Elizabeth, you resemble nothing so much as a hen trying to hatch a book.

The girl doesn’t need a violin,” he added. “She needs to have her hands bound so she can never touch an instrument again.

He'd been waiting for a love fraught with passion and drama; it hadn't even occurred to him that true love might be something that was utterly comfortable and just plain easy.

I am going to kill you," he hissed. She gulped. "Don't you want to lecture me first?" He stared at her with a heavy dose of stupefaction. "I take that back," he said with precisely clipped words. "First I am going to strangle you, and then I am going to kill you." "Here?" she asked doubtfully, looking around. "Won't my dead body look suspicious in the morning?

And what renders him so unmarriageable?” Eloise asked. Francesca leveled a serious stare at her older sister. Eloise was mad if she thought she should set her cap for Michael. “Well?” Eloise prodded. “He could never remain faithful to one woman,” Fran-cesca said, “and I doubt you‟d be willing to put up with infidelities.” “No,” Eloise murmured, “not unless he‟d be willing to put up with severe bodily injury.

You are always looking at people like this.” And then she made a face, one he couldn’t possibly begin to describe. “If I ever look like that,” he said dryly, “precisely like that, to be more precise, I give you leave to shoot me.

I’m not certain you’d know the right sort of man for you if he arrived on our doorstep riding an elephant.” “I would think the elephant would be a fairly good indication that I ought to look elsewhere.