudded.He glanced at her, his lips curved in not quite a smile. The next thing she knew, his shirt had flown through the air and landed on the cage, blocking her view toward the bathtub.“Sorry, sweetheart. I am shy.”She chirped indignantly. It was not as if she would have continued to watch him disrobe beyond a certain point.”