Above all else, be true to your heart. When you marry, whether it be a marquis or an estate manager (or both!), it will be for life. You must go where your heart leads and never forget that love is the most precious gift of all. Money and social status are poor substitutes for a warm, tender embrace, and there is little in life more fulfilling than the joy of loving and knowledge that you are loved in return.

If one didn't have love, was it better, then, to be alone?

And, she was able to tell herself with some satisfaction, the man in question - one Colin Bridgerton - felt precisely the same way.... ....His earth shook, his heart leaped, and Penelope knew without a doubt that his breath was taken away as well. For a good ten seconds. Falling off a horse tended to do that to a man.

The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.

Michael nodded tersely, eyeing a table across the room. It was empty. So empty. So joyfully, blessedly empty. He could picture himself a very happy man at that table. "Not feeling very conversational this evening, are we?" Colin asked, breaking into his (admittedly tame) fantasies.

Love is blind,” Harriet quipped. “But not illiterate,” Elizabeth retorted.

She hated that she was still so desperate for a glimpse of him, but it had been this way for years.