"My God, Sage. Your eyes. How have I never noticed them?"
That uncomfortable feeling was spreading over me again. "What about them?"
"The color," he breathed. "When you stand in the light. They're amazing... like molten gold. I could paint those..."
He reached toward me but then pulled back. They're beautiful. You're beautiful."
Something in the way he was looking at me froze me up and made my stomach do flip-flops, though I couldn't quite articulate why. I only knew that he looked as though he was seeing me for the very first time... and it scared me. I'd been able to brush off his easy, joking compliments, but this intensity was something different altogether, something I didn't know how to react to. When he looked at me like this, I believed that he thought my eyes were beautiful--that I was beautiful.
--Bloodlines by Richelle Mead
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Confession time: I kinda hated/ignored Adrian when I was reading the Vampire Academy series. Now I wonder why the heck I did that. I love Adrian, and I ship Adrian/Syndey like whoa now and I don't care that it's all kinds of forbidden because when Adrian Ivashkov looks at someone with a kind of intense, awed reverence and calls her beautiful (not pretty or cute or gorgeous or sexy but beautiful), you know he isn't messing around and it's as real as it gets. I need the second book now, thanks.
Adrian Ivashkov, Sydney Sage (c) Richelle Mead.