Chloe

“What if he hates me?"

"No one could possibly hate you, Xander," I told him, my heart twisting.

"Avery, people have hated me my whole life." There was something in his tone that made me think that very few people understood what it was like to be Xander Hawthorne.

"Not anyone who knows you," I said fiercely.

Xander smiled, and something about it made me want to cry. "Do you think it's okay," he said, sounding younger than I'd ever heard him, "that I loved playing those Saturday morning games? Loved growing up here? Loved the great and terrible Tobias Hawthorne?”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Final Gambit

“I love you. I would die to protect you. I would make you hate me to keep you safe because damn it, Avery—some things are too precious to gamble.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Final Gambit

“Sometimes you have an idea of a person — about who they are, about what you'd be like together. But sometimes that's all that it is: an idea. And for so long, I have been afraid that I loved the idea of Emily more than I will ever be capable of loving anyone real.”

He looked at me like the act of doing so was painful and sweet. “It was never just the idea of you, Avery.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Final Gambit

“The only person I trust with all that I am and all that could be, Heiress, is you.”
― Jennifer Lynn Barnes, The Final Gambit