After all, you are a hero and everything.

— V.S. Carnes

A hand stole around her mouth, silencing her, then his lips parting her tumbled hair: “The walls have ears.” She blinked, and for the first time, looked around. A thin beam of light beneath what may have been a door. That was all. When he released her, she endeavored to match his own, barely audible tone. “Do the walls understand English?

— V.S. Carnes

And what was to become of what he had taken from her? He had dashed her heart to the ground and danced on it with combat boots. Did he sit in that seditious palace day after day and not even bother to scrape it off of his soles with a passing thought of her?

— V.S. Carnes

Anger swirled in him, the tempest readying her strike. And like a helpless vessel caught in her fury, he felt himself dashed against the rocks without mercy.

— V.S. Carnes

Are you in the habit of taking tea with anyone who approaches you in a foreign port?” He went on and snorted carelessly. “No wonder you were abducted so easily.

— V.S. Carnes

Because you have my heart, Virginia Wessex.” Softly, almost achingly. “Every black ounce of it. Scars and all.

— V.S. Carnes

Better this way, what remained of his battered sensibilities told him. He was no good for her, anyway. She didn’t understand him. She didn’t understand that he was cursed. And, selfish as he was, he’d rather she hates him than he hates himself any more than he was already going to. Any more than he already did.

— V.S. Carnes

By now, she was far from the scorch of these sands. After the ransom deal, she would be safely married in England. To Ashton. And Caine, who had hurt her far more than anything Abdullah had planned for her with that long, curved dagger, deserved no better than this torment of knowing it.

— V.S. Carnes

Caine might have smiled at her, had his heart not been breaking to smithereens inside of him.

— V.S. Carnes

Caine usually woke from the recurring dream midair, having yet to be dashed upon the rocks, whimpering and panting like a child crying for his mother. Now he lifted his eyes to a dark, empty room in Jinan and the unusual, lingering scent of roses, and wept in his hands for his Father.

— V.S. Carnes