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" There was something different about Severin today, Devon thought. A look of being stranded in some foreign place without a map. “How are you, Tom?” he asked with a touch of concern. “Why are you really here?”
Severin’s usual response would have been something flippant and amusing. Instead, he said distractedly, “I don’t know.”
“Is there a problem with one of your businesses?”
“No, no,” Severin said with a touch of impatience. “All that’s fine.”
“Your health, then?”
“No. It’s only that lately … I seem to want something I don’t have. But I don’t know what it is. And that’s impossible. I have everything.”
Devon bit back a wry smile. The conversation always became somewhat tortured whenever Severin, who was habitually detached from his emotions, tried to identify one of them. “Do you think it could be loneliness?” he suggested.
“No, it’s not that.” Severin looked pensive. “What do you call it when everything seems boring and pointless, and even the people you know well are like strangers?”
“Loneliness,” Devon said flatly.
“Damn it. That makes six.”
“Six what?” Devon asked in bewilderment.
“Feelings. I’ve never had more than five feelings, and they’re hard enough to manage as it is. I’ll be damned if I’ll add another.”
Shaking his head, Devon went to retrieve his glass of brandy. “I don’t want to know what your five feelings are,” he said. “I’m sure the answer would worry me. "
― Lisa Kleypas , Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels, #6)
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" When you said our engagement is subject to your family’s approval,” he ventured, “I hope you don’t expect it to be unanimous.”
“I would like it to be. But it’s not a requirement.”
“Good,” he said. “Because even if I manage to talk Trenear into it, debating with West will be like tilting at windmills.”
She looked up at him alertly. “Was Don Quixote one of the books you read?”
“To my regret, yes.”
“You didn’t like it?”
Tom gave her a sardonic glance. “A story about a middle-aged lunatic who vandalizes private property? Hardly. Although I agree with Cervantes’ point that chivalry is no different from insanity.”
“That’s not at all what he was saying.” Cassandra regarded him ruefully. “I’m beginning to suspect you’ve missed the point of every novel you’ve read so far.”
“Most of them are pointless. Like the one about the French bread thief who violated his parole—”
“Les Misérables?”
“Yes. It took Victor Hugo fourteen hundred pages to say, ‘Never let your daughter marry a radical French law student.’ Which everyone already knows.”
Her brows lifted. “Is that the lesson you took from the novel?”
“No, of course not,” he said promptly, reading her expression. “The lesson of Les Misérables is …” Tom paused cagily before taking his best guess. “… ‘It’s usually a mistake to forgive your enemies.’”
“Not even close.” Amusement lurked at the corners of her mouth. “I have my work cut out for me, it seems.”
“Yes,” Tom said, encouraged by the remark. “Take me on. Influence me for the better. It will be a public service.”
“Hush,” Cassandra begged, touching his lips with her fingers, “before I change my mind.”
“You can’t,” Tom said, knowing he was taking the words more seriously than she’d intended. But the very idea was like an ice pick to the heart. “That is, don’t. Please. Because I …” He couldn’t break their shared gaze. Her blue eyes, as dark as a cloudless midnight, seemed to stare right inside him, gently and inexorably prying out the truth. “… need you,” he finally muttered.
Shame caused his face to sting as if from spark burns. He couldn’t believe what he’d just said, how weak and unmanly it had sounded.
But the strange thing was … Cassandra didn’t seem to think less of him for it. In fact, she was looking at him with more certainty now, nodding slightly, as if his mortifying admission had just cemented the bargain.
Not for the first time, Tom reflected there was no understanding women. "
― Lisa Kleypas , Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels, #6)
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" It's a novel by Jules Verne," she continued. "He writes for young readers, but adults enjoy his work as well."
"What's it about?"
"An Englishman who accepts a wager to go around the world in eighty days. He travels by train, ships, horse, elephant, and even a wind-powered sledge."
Mr. Severin's perplexed gaze met hers. "Why read an entire novel about that when you could obtain the itinerary from a travel office?"
She smiled at that. "The novel isn't about the itinerary. What's important is what he learns along the way."
"Which is?"
"Read it," she challenged, "and find out. "
― Lisa Kleypas , Chasing Cassandra (The Ravenels, #6)
