Suddenly You

“A chuisle mo chroi,” he murmured, stroking the curls back from her round face.

For she did love him.

The realization had come over her, not with the immediacy of a summer thunderstorm, but with the slow persistence of April rain. She thought it unlikely that any woman could keep from falling in love with Jack Devlin, as handsome and wily and damaged as he was

For she did love him.

The realization had come over her, not with the immediacy of a summer thunderstorm, but with the slow persistence of April rain. She thought it unlikely that any woman could keep from falling in love with Jack Devlin, as handsome and wily and damaged as he was.

There was something lacking in him, an inability to give of himself in anything but the most superficial ways.

And why should that be so? She had lacked the good fortune of having been loved so greatly by a man that he would seek to join his life with hers. But did that mean she should forever be undesired, unwanted, unclaimed? There were perhaps twenty thousand nights in a woman’s lifetime. For at least one of them, she did not want to be alone.

Oh, yes. All of her life, she had feared this…the risk, the possible rejection and ridicule…she had even feared the disappointment of discovering that intimacy with a man was indeed as base and repulsive as both her sisters had assured her it was. However, she had lately come to discover that there was something she feared even more: not ever knowing about the great tantalizing mystery that everyone else in the world seemed to have experienced. She had described passion so well in her novels, the yearning and madness and ecstasy it inspired, all the feelings she herself would never experience.

“Why is it unfortunate to be opinionated?”

“In a man, it’s an admirable quality. In a woman, it is considered a defect.”

“Not by me.”

Gentlemen did not want wives with well-cultivated minds. They wanted attractive wives who never second-guessed or disagreed with them. And they certainly didn’t seek women with vibrant imaginations who daydreamed about fictional characters in books. Therefore, Amanda’s two prettier elder sisters had both caught husbands, and Amanda had resorted to novel-writing.

chest, sniffling back her remaining tears.
He held her

Without physical beauty, Amanda had chosen instead to cultivate her mind and imagination, which, as her mother had gloomily predicted, had been the final stroke of doom