Anne Calhoun > Quotes

“Last time I checked, women didn’t come with expiration dates.”
― Anne Calhoun, Liberating Lacey

“Kissing meant he had to touch. Touching meant he wanted to crush her under him. Getting her under him meant he had to be inside her, and when he got there the only thing that kept him from losing it and going all caveman on her was the knowledge that he’d scare her to death if he did.”
― Anne Calhoun, Liberating Lacey

“I'll sacrifice a little skin to watch you come under me, beautiful.”
― Anne Calhoun, Liberating Lacey

“She watched unguarded emotion wash across his face as he sank into her. Wonder. Pleasure. Need. Anticipation. Love. Under it all, infusing every look, every action, every touch. Love.”
― Anne Calhoun, Liberating Lacey

“Because there’s nothing like the feel of a woman's body under mine, all tight and hot and wet as she slowly comes apart.”
― Anne Calhoun, Liberating Lacey

“I'm not trying to rescue her. She can rescue herself. I just want to give her a reason to try.”
― Anne Calhoun, Breath on Embers

“I like how you blush, beautiful.”
― Anne Calhoun, Liberating Lacey

“You look so sexy wearing my cuffs," he growled.
"I'm gonna leave them on when I fuck you. Feel how hard I am? That's from thinking about every stroke, so hot and wet.”
― Anne Calhoun, Liberating Lacey

“What spooked him was how the lack of a barrier ratcheted up not only the physical sensation but also the pound of his heart, the inability to get air into his lungs.”
― Anne Calhoun, Liberating Lacey

“When you get everything aligned, when love welcomes the longing, accepts it, learns to live with it, you make love.”
― Anne Calhoun, Unforgiven

“The best things are never easy, Hunter.”
― Anne Calhoun, Liberating Lacey

“All anyone wants is someone to walk with them,” Sam said quietly. Rachel. So strong, and so alone. And he’d been teaching her to walk alone. He wanted to watch her do everything. Come apart under him, discover who she was now, who she’d be in a month, a year, a decade. He wanted to watch her live. Rachel was the kind of woman who’d be different every time he came home after a shift, and there was another thought he couldn’t shake—Rachel in his apartment when he came home, or maybe in a house they bought together. He’d tried to force her to disconnect, to treat life like he did, as a dip in the shallow end of pleasure. Meaningless. Empty. He’d done what he did with every other woman, made it hot and fast and rough, and she’d called him on it. His apartment was empty, missing even the promise of Rachel. His life was empty of that as well, and of Sam, even though Sam had been back for a decade. That’s what was inside him. Emptiness.”
― Anne Calhoun, Uncommon Passion

“I meant you're very, very persuasive and I doubt I'd resist for long if you set your mind to convincing me."

"Say no sometime. Let me persuade you.”
― Anne Calhoun, Liberating Lacey

“Ben asked the hard question, the one she didn’t have a good, simple answer for. They needed me to be someone I am not. They expected me to surrender all choice and control in my life to God, and if God’s direction wasn’t clear, my pastor or my father would explain it to me. But on the days when she felt some winged creature inside her, talons latched around her heart, beating its wings against her ribs, safety and salvation seemed distant, and untouchable. “I didn’t fit in anymore,” she said.”
― Anne Calhoun, Uncommon Passion

“She was so goddamn beautiful, the way things that could end you were. Guns. Knives. The tawny bird of prey she resembled.”
― Anne Calhoun, Uncommon Passion

“He’d never seen a woman look more satiated, a small, knowing smile on her face, like she knew a secret. A secret about him. One he didn’t even know.”
― Anne Calhoun, Liberating Lacey

“It was easy to be with her, so easy he forgot about the rest of the world.”
― Anne Calhoun, Liberating Lacey

“You don't have to be better, or healed, or over your husband. You just have to be here. That's all I'm asking for. I'm not asking for forever. I'm just asking you to be here, now, with me.”
― Anne Calhoun, Breath on Embers

“I want to take you upstairs, and turn off the lights, and watch your skin turn pink as I move inside you. When I've kissed you and your skin's marked by my mouth, you look like a rose in the moonlight. It gets darker when I'm moving inside you, that blood flush.”
― Anne Calhoun, Jaded

“He’d always enjoyed the slow, sexy build of foreplay, loved women’s bodies and all the mysterious, amazing things they could do, but with Lacey, he couldn’t detach. Kissing meant he had to touch. Touching meant he wanted to crush her under him. Getting her under him meant he had to be inside her,”
― Anne Calhoun, Liberating Lacey

“Jesus God, Ben,” Sam said, then swallowed hard. “Is that why you do this? Make it easy for people to leave?” “Sam, don’t ask me why,” he said. “Do I strike you as even remotely self-aware?”
― Anne Calhoun, Uncommon Passion

“How can you even think about being awake in the world, let alone caring about someone?"
"Because they may be gone, but I'm not. I honor their memories by living, not by becoming the walking dead.”
― Anne Calhoun, Breath on Embers

“It’s a mirage,” she said flatly. “It’s pain from a ghost limb.”

“You are not a mirage. It’s there,” he said, once again ruthlessly contradicting her personal experience. “Know how I know? You fight too hard to push it down. The music, the way you try to cram what’s happening between us into just a fuck. You don’t pour thirty thousand gallons of water into a stone cold building. You pour it into an inferno.”
― Anne Calhoun, Breath on Embers

“Why should she spend her time dwelling on the past when she had something precious right here in front of her?”
― Anne Calhoun, The Devil's Doorbell

“Shitstorms happen. It's what you do after the storm ends that matters.”
― Anne Calhoun, Under the Surface

“Some doors stay open until you close them.”
― Anne Calhoun, The Devil's Doorbell

“she felt as though she were suffocating. Drowning on dry land. Loving him had killed her, but she was taking a very long time to die.”
― Anne Calhoun, The Devil's Doorbell

“He wanted Rachel. Slow and passionate and deep as the ocean. But Rachel asked more of him than he could give. Fuck dilemmas. Fuck rocks and hard places. The razor-sharp edge of who she was hovered over his paper-thin excuse for a soul. He didn’t want that blade to fall. He couldn’t bear to push it away, either.”
― Anne Calhoun, Uncommon Passion

“In all her hours with Ben, his naked body against hers, inside hers, she’d never felt as dirty and ashamed as she did when the men who used to rule her world judged her in the Silent Circle Farm parking lot.”
― Anne Calhoun, Uncommon Passion

“The last time she kissed him was in a doorway. She stepped through. He did not follow, and she left him behind. Finally, she left him behind.”
― Anne Calhoun, The Devil's Doorbell