She expected the pain, when it came. But she gasped at its sharpness; it was not like any pain she had felt before. He kissed her and slowed and would have stopped. But she laughed, and said that this one time she would consent to hurt, and bleed, at his touch. He smiled into her neck and kissed her again and she moved with him through the pain. The pain became a warmth that grew. Grew, and stopped her breath. And took her breath and her pain and her mind away from her body, so that there was nothing but her body and his body and the light and fire they made together.

The more I see and hear, the more I realize how much I don't know.

It was a very hard thing to have crushed the heart, and the hopes, of a friend.

Your eyes are beautiful," he said, and she felt warm suddenly, warm in the sun that dappled through the treetops and rested on them in patches.

I've liked you better when Katsa's around," Giddon said. "She's so rotten to me that you seem positively pleasant in contrast.

He leaned heavily on the desk now, as if danger had strengthened him before and its lack now made him weak.

You're beautiful this morning," Archer said, stopping before her, kissing her nose. "You're impossibly sweet in my shirt." That might be but she felt like death. She would gladly make the trade; how blissful it would be to feel impossibly sweet and look like death.