Home > Work > The Lawrence Browne Affair (The Turners #2)
1 " The man meant to stay here, to meddle and talk and distract; he planned to smell good and be handsome and obviously Lawrence should never have agreed to any of this. "
― Cat Sebastian , The Lawrence Browne Affair (The Turners #2)
2 " All this fuss about a couple of small explosions. "
3 " And then—oh, his kingdom for a pair of field glasses. The earl dropped the ax long enough to strip down to his shirtsleeves. That couldn’t be necessary, given the chill in the November air. But on another, purely aesthetic level, it was quite, quite necessary for this man to take off his clothes whenever the spirit moved him. Perhaps he ought to go the full distance and take his shirt off too. No sense in doing things by halves. "
4 " Then I’ll tell you,” Turner continued, undeterred by Lawrence’s coarse language. “You have a library of hundreds—if not thousands—of books downstairs, and you let them rot.” So it was a book Turner was waving about, brandishing like a weapon. “Do you have any idea what that does to any person of sense? It’s obscene, I tell you.” “I don’t give a damn about the library.” “Plainly not! But you could have given the books to a school, or . . . I don’t know, a lending library.” It was the middle of the night. Even Lawrence thought this a strange hour to discuss lending libraries. “But I didn’t, so kindly get out of my bedroom. "
5 " They were still standing too close. Turner tipped his head against the wall and looked up at Lawrence with lazy indifference. Most unsecretarial. But Turner didn’t seem afraid, and Lawrence didn’t know how to feel about that. He was so accustomed to fear that the absence of it was unsettling. "
6 " But it wasn’t fear or curiosity that Lawrence read in Turner’s gaze. He was familiar with both those expressions, and this wasn’t either of them. Lawrence might not have any interest in interacting with his fellow man, but he was a student of science and he liked being able to classify and categorize. This look of Turner’s didn’t fit into any of the looks he was accustomed to receiving. It was something darker and lighter and colder and warmer all at once. "
7 " Lawrence had a hard time attending to the man’s words. Turner himself was as much an intrusion as his stacks. Lawrence’s gaze drifted unwillingly to the secretary’s face, taking in the sweep of dark lashes, the dimple that appeared on one cheek as he smiled—oh, damn it. "
8 " Georgie, who fancied himself more skilled in faking an education than in actually acquiring knowledge, was surprised by how drawn he was to Radnor’s world of invisible particles. "
9 " Lawrence took hold of Georgie’s hand and trapped it on his chest, partly so Georgie could feel the way his heart pounded, partly because he hadn’t the faintest idea how else to respond. All he knew was that he needed to hold Georgie close and keep him safe and spend the rest of eternity enumerating his every quality. He realized with disorienting certainty that this was love. Judging by the bleak tenderness in Georgie’s dark eyes, he knew it too. But what they had felt so fragile and out of place, built of blown glass on unstable ground in the middle of a hurricane. Beautiful, but never meant to last. "
10 " He tried to imagine what Georgie would do, what measures he would invent to make Lawrence feel more at home, less in the wilderness of confusion and nerves. "If you could see to it that I have bread and ham when we stop for supper, perhaps?" It sounded childish, pathetic."Of course," Lady Standish said briskly, as if nothing were amiss. This, Lawrence reminded himself, was friendship. "
