4
" She swallowed, watching as the servants and Harry and Bert trooped out of the room. Lad, apparently not the brightest dog in the world, sat down next to Mickey O’Connor and leaned against his leg.
Mr. O’Connor looked at the dog, looked at the damp spot growing on his breeches where the dog was leaning, and sighed. “I find me life is not as quiet as it used to be afore ye came to me palace, Mrs. Hollingbrook.”
Silence lifted her chin. “You’re a pirate, Mr. O’Connor. I cannot believe your life was ever very quiet.”
He gave her an ironic look. “Aye, amazin’, isn’t it? Yet since yer arrival me servants no longer obey me and I return home to find me kitchen flooded.” He crossed to a cupboard and took down a china teapot, a tin of tea, and a teacup. “And me dog smells like a whorehouse.”
Silence glanced guiltily at Lad. “The only soap we could find was rose scented. "
― Elizabeth Hoyt , Scandalous Desires (Maiden Lane, #3)
5
" As I said, I don’t expect you to understand—”
“And I don’t,” he cut in. “Ye ask how I can live a life that I know will end with the hangman’s noose. Well, at least I am alive. Ye might as well have climbed inside yer husband’s coffin and let yerself be buried with his corpse.”
Her hand flashed out before she’d thought about it, the smack against his cheek loud in the little courtyard.
Silence had her eyes locked with Michael’s, her chest rising and falling swiftly, but she was aware that Bert and Harry had looked up. Even Mary and Lad had paused in their play.
Without taking his gaze from hers, Michael reached out and grasped her hand. He raised her hand to his lips and softly kissed the center of her palm.
He looked at her, her hand still at his lips. “Don’t take to yer grave afore yer time, Silence, m’love. "
― Elizabeth Hoyt , Scandalous Desires (Maiden Lane, #3)
6
" I said, somewhat confused, “What’s the problem?”
[Kristy] rolled her eyes. Beside her, Monica said, “Donneven.”
“Kristy.” Delia shook her head. “This isn’t the time or the place, okay?”
“The time or the place for what?” Caroline asked.
“There is never,” Kristy said adamantly, “a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment.”
“Throbbing?” my mother said, leaning forward and looking at me. “Who’s throbbing?”
“Macy and Wes,” Kristy told her.
“We are not,” I said indignantly.
“Kristy,” Delia said helplessly. “Please God I’m begging you, not now.”
“Wait a second, wait a second.” Caroline held her hands up. “Kristy. Explain.”
“Yes, Kristy,” my mother said, but she was looking at me. Not really mad as much as confused. Join the club, I thought. “Explain.”
Bert said, “This ought to be good.”
Kristy ignored him, tucking a piece of hair behind her ear. “Wes wants to be with Macy. And Macy, whether she’ll admit it or not, wants to be with Wes. And yet they’re not together, which is not only unjust, but really, when you think about it, tragical.”
“That’s not a word,” Bert pointed out.
“It is now,” she said. “How else can you explain a situation where Wes, a truly extraordinary boy, would be sent packing in favor of some brainiac loser…”
“Why,” I said, feeling embarrassed, “do we have to keep talking about this?”
“Because it’s tragical!” Kristy said….”I’ll tell you what it is. It’s wrong. You should be with Wes, Macy. The whole time you guys were hanging out, talking about how you were both with other people, it was so obvious to everyone. It was even obvious to Wes. You were the only one who couldn’t see it, just like you can’t see it now.”
“Mmm-hmm,” Monica said aloud. "
― Sarah Dessen , The Truth About Forever
8
" All the various time travel devices used by Verne and Bert were stored in the repository, Poe explained, including the ones that had never quite worked as they were meant to. There was one that resembled a blue police box from London—“Stolen by a doctor with delusions of grandeur,” said Poe—one that was simply a large, transparent sphere—“Created by a scientist with green skin and too much ego,” said Verne—and one that was rather ordinary by comparison.
“This one looks like an automobile,” John said admiringly, “with wings.”
“The doors open that way for a reason,” Verne explained, “we just never figured out what it was. The inventor of this particular model tried integrating his designs into a car, an airplane, and even a steam engine train. He was running a crackpot laboratory in the Arizona desert, and he never realized that it was not his inventions themselves, but his proximity to some sort of temporal fluctuation in the local topography, that allowed them to work.”
“What happened to him?” asked Jack.
“He’d get the machines up to one hundred and six miles per hour,” said Bert, “and then he’d run out of fuel and promptly get arrested by whatever constabulary had been chasing him. The sad part was that Jules figured out if he’d just gone two miles an hour faster, he’d likely have been successful in his attempt. "
― James A. Owen , The Dragon's Apprentice (The Chronicles of the Imaginarium Geographica, #5)