He just didn't look like the kind of creep that would messily murder a woman in her hotel room; he looked like the kind of creep that could line her up in the sights of an assassins rifle without a shred of emotion.

You might be able to thrash your way out of a spiderweb, but thrashing in quicksand doesn’t work. The harder you fight, the more ground you lose. Struggling merely expedites your inevitable defeat.

How dare the embodiment of her worst nightmare come packaged as her hottest fantasy?

You'll never be just anything. A tsunami can never be just a wave (...) Waves are banal. Tsunamis reshape the Earth

I felt the electricity of his body behind me as he reached around me and took the card from my hand. He didn't move away, and I battled the urge to lean back into him, seeking the comfort of his strength. Would he wrap his arms around me? Make me feel safe, if only for a moment, and if only a delusion?

It's hard to say what makes the mind piece things together in a sudden lightning flash. I've come to hold the human spirit in the highest regard. Like the body, it struggles to repair itself. As cells fight off infection and conquer illness, the spirit, too, has remarkable resilience. It knows when it is harmed, and it knows she the harm is too much to bear. If it deems the injury too great, the spirit cocoons the wound, in the same fashion that the body forms a cyst around infection, until the time comes that it can deal with it.

Beautiful women rarely possess sufficient depth of character to survive without their pretty feathers.