Regency Love Quotes

Sometimes Hen...I think I would give my life just for one of your smiles.

Love will find a way against time itself.

To my unsuspecting love. When I look into your eyes, I lose all sense of time and place. Reason robbed, clear thought erased, I am lost in the paradise I find within your gaze. I long to touch your blushing cheek, to whisper in your ear how I adore you, how I have lost my heart to you, how I cannot bear the thought of living without you. To be so near to you without touching you is agony. Your blindness to my feelings is a daily torment, and I feel driven to the edge of madness by my love for you. Where is your compassion when I need it most? Open your eyes , Love, and see what is right before you: that I am not merely a friend, but a man deeply, desperately , in love with you. Longing for you.

Oh, yes, she's unusual!" he said bitterly. "She blurts out whatever may come into her head; she tumbles from one outrageous escapade into another; she's happier grooming horses and hobnobbing with stable-hands than going to parties; she's impertinent; you daren't catch her eye for fear she should start to giggle; she hasn't any accomplishments; I never saw anyone with less dignity; she's abominable, and damnably hot at hand, frank to a fault, and – a darling!

You are brave and loyal and true. You have such a good heart." He held my hand close to his chest and covered it with his other hand. "It is only afraid. But I would take such good care of it, love, if you would give it to me.

Dear Philip, I don't imagine you will ever read this. If you do, it is bacause something dreadful has happened to me. I find myself in the hands of a dangerous man. I am determined to fight him but before I do, my heart demands that I write this note to tell you that I love you. I am sending my heart to you in this letter so it will be kept safe from whatever may happen to me tonight. I don't know if you want it or not, but it has always been yours. With all my love, Marianne

You don't feel you could marry me instead? Got no brains, of course, and I ain't a handsome fellow, like Jack, but I love you. Don't think I could ever love anyone else.

If I could,” he went on, “I would remain like this indefinitely—clasped by you, held inside you, a part of you—without moving at all. When we make love, I fight climax with everything I have. I don’t want to come; I do not want it to end. No matter how long I make it last, it isn’t nearly long enough. I am furious when I cannot hold back any longer. Why, Jess? If all I seek is the physical relief of natural lust, just as I would seek sleep or food, why would I deny myself?” She turned her head and caught his mouth with hers, kissing him desperately. “Tell me you understand,” he demanded, his lips moving beneath hers. “Tell me you feel it, too.” “I feel you,” she breathed, as intoxicated by his ardency as she was by the finest claret. “You have become everything to me.

Please, I do not wish to be rescued by a gentleman. Could you find a farmer or a shopkeep - anyone not of the gentry - and then do me a great favor of forgetting you saw me?

But why, she thought wryly, did a man seem more attractive as he became less available? How humbling to think one had so much in common with a cow stretching its neck through a gate for better grass.

But gratitude would not have me love you as I do. Love was inspired by what you are - the good, the bad, and even the foolish, which is what you're being right now.

Winning her would be like coaxing a butterfly to land on his hand. Patience, gentleness, and perhaps a prayer or two would be required.

A faerie told me that true love's kiss could wake Miss Buckley," Effie told him. "I cannot think of any truer or more unconditional love than that of a dog.

Life is a good deal more comfortable if one doesn't expect it to be fair.

Except I was hoping someday to see you standing on a ship's deck in your shirtsleeves with a cutlass between your teeth." "Maybe it can be arranged

I love your wit and cleverness. I love that you are kind but almost never nice. I love your eyes and your hair and your freckles, and the fact that you smell like some monstrous floral perfume all of the time.” He paused, now looking somewhat offended at himself. “And I love to dance with you. That is the worst of it by far.

If you allow an experienced man of the world to introduce you to passion when you want him more than he wants you, he will own your soul, but you will not own his.

Oh, my dear, love isn't always the coup de foudre--the lightning strike. Sometimes it happens quietly, so quietly you may not even notice.

Yes, love," responded his sister cheerfully, "but it wasn't of the least consequence, and in any event I answered for you. You would be astonished, I daresay, if you knew what interesting conversations I enjoy with myself.

I do not believe in such a thing as love,' Elias scoffed. 'Perhaps attraction, or companionship, or friendship. But so many men act as though love is a special sort of magic. I feel that I am qualified to say it isn't so.' 'Well, but you have just described love, I think,' Albert replied in bemusement. 'Attraction and companionship and friendship. Is there nothing special about those things, especially if they are all together at once?

I am in love with you. You deserve to hear that.

I do, love. I want you more than you could ever know. More than I could have ever dreamed. I want you enough for two men. For ten.

Had he not been the keeper of the flame, of anguish, trapped under the brilliance of what she had been to him? He had been a man of permanence, how could he have swayed to emotion like this?

Lord, if we were all to marry our first loves what a plague of ill-assorted marriages there would be!

Her whole world was in the depth of his eyes.

He didn't choose between me and you, Julia: it was between me and ruin.

People do understand the language of the heart, you know, even if the head does not always comprehend it.

I saw your intelligence, and I was intrigued. I saw your humor, and I was charmed. I saw your soul, and it was beautiful. I'm in love with you, Mary Bennet.

He was silent. Well! Now she knew how right she had been. He was not in the least in love with her, and very happy she was to know it. All she wanted was a suitable retreat, such as a lumber-room, or a coal-cellar, in which to enjoy her happiness to the full.

With a hand on the back of his neck, Raleigh pulled him down until their foreheads touched. “I love you. I want to suffocate you in your sleep with your pillow sometimes, but I love you.” Steven chuckled and nipped Raleigh’s full bottom lip. “I love you too, Cony.” Running his fingers through the back of the thick black hair, Steven urged Raleigh forward. “Please don’t murder me in my sleep.” Their lips met.

Yet, after all, Jenny thought she had been granted more than she hoped for when she married him. He did love her: differently, but perhaps more enduringly; and he had grown to depend on her. She thought that they would have many years of quiet content: never reaching the heights, but living together in comfort and deepening friendship.

Te amo, Querida," he whispered, stroking her hair. "Tu eres mi luz en la oscuridad." I love you. You are my light in the darkness.

The night was bright. He was seen. And she was everything.

He clutched her to him with a desperate strength that almost hurt. "I will love you for your light, if you can love me through the dark times. And that love will be like the clear night sky when the moon is full. Not like the sun....but beautiful and bright enough to find our way.

The end of the idyll was implicit in the beginning: I at least knew that, though you might not. And also that the more enchanted the idyll the greater must be the pain of its ending. That won’t endure. Hearts don’t really break, you know.

He thought about alone in Constantinople that time, having quarreled in Paris before he had gone out. He had whored the whole time and then, when that was over, and he had failed to kill his loneliness, but only made it worse, he had written her, the first one, the one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it . . . . How when he thought he saw her outside the Regence one time it made him go all faint and sick inside, and that he would follow a woman that looked like her in some way, along the Boulevard, afraid to see it was not she, afraid to lose the feeling it gave him. How every one he had slept with had only made him miss her more. How what she had done could never matter since he could never cure himself of loving her.

Listen here, Miss Ettings! I am in love with you. You deserve to hear that. I love your wit and cleverness. I love that you are kind but almost never nice. I love your eyes and your hair and your freckles, and the fact that you smell like some monstrous floral perfume all of the time.” He paused, now looking somewhat offended at himself. “And I love to dance with you. That is the worst of it by far.

I don’t know what you hope for in a husband, but if it is to be loved … well, I think it would be very easy to fall in love with you.

Julia stood for his youth, and the high hopes he had cherished; and although he might no longer yearn to possess her she would remain nostalgically dear to him while life endured.

But it did matter. Because as much as he tried to deny it, the truth was simple. He had fallen in love with her. Idiot.

But to love is a choice, and it will always be a choice—a choice that must be made every day.

Would you - would you like to marry me, Kitty?' Lord Radcliffe - James - asked, voice like gravel. She gave a helpless little laugh at the absurdity of the question - as if he did not know. 'I would,' she said. 'But first, I feel I must inform you that I come with four sisters, a badly leaking roof, and a veritable ocean of debt.' He had started to smile now, and once begun it did not seem to stop, overtaking his whole face. “I thank you for your honesty,’ he said cordially, and she laughed. ‘May I reassure you that I am desperate to meet your other sisters, the roof sounds charmingly rustic, and the debt does not faze me.’ He paused. ‘Of course, I understand that you will need to see my accounts before committing yourself,’ he went on, and she laughed again, loud and bright. ‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary,’ she said. ‘As long as you can promise you’re absurdly rich and you’ll pay off all my family’s debts.’ ‘I am absurdly rich,’ he repeated. ‘And I will pay off all your family’s debts.’ ‘Why then by all means,’ she said, grinning up at him, ‘I would indeed like to marry you.

No, I'm not smart," he whispered against her ear, "but I was wise enough to fall in love with you and clever enough to convince you to marry me. I hope I'm not so stupid that I would ever let you go.

Those piercingly beautiful blue eyes were looking down at him, stupefying him as they met his own, evoking images of sapphire jewels and a starry sky and… Good Lord, was her hair truly the shade of moonbeams?

She sighed and leaned her cheek against his shoulder. "How comfortable this is! she said. "And so delightfully vulgar! Does plain Mr Dash put his arm round ladies in hackney coaches?" "When not in gaol he does," the Duke responded.

But above all, above respect and esteem, there was a motive within her of good will which could not be overlooked. It was gratitude. -- Gratitude, not merely for having once loved her, but for loving her still well enough, to forgive all the petulance and acrimony of her manner in rejecting him, and all the unjust accusations accompanying her rejection. He who, she had been persuaded, would avoid her as his greatest enemy, seemed, on this accidental meeting, most eager to preserve the acquaintance, and without any indelicate display of regard, or any peculiarity of manner, where their two selves only were concerned, was soliciting the good opinion of her friends, and bent on making her known to his sister.

He took her face between his hands, turning it up, and looking down at her for a moment before he kissed her. "I do love you, Jenny," he said gently. "Very much indeed-- you are part of my life. Julia was never that-only a boy's impractical dream.

I recall how I suspected at the time that my young friend was indulging in her first bout of calf love.

God's love doesn't change just because my circumstances do.

Even without the Grand Reclaimer bond, Helen, you are my heartbeat. My pulse. You are the fire in my blood and the laughter in my soul.

Her soul felt at rest, for now she knew the true power of love, the unbending strength of loyalty, and the eternal beauty of forgiveness. (page 338)

Around her shone the nameless charms unmarked by her alone—the light of Love, the purity of Grace, the mind, the Music breathing from her face …

I’ve a trunk full of books. The porters will despise me, but I'll be the most prepared Englishwoman ever to set foot on Egyptian sand.

One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life. That word is love." (Sophocles) by Adam Harford, Duke of Harford, from the last page of "Sophie's Salvation

Only the most passionate love could ever induce me to marry.

The soft atmosphere made her feel even more than usual that she was dreaming. But it was the sort of lovely dream that one dwelled purposely upon, unwilling to wake too soon.

Dora thought, Oh dear. Because she was now quite sure that she was in love.

It was, of course, a great failure in a woman's life - to never have achieved even a doomed and unsuccessful love. But she was not quite sure whether she had failed or not. When she was young there had been moments, of course. But those moments had never amounted to much more than a little fever of admiration - a little flutter and agitation in a ballroom - so slight a feeling that the cautious Dido had never considered it a secure foundation for a lifetime of living together. And then, sooner or later, she had always made and odd remark, or laughed at the wrong moment, and the young men became alarmed or angry - and the flutter and the agitation all turned to irritation. Dido could laugh and gossip about love as well as any woman but, deep down, she suspected that she had not the knack of falling into it.

I can't help wanting. I want you to burn as I burn. I want you to lie awake at night thinking of me. If you sleep, I want you to dream of me. I want you to tell me that you can't stand the sight of me dancing with another woman. I want to know this last week has been as miserable for you as it has been for me.

You are not by any manner of means the sort of woman I am in search of as a wife, and I am in a totally different universe from the husband you hope to find. But I feel a powerful urge to kiss you, for all that.

I must own, too, that I can't be astonished at his being vexed to death over this business. It is excessively awkward! However, he doesn't lay the blame for that at my door: you mustn't think that!" "I should think not indeed!" exclaimed Anthea between amusement and indignation. "How could he possibly do so?" "No, very true, my love!" agreed Mrs Darracott. "I thought that myself, but it did put me on the fidgets when Richmond said he wanted to see me, because in general, you know, things I never even heard about turn out to be my fault.

Te amo, Querida," he whispered suddenly, stroking her hair. "Tu eres mi luz en la oscuridad." "This is the second time you've said that," Cassandra murmured. "What does it mean?" "I love you." His voice was as rough as his hand on her cheek was gentle. "You are my light in the darkness.

I will grab your other arm, you will close your eyes, and up you will come. Back on terra firma." "This is terra firma. " Juliana pointed with her nose to the rugged cliff wall. "Yes, but I doubt very much that you want to stay there." "I like the idea of dangling in the air so much less.

I don't know what you want from me then,' she cried, casting out her arms. 'For I cannot make my situation any different. I must marry. And so far, I have no promises.' He would not look at her. 'Ask me then,' she said, voice raw, 'ask me if I should like, if I should want to marry Pemberton, were the choice only about me?' He looked up. 'Would you?' 'No,' she said, voice cracking. 'Now ask me, whether I should still love you, were the choice only mine to make?' He took a step forward. 'Would you?' he said again. 'Yes,' she confessed. 'I will always choose my sisters. I will choose their need more than my want every day. But I want you just as much as I need money. You see me, in my entirety - the worst and the best of me - as no one else ever has.

He then, with great presence of mind, put a stop to any further recriminations by kissing her; and his indignant betrothed, apparently feeling that he was too deeply sunk in depravity to be reclaimable, abandoned (for the time being, at all events) any further attempt to bring him to a sense of his iniquity.

You are too romantic! We have been dwelling in Arcadia my green girl: the rest of the world is not so golden as this retired spot. Only in fantasy does every circumstance conspire to make it inevitable that two people should fall in love! We should hardly have been more isolated had be been cast on a desert island together.

I have not always appeared to be sensible of the care you have bestowed on me, but I know now that it has been unceasing.

The girl who was in love with you is gone. And the man she was in love with never existed.

Does this feel like pity to you, Alex? I assure you a great many emotions for you fill me, but pity is not one of them.

Please don’t say you’re sorry, False platitudes of sorrow, of pity, of goddamned praise of being a hero, sicken me.

Of anyone, I know better than most we are what we make ourselves.

Should I rejoice in the inferiority of my fate?" - John Lockwood

I love stepping back in time

Where do you prefer to sit, Sir?" (Lady Alexandra to William, the Duke, during her mail-order bride interview.)

Albert is her favourite because he is broken. She feels she must make up for that with extra love, the same way that Vanessa feels for me.

You may not be the one standing out from a crowd, but you are the one that makes sure everyone in that crowd is still standing.

Love? Was that what it was? Willingly forgiving another? Accepting them as they were? While also wanting to kiss them until you were both breathless?

In his letter, he’d written three different words. 'You’re not alone.' They swirled inside her head, solid and deep and resonant in a way that ethereal 'I love you' could never be.

I think I love Jeremy,” she said quietly, forcing herself to state the words simply, without hesitation. “I’ve no idea why,” she added, unable to help herself, “considering he’s vain and maddening and I can barely converse with him without wanting to stab him with a fork, but apparently that is what love looks like for me. And,” she added, her mind lingering on the look in his eye when he gazed at her sometimes, as though marveling at her very existence, “I think he might love me, too—though, being a man, I expect he’s too dense to realize it.

The story of a family where three generations drifted between Christianity and Islam and back again, between suits and salvars, Mughal Hyderabad and Regency London, seemed to raise huge questions: about Britishness and the nature of Empire, about faith, and about personal identity; indeed, about how far all of these mattered, and were fixed and immutable – or how far they were in fact flexible, tractable, negotiable. For once it seemed that the normal steely dualism of Empire – between rulers and ruled, imperialists and subalterns, colonisers and the colonised – had broken down. The easy labels of religion and ethnicity and nationalism, slapped on by generations of historians, turned out, at the very least, to be surprisingly unstable.

he had failed to kill his loneliness, but only made it worse, he had written her, the first one, the one who left him, a letter telling her how he had never been able to kill it. … How when he thought he saw her outside the Regence one time it made him go all faint and sick inside, and that he would follow a woman who looked like her in some way, along the Boulevard, afraid to see it was not she, afraid to lose the feeling it gave him. How every one he had slept with had only made him miss her more. How what she had done could never matter since he knew he could not cure himself of loving her.

Metaphorically speaking: While unfortunate, corruption, and evil will always exist in our story, driven by the force of greed, power, hate, and ignorance. Don't stop at the end of the chapter because love, kindness, faith, and cliques— still abound— all around us if we only continue to read. We must always believe that good will triumph over bad for a five-star review by the end of our book. -Lisa Higgins

He knew how he wanted to kiss her. Forcefully, demandingly, with everything he had, in a way that would require her wholehearted response. But he knew how he should kiss her. Gently. Softly. Irreproachably.

He wanted to memorize every inch of her, every curve and angle, the strong length of her thigh and the delicate bones of her wrist, storing up memories against a bleak and empty tomorrow. But that wasn’t how love worked. Love wasn’t a sum safely invested in the five percents. One couldn’t prevent future sorrow by capitalizing on present bliss. All he could do was have this moment, wring all the joy out of it, and then somehow continue after it was over.

Do what feels natural. Forget what you have been taught, or trained, or hell, been told. If you want to touch me, do so. If you want to explore your body,” his gaze followed the line of her body, “by all means please touch yourself.

Her jaw was firmly set, but her lips... her full, perfect lips were slightly parted in an expression that matched the vulnerability in her eyes -frightened yet determined. His heart skippeed a beat, and he swallowed the lump in his throat.

Jane Austen’s world is a unique wedge of history, immortalized by her wonderful books. It is ironic that I am fascinated by the Regency world in all its details, when Jane Austen seldom mentions any of those facts. She never mentions the war raging in Europe, her characters are apparently unaware of the industrialization shortly to overtake them. The revolution of steam travel does not touch her people–they travel by coach, horse, and foot.” and “There is no doubt that Austen herself was aware of the world around her and its imminent change. But her characters live in the world of the family, the village and the heart–and are loved because of it. The trappings of the greater world do not impinge on Jane Austen’s books.

Love, real love is not a romantical whim. It is a choice - " "You make it sound so appealing." "A choice I gladly make every day, because I love Catherine, and wish to put her feelings and considerations ahead of my own." (Miss Serena's Secret)

The night they’d made love, Eleanor had given him everything. She’d placed her body and her pleasure in his hands, yes, but she’d given him her trust, too. He’d felt it in every sigh, every gasp, every kiss, and it had devastated him. Humbled him. It was the sweetest pleasure he’d ever known.

Diane Gonclaves DeLuna and her mother, Mary for whom my heroine is named for. Diane and I met on Facebook, but we soon learned we have one thing (besides romance novels) in common. Her mother suffers from Alzheimer’s and min suffered from Dementia. Both of us wish we only had the love of romances in common.   Jane

How happily we explored our shiny new world! We lived like characters from the great books I curled up with in the big Draylon armchair. Like Jack Kerouak, like Gatsby, we created ourselves as we went along, a raggle-taggle of gypsies in old army overcoats and bell-bottoms, straggling through the fields that surrounded our granite farmhouse in search of firewood, which we dragged home and stacked in the living room. Ignorant and innocent, we acted as if the world belonged to us, as though we would ever have taken the time to hang the regency wallpaper we damaged so casually with half-rotten firewood, or would have known how to hang it straight, or smooth the seams. We broke logs against the massive tiled hearth and piled them against the sooty fire back, like the logs were tradition and we were burning it, like chimney fires could never happen, like the house didn't really belong to the poor divorcee who paid the rates and mortgage even as we sat around the flames like hunter gatherers, smoking Lebanese gold, chanting and playing the drums, dancing to the tortured music of Luke's guitar. Impelled by the rhythm, fortified by poorly digested scraps of Lao Tzu, we got up to dance, regardless of the coffee we knocked over onto the shag carpet. We sopped it up carelessly, or let it sit there as it would; later was time enough. We were committed to the moment. Everything was easy and beautiful if you looked at it right. If someone was angry, we walked down the other side of the street, sorry and amused at their loss of cool. We avoided newspapers and television. They were full of lies, and we knew all the stuff we needed. We spent our government grants on books, dope, acid, jug wine, and cheap food from the supermarket--variegated cheese scraps bundled roughly together, white cabbage and bacon ends, dented tins of tomatoes from the bargain bin. Everything was beautiful, the stars and the sunsets, the mold that someone discovered at the back of the fridge, the cows in the fields that kicked their giddy heels up in the air and fled as we ranged through the Yorkshire woods decked in daisy chains, necklaces made of melon seeds and tie-dye T-shirts whose colors stained the bath tub forever--an eternal reminder of the rainbow generation. [81-82]

The only thing he was sorry for was slamming the door and perhaps raising his voice to the woman who'd been like a mother to him since the passing of his parents. Perhaps she hadn't really deserved his reaction, but he was, justifiably, weary of their meddling and hearing about his father's will. Apparently no suitable maiden was going to appear on his doorstep. He seemed to be looking for a needle in a haystack.

We, men, who work hard to get somewhere in life, to make something of ourselves in life, to mean something to someone, to have what our ancestors never had.....We, men, who toil for a name, respect, livelihood, who are pitied, mocked all for the love of a woman.....We men who need to have a coherent existence, and oneness of spirit with a single soul; We, sir, do not deserve such an audience as Ms. Adams." - Pritchard's letter

We, men, who work hard to get somewhere in life, to make something of ourselves in life, to mean something to someone, to have what our ancestors never had.....We, men, who toil for a name, respect, livelihood, who are pitied, mocked all for the love of a woman......We men who need to have a coherent existence, and oneness of spirit with a single soul; We, sir, do not deserve such an audience as Ms. Adams. " - Pritchard's letter

He shut the door, and stood looking across the room at her. 'Cressy, what did you mean when you told that harridan that your affections were engaged?' The colour deepened a little in her cheeks, but she replied lightly: 'Well, she talked so much like someone in a bad play that I became carried away myself! Besides, I had to say something to convince her! I could see she didn't quite believe me when I said I wasn't going to marry your brother.' He let his breath go in a long sigh, and walked forward, setting his hands on her shoulders, and saying: 'You don't know how much I have wanted to tell you the truth! Cressy, my dear one, forgive me! I've treated you abominably, and I love you so much!' Miss Stavely, who had developed an interest in the top button of his coat, looked shyly up at this. 'Do you, Kit?' she asked. 'Truly?' Mr Fancot, preferring actions to words, said nothing whatsoever in answer to this, but took her in his arms and kissed her. Miss Stavely, who had previously thought him unfailingly gentle and courteous, perceived, in the light of this novel experience, that she had been mistaken: there was nothing gentle about Mr Fancot's crushing embrace; and his behaviour in paying no heed at all to her faint protest could only be described as extremely uncivil. She was wholly unused to such treatment, and she had a strong suspicion that her grandmother would condemn her conduct in submitting to it, but as Mr Fancot seemed to be dead to all sense and propriety it was clearly useless to argue with him.

She turned to him with wide, shocked eyes. "Why did he..." His lips twitched. No coarse language in front of the infants limited the ability to discuss the fountain of baby piss that had just arced halfway across the room. "Twasn't you, darling. It's one of their favorite bath-time games. "Something about the cool air on their naked...berries," he substituted at the last second.... "Do I have piddle in my hair?" she whispered, her eyes sparkling with laughter above her flushed cheeks. "Not much," he assured her with a straight face. "You look almost becoming."... "Decades from now, when our children ask how I fell in love with their mother, I'll say 'twas her sweet, gentle compliments during bath-time, and her fleetness of foot whilst dodging a flow of ---

[Dora] 'I have often though that I am capable of emotions with a long tail. I am not sure if that makes sense. I do not feel the shock of fear, but I can feel dread--I was scared of the image in the mirror after thinking on it for a while. And while you do not enrage me, per se, I am vexed when I think of the way you treat others.' Elias smiled sharply at that...'Have you ever felt happiness at all, Miss Ettings? Even the sort with a long tail?' Dora settled her chin into her hand. 'I don't know what happiness ought to feel like any more,' she said. 'It is the most elusive feeling of all, I think. But...I feel at peace when I am near Vanessa. She is like a warm lantern to me. I think it must be because she loves me so obviously. When I am around her, I do not need to pretend to be something I am not.

Laurel stood on stage. She was very still. Her lovely blue eyes were lowered modestly. Her silver blonde hair fell in disheveled curls around her face, white roses and strands of pearls woven artfully throughout. A necklace of what looked like diamonds clasped her slender throat while white kid gloves were drawn up to her elbow. She held a fan of frosted silver in one hand, dangling at her side. Her dress was a shimmering sapphire blue, and it fit her exquisitely, molding to her form, hugging her small bosom and lifting her breasts until they appeared ready to spill from the satin bodice. A silver braided sash cinched her waist, emphasizing its narrowness. And then, she lifted her head, raised the hand that held the fan, then the other one and, tipping her head back, opened her eyes. They were haunting and luminous, soft in the candlelight. Her skin was pale and smooth. The crowd was utterly quiet, watching her. And then, she began to sing. If Dare had thought Laurel Spencer beautiful before, now she became goddess-like to him in an instant as a melody so heart-wrenching and lovely spilled forth from her lips.

Thirty-nine-year-old moderately successful Human Resources Director. Interests include regency romances, reality TV, and baking large novelty birthday cakes for other people’s children. Hobbies include drinking Tia Maria and eating Turkish delight in the bath and dining out with her mum and dad. Wanted to be a ballerina but didn’t end up with a ballerina body; however, has been told she is an impressive dirty dancer when drunk. Knows her wine, so please just hand the wine list over. Godmother to nine children, member of two book clubs, Social Club Manager for the Australian Payroll Officers’ Association. Suffers from a severe blushing problem but is not shy and will probably end up better friends with your friends than you, which you’ll find highly irritating after we break up. Has recently become so worried about meeting the love of her life and having children before she reaches menopause that she has cried piteously in the middle of the night. But otherwise is generally quite cheerful and has on at least three separate occasions that she knows of been described as ‘Charming’. Yep, that about summed it up. What a catch.

THE NIGHTGOWN was only the first of the garments in the box. There were seven nightgowns, in fact—one for each day of the week—of delicate silk, lovely georgette, and beautiful tiffany. As Alexandra pulled them out, she draped them on the bed. She’d never seen a nightgown that wasn’t white, but these were almond and pale blush pink, powder blue and soft peach, with delicate edgings of lace and intricate, exquisite embroidery. “They’re stunning,” she said. “Madame Rodale has nothing like them in her book of fashion plates.” Tris just grinned. He seemed different tonight. More relaxed, less worried. She didn’t know what had prompted his sudden good humor, but she didn’t want to question it. She’d rather enjoy it instead. After the afternoon she’d had—starting with Elizabeth’s letter and ending with three fruitless interviews—she wasn’t about to risk the one thing that seemed to be going right. “Are you going to try one on for me?” he asked. Her face heated. He chose a nightgown off the bed, palest lavender with black lace and violet embroidery. “This one,” he said, handing it to her. “Do you require assistance with your dress?” “Just the buttons,” she said, and turned to let him unfasten them. She shifted the nightgown in her hands. It felt so light. “There,” he said when the back of her green dress gaped open. He kissed her softly on the nape of her neck, then settled on one of the striped chairs, sipping from the glass of port he’d brought upstairs with him. “Use the dressing room. I’ll be waiting.” In the dressing room, she shakily stripped out of her frock, chemise, shoes, and stockings, then dropped the nightgown over her head and smoothed it down over her hips. The fabric whispered against her legs. She turned to see herself in the looking glass. Sweet heaven. She’d never imagined nightgowns like this existed. Her nightgowns all had high collars that tied at the throat. This one had a wide, low neckline. Her nightgowns all had long, full sleeves. This one had tiny puffed sleeves that began halfway off her shoulders. Her nightgowns were made of yards and yards of thick, billowing fabric. This one was a slender column that left no curve to the imagination. It was wicked. “Are you ready yet?” Tris called. Alexandra swallowed hard, reminding herself that he’d seen her in less clothing. And he was her husband. Still, wearing the nightgown for him somehow felt more intimate than wearing nothing at all. She was as ready as she’d ever be. Drawing a deep breath, she exited the dressing room, walked quickly through the sitting room, and paused in the bedroom’s doorway. She dropped her gaze, then raised her lashes, giving him the look—the one Juliana had said would make men fall at her feet. Judging from the expression on Tris’s face, it was a good thing he was sitting. The way he looked at her made her heartbeat accelerate. He rose and moved toward her. She met him halfway, licking suddenly dry lips. “Will you kiss me?” she asked softly, reaching up to sweep that always unruly lock off his forehead. It worked this time. He kissed her but good.