“He heard the news long before her scent reached him. Brandt Talbot shrank into the heavy vegetation, his chest tight and his body taut with sudden anticipation. She was here at long last. In his domain. Within his grasp. It had been a long hunt to find her, nearly impossible, yet he managed it. He had deliberately lured her to his lair and she had come.”

“Emma, I’ll never be easy. I won’t. I’m not going to pretend your life will be a bed of roses, but I can tell you that no man will ever need you more, or want you more, or love you more than I will.”

“She didn’t want soft and gentle. She needed his rough possession, claiming her, branding her, taking her in a firestorm of heat and flame that would end the world around them, leaving them nothing but ashes, clean and fierce and forever welded together.”

“I made the decision fifteen years ago that you were my life. My everything. You were with me in my dreams my dark lover my friend and confidant.”

“Shadow and dust shall be reclaimed, earth sealing the tomb from which you came. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, warrior return, breathe your last. Air, earth, fire, water, hear my voice, obey my order, thrice around your grave do bound, evil sink into the ground. I now invoke the law of three, this is my will, so mote it be.”

“The minute I’m in a little pain … your rough, tough, scary bad boy image totally falls apart.”

“Sarah, honey, I hardly think kidnappers are going to take the time to buy a memento of their stay. I could be wrong, but it seems rather unlikely.”

“We can do anything you like. Just be with me.”

“Maybe you are already lost and just do not know it.”

“If what he said was the truth, it broke her heart. If what he said was a lie, it was broken anyway.”

“And maybe that was love. Being so vulnerable and allowing someone else in so far they could hurt you, but they also give you everything.”

“Life gives us choices. You either grab on with both hands and just go for it, or you sit on the sidelines.”