Roger S. Pressman

“Wicked girl,’ Hamish chided, laughing into her hair. She felt the familiar wave of jealousy, battling her heart’s desire to give herself to him without fear. The thought of having that French vixen back under the roof of Castle Kintochlochie made her feel quite nauseous. It would take all her self-control not to throw a cup of hot coffee into Felicité’s lap.”
― Emmanuelle de Maupassant, Highland Christmas

“We stared at the vegetation for a moment, and I wondered whether the loss of a wife or child had burned the haggard and bluish look of cholera death into his memory. A few years before I was born, the water from a public pump on Broad Street had killed more than six hundred people, marking the end of London’s last cholera epidemic. A cesspit had been dug too close to the public pump, allowing the disease to spread quickly. As soon as both pump and cesspit were shut down, the epidemic ceased.”
― Annelie Wendeberg, The Devil's Grin

“crushed wing. Crying, in a pitch almost too high for Patricia to hear. She looked into the sparrow’s eye, enveloped by a dark stripe, and she saw its fear. Not just fear, but also misery—as if this bird knew it would die”
― Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky

“Satisfactory in that we have a four per cent chamber failure rate amongst the cargo,’ she told him flatly. ‘For just short of two millennia, I think that counts as satisfactory. It could have been worse.”
― Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time