It seemed to me that Mr. Forrester would approve of a woman who could follow him in conversation and not be baffled by ledgers and currency conversions. I had grossly overestimated him.

And Mother, I love her dearly, but she flies into a panic whenever I mention women’s rights. As she sees it, it will be so much more difficult to marry me off if I am...

Maybe love, unfathomable love, was too much for people, so they had traded it for something easier.

Now would you get me a soda?

You are so much like her.”This is something my mother often says and never explains. Though it is a great mystery to me it is also a blessing, for she always hurries from the room...

That could be very tiring indeed.

But I will stand.

Loyal,” he tells me. St. Louis is a loyal town.

Wicked eyes are not a good prospect for seminary boys. They want a gentle, soft sort of wife, not a wife who looks as though she may sprout wings and carry off the young children...

I came from across the ocean and through the wilderness and landed here and found you hiding behind a tapestry. My fate was sealed at the sight of your stockinged feet.~Viktor von Strassenberg

No jeans either, this is a professional establishment.

He had touched her. Bare skin to bare skin. She needed a bleach wipe. She would absolutely use a bleach wipe on her leg. Even if it ate her flesh off.

Katherine stared intently at the cold, hard steel. She knew it would be loaded and that, if need be, there was extra ammunition in the back of the drawer. She would not be one of...

Viktor, what?

Doesn’t matter now,” he whispered and felt that he could not cry out to God.~William Drexler the Third

They don’t teach kidnapping at Eton, dad

business.

We ran on the fuel of youth and hormones and ignorant arrogance, imagining we had the whole world and the workings thereof figured out.

Tragic tales rarely do make sense.

It was enough to drive me mad. I was no longer myself and yet I was so much more me than I had ever been before. ~Katherine Demure

You may suppose that perhaps this Walter T. Wallace found his destiny in food and passed down to his progeny a legacy like that of the great Colonel Sanders. The folks here in Wallace County...

All I know is that the fear I have been battling all night is breaking down the door of my ignorance. As my feet slam down I feel not the hard, wet asphalt but the...

If he looks at me like that again Dottie will need a bucket and mop to get me back to my room.

Viktor!” the accented voice bellowed from below. And then the shadow was gone. Darkness overwhelmed her then and carried her away to a land of crows and mocking strangers.

My life is hard. No one would rob me of that. The clothes I am wearing came out of a knotted up black plastic trash bag from a resale shop downtown. And not the downtown...

The image of him shifted with the violent frenzy of leaves. He was there and he wasn’t, as the leaves whipped and the lightning fell away in a slow strobe effect across the expanse of...

They had pulled me from the hemorrhaging, dying body of my mother and turned me over to the care of the man who was not my father. He had taken me home to their tiny...

Well darlin’, that’s the sign of a life being lived. I think we’re all tired when we’re giving it our best.

Kevin looks at me and I know he isn’t seeing the little girl I use to be, all pigtails and gangly limbs. He isn’t seeing my mother’s daughter or even my mother anymore. As his...

And you were always nothing but slime, Henry Wallace. Fancy trash

She says it is a school for bluestockings which, according to her, is really only a fashionable way of saying it is a school for ugly girls who cannot find suitable husbands. To tease her,...

I doubt very much we will have to worry about that after today!

A glance would not be enough to tell you this was the daughter of Katherine Raquel Demure. Even a lingering gaze would not suffice. No. Only careful study of the original and a comparative inspection...

You are a force to be remembered, Dacie Mae.

Are you all right,” he whispered, his lips brushing the tips of my spiky hair. Granted, I knew he was only being discreet so as to save poor Hillary from being reamed again, but my...

That’s what I hear Janet. Of course, living it up can take years off your life and add them to your face.

I can also speak to small woodland creatures,” he grins at me.

How many times can a heart be shattered and still be pieced back together? How many times before the damage is irreparable?

These were not the belongings of the past prisoner he had imagined. These were a lady’s things—hairpins and stockings and a glove. There were more clues waiting but William no longer felt certain he wanted...

Oil and Water, Daddy calls us. At four years younger than me, Katie is only fourteen and she already has half the boys in town eating from her pretty little hand. She tells me I...

My dear lady, you have no idea just how scandalous I can be. ~Peter Viktor von Strassenberg, 1905

Whatever happened in those more than one hundred years, from the time my great-great-great grandfather studied law to the time when my own father took his bar exam in 1989, I may never know. Perhaps...

Because he wants her.