Sweeney: I can just see all you tough young soldiers cuddling together. Richard: Not cuddling, huddling. There's a difference.

Women were always complications, bless their perverse little hearts.

A thousand thoughts ran through my mind. Well, at least six or seven, anyway, because a thousand thoughts are a lot. Try counting your own thoughts and see how long it takes you to get to a thousand.

Death isn't peaceful; it is just nothing. Everything is gone. No more sunrises, no more hopes, no more fears. Nothing.

He needed a woman. Bad.

But never had he felt more enthralled than he was right now, sitting beside Evie on a weathered old dock, with a blazing afternoon sun, almost brutal in its clarity, bathing everything in pure light. Sweat trickled down his back and chest from the steamy heat, and his entire body pulsed with life. Even his fingertips throbbed. It took all of his formidable self-control to prevent himself from pushing her down on the dock and spreading her legs for his entry.

He supposed he knew, rationally, that she wasn't the prettiest woman in the world, but if his eyes saw any imperfections, his heart didn't care.