Went to Half Price Books total to do my usual perusing of the historical romance mmpb's, and lo and behold, what did I find for $2.50? A signed first edition of Anne Stuart's Shadow Dance.

He only unmasked himself in this way when he was feeling particularly sure of himself, for he did not like to expose his eyes. His eyes were large and pale, with long, fair lashes; huge eyes, that blinked and stuttered in the light like shy children. His delicate, pick-pocket hands dealt gracefully with his glasses; such pretty, pink-and-white butterfly hands. But they were extraordinarily, deceptively strong; Morris had once seen him tear a telephone directory in half with his pretty hands. They were dirty, though, and there was a hint of something rusty in the fingernails, rusty like dried blood.

Round and round they swayed. Their movements became more and more florid and abandoned. They were dancing at a Grand Ball in the Court of Ruritania, Morris clinking a breastful of medals and flashing two spurred, patent-leather feet. Honey with a king's ransom of diamonds on his high piled hair and another on his snowy breast, advancing and retreating in a tide of swishing petticoats. He flung away his boater after the first circuit of the floor. It skidded across the room like a quoit. Their reflections merged together, rippling on the dark surface of the mirror that recorded only the intermittent pale blurs of their faces and the gracious, rocking-chair, three-four rhythm of their bodies, spinning between the waltzing walls. Laughing, breathless, they whirled to the invisible rhetoric of a hundred violins. The patches of candlelight illuminated only their feet for odd moments, and then they were back, dancing in darkness again. They neared the extravagant climax of the dance.

In the flickering blue light, Honey's long, pale hair and high-held, androgynous face was hard and fine and inhuman; Medusa, marble, terrible. A little wind through the door blew about his flame so that the light seemed to stream from the ends of his whipping hair. She gaped up, baffled, wondering; like the Virgin in Florentine pictures meeting the beautiful, terrible Angel of the Annunciation, she all heaped upon the ground, her slack mouth opening and closing soundlessly. Then Honey, possessed by some personal devil, darted forward spreading his billowing white sleeves like wings, emitting a high, piercing scream, a spectre, a madman, a vampire.

He’s always seemed so essential to me, like a limb. You can’t call your hand a friend, it’s just there. And you don’t bother to ask it why it does things -- picks things up, puts them down. And he was like my hand that belonged to me but I never understood how it functioned.’