She keeps her hair shoulder length but has had bangs cut in. She rarely wears makeup and I love that about her. She’s a natural beauty and her most stunning features are her smile and her kind heart.
“Aren’t you swimming?” she asks. I’m still dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.
I close the door behind me. “I want to spend some time alone with you first.” I walk toward her. “Turn around,” I tell her and take the straps of the bikini from her but instead of tying them, I slip it off.
“Hey,” she protests, turning in my arms as I let the slip of turquoise drop.
“What?” I ask, wrapping my arms around her and kissing her.
“I promised Alessandro I’d snorkel with him.”
“Alessandro can wait.” I kiss her again and walk her backward to the bed. Once she’s there, I slide my arms down to strip off the bottoms and only when she’s naked do I draw back to look at her. “God, you’re so fucking gorgeous.”
She smiles wide and puts her hands on either side of my face. “It’s because I’m happy.” She kisses me. “But really, we can’t do this now. They’re waiting. Lenore has cake and my father will be here—”
“Shh.” I kiss her as I push her again to sit on the bed and lean over to kiss her, forcing her to lie down as I pull my shirt over my head. Her greedy hands fumble with my belt as I kiss her neck, her chest, and I take her wrists to draw her hands away. When I bring my mouth to her sex, she opens her legs and arches her back, moaning and weaving her fingers into my hair.
“I love…” she gasps as I tease her sex, licking the length of her before taking her clit into my mouth and sucking. “Oh fuck, I love…” Her breath catches then and within moments, she’s coming, her body jerking once as she pulls me closer. I suck harder, drawing every last ounce of pleasure from her. Her taste on my tongue makes me harder, her hands drawing me up to kiss her once her orgasm abates. When I press myself against her she moans with an insatiable need.
“What do you love? You never finished your sentence,” I say against her mouth.
“I love your mouth on me,” she teases, teeth biting my lip. “And I love my mouth on you.” She starts to slide down to her knees, but I stop her.
“You make me crazy.”
Her hands are at my belt again, but I pull them away.
“What? You get a taste, and I don’t?” she asks.
I smile wide. “I have a gift for you first.”
She pauses. She must see something on my face. “A gift? You didn’t have to give me a gift.” Her eyes get teary. It makes me a little sad to see this still. She’s so unused to kindness even after more than a year with me, with her family. But I shove those thoughts aside.
“I wanted to,” I tell her, kissing her once more as I reach into my pocket and palm the ring.
“Dante?” her smile wavers and her eyes mist.
“Destiny you said. Do you remember that?”
She nods, a tear dropping down her cheek.
“You believed in us from the start. And while I still believe you can do a lot better than me,” I start, taking her left hand as she sniffles and sliding the ring onto her finger. “I’m not letting you go. Ever. You’re my destiny, Mara. Will you marry me?”
She smiles through her tears, and I think I can watch her all day. I think I can just watch her face, all her expressions, her emotions. I love her so fucking much I don’t know how I existed without her.
She looks up at me and nods, leaning in to hug me tight. “Destiny,” she whispers. “Yes, I’ll marry you.”
Epilogue 2
Mara
Three Months Later
We are to be married on the beach at sunset. Neither of us wanted to wait. What’s the point of a long engagement? I don’t want to lose any more time.
It’s almost time as I look out onto the small gathering. It’s just our families, everyone barefoot, the women in pretty dresses, the men in casual suits. Dante is already at the makeshift altar, a beautiful arch he and Cristiano built together. I didn’t know he could do that. It’s draped with white silks and decorated with hundreds of wildflowers in every color with red poppies being prominent. It’s so pretty I can’t believe it. The chairs too have bouquets tied to them and white silk ribbon blows in the sea breeze.
The sun will be setting soon. And on cue, there’s a knock on my door.
“Come in,” I say, turning, picking up my bunch of wildflowers.
My father and Noah enter. My father. It’s so strange. So unreal. I have a father. And he’s kind and a little bit lonely, I think. Or maybe what I see is the regret at the lost years.
“Wow,” Noah says as my father’s eyes grow watery.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I’m wearing a simple white dress. It’s the softest organza silk with spaghetti straps and a small train behind me. My hair is woven with baby’s breath as well as one lone sapphire comb. A gift from my grandmother. It’s an antique her mother wore at her wedding and Lenore wore at hers. My mother never had a chance to wear it.
“You look beautiful,” my father says.
“Thank you.”
“We’d better go down,” Noah says.
“Just one minute.” My father reaches into his pocket to take something out. “I have something for you.”
Noah slips out subtly and I look up at my father.
“You made me very happy when you asked me to walk you down the aisle. You didn’t have to do that.”
“Of course, I did. I wanted you to.”
“You didn’t but I’m happy you did. And I’m just happy to have found you and I want you to know however much time you need, I won’t rush you.”
“I’m glad I found you too.”
He holds his palm up and inside it is a key. “This is for you and your husband. You’re always welcome. My home is yours whenever you’re ready.”
I smile, look up at him and I hug him. I’m happy to see each time we go to stay at his house that more and more of it is opened, windows no longer shuttered, life slowly returning. “Thank you. Thank you so much. I’m so glad you’re here.”
A knock comes on the door again and we straighten, both of us wiping our eyes. Noah peers in. “Sunset…” he says.
My dad sets the key on the nightstand and extends his arm. I tuck mine inside his and we walk out of the room and out of the house. Noah comes to my other side, and I take his arm too as we walk onto the beach where the harpist begins to play.
I curl my toes in the sand as everyone turns to us and I think how magical this is. Us on the beach like this. Waves rolling softly in. The delicate sounds of the harp. My family all around me. More family than I ever thought I’d have. And at the end of the aisle, my heart.
When Noah and my father hand me over to Dante and he takes my hands, I feel my eyes mist with happy tears. He wraps his arms around me, hugging me close to him, his forehead to mine, nose touching nose.
“Destiny,” he whispers.
“Destiny.”
We kiss.
What To Read Next
Sample from Taken
Helena
I’m the oldest of the Willow quadruplets. Four girls. Always girls. Every single quadruplet birth, generation after generation, it’s always girls.
This generation’s crop yielded the usual, but instead of four perfect, beautiful dolls, there were three.
And me.
And today, our twenty-first birthday, is the day of harvesting.
That’s the Scafoni family’s choice of words, not ours. At least not mine. My parents seem much more comfortable with it than my sisters and I do, though.
Harvesting is always on the twenty-first birthday of the quads. I don’t know if it’s written in stone somewhere or what, but it’s what I know and what has been on the back of my mind since I learned our history five years ago.
There’s an expression: those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. Well, that’s bullshit, because we Willows know well
our past and look at us now.
The same blocks that have been used for centuries standing in the old library, their surfaces softened by the feet of every other Willow Girl who stood on the same stumps of wood, and all I can think when I see them, the four lined up like they are, is how archaic this is, how fucking unreal. How they can’t do this to us.
Yet, here we are.
And they are doing this to us.
But it’s not us, really.
My shift is marked.
I’m unclean.
So it’s really my sisters.
Sometimes I’m not sure who I hate more, my own family for allowing this insanity generation after generation, or the Scafoni monsters for demanding the sacrifice.
“It’s time,” my father says. His voice is grave.
He’s aged these last few months. I wonder if that’s remorse because it certainly isn’t backbone.
I heard he and my mother argue once, exactly once, and then it was over.
He simply accepted it.
Accepted that tonight, his daughters will be made to stand on those horrible blocks while a Scafoni bastard looks us over, prods and pokes us, maybe checks our teeth like you would a horse, before making his choice. Before taking one of my sisters as his for the next three years of her life.
I’m not naive enough to be unsure what that will mean exactly. Maybe my sisters are, but not me.
“Up on the block. Now, Helena.”
I look at my sisters who already stand so meekly on their appointed stumps. They’re all paler than usual tonight and I swear I can hear their hearts pounding in fear of what’s to come.
When I don’t move right away, my father painfully takes my arm and lifts me up onto my block and all I can think, the one thing that gives me the slightest hope, is that if Sebastian Scafoni chooses me, I will find some way to end this. I won’t condemn my daughters to this fate. My nieces. My granddaughters.
But he won’t choose me, and I think that’s why my parents are angrier than usual with me.
See, I’m the ugly duckling. At least I’d be considered ugly standing next to my sisters.
And the fact that I’m unclean—not a virgin—means I won’t be taken.
The Scafoni bastard will choose one of their precious golden daughters instead.
Golden, to my dark. Golden—quite literally. Sparkling almost, my sisters.
I glance at them as my father attaches the iron shackle to my ankle. He doesn’t do this to any of them. They’ll do as they’re told, even as their gazes bounce from the closed twelve-foot doors to me and back again and again and again.
But I have no protection to offer. Not tonight. Not on this one.
The backs of my eyes burn with tears I refuse to shed.
“How can you do this? How can you allow it?” I ask for the hundredth time. I’m talking to my mother while my father clasps the restraints on my wrists, making sure I won’t attack the monsters.
“Better gag her, too.”
It’s my mother’s response to my question and, a moment later, my father does as he’s told and ensures my silence.
I hate my mother more, I think. She’s a Willow quadruplet. She witnessed a harvesting herself. Witnessed the result of this cruel tradition.
Tradition.
A tradition of kidnapping.
Of breaking.
Of destroying.
I look to my sisters again. Three almost carbon copies of each other, with long blonde hair curling around their shoulders, flowing down their backs, their blue eyes wide with fear.
Well, except in Julia’s case.
She’s different than the others. She’s more…eager. But I don’t think she has a clue what they’ll do to her.
Me, no one would guess I came from the same batch.
Opposite their gold, my hair is so dark a black, it appears almost blue, with one single, wide streak of silver to relieve the stark shade, a flaw I was born with. And contrasting their cornflower-blue eyes, mine are a midnight sky; there too, the only relief the silver specks that dot them.
They look like my mother. Like perfect dolls.
I look like my great-aunt, also named Helena, down to the silver streak I refuse to dye. She’s in her nineties now. I wonder if they had to lock her in her room and steal her wheelchair, so she wouldn’t interfere in the ceremony.
Aunt Helena was the chosen girl of her generation. She knows what’s in store for us better than anyone.
“They’re coming,” my mother says.
She has super hearing, I swear, but then, a moment later, I hear them too.
A door slams beyond the library, and the draft blows out a dozen of the thousand candles that light the huge room.
A maid rushes to relight them. No electricity. Tradition, I guess.
If I were Sebastian Scafoni, I’d want to get a good look at the prize I’d be fucking for the next year. And I have no doubt there will be fucking, because what else can break a girl so completely but taking that of all things?
And it’s not just the one year. No. We’re given for three years. One year for each brother. Oldest to youngest. It used to be four, but now, it’s three.
I would pinch my arm to be sure I’m really standing here, that I’m not dreaming, but my hands are bound behind my back, and I can’t.
This can’t be fucking real. It can’t be legal.
And yet here we are, the four of us, naked beneath our translucent, rotting sheaths—I swear I smell the decay on them—standing on our designated blocks, teetering on them. I guess the Willows of the past had smaller feet. And I admit, as I hear their heavy, confident footfalls approaching the ancient wooden doors of the library, I am afraid.
I’m fucking terrified.
One-click Taken here!
Also by Natasha Knight
To Have and To Hold
With This Ring
I Thee Take
Stolen: Dante’s Vow
The Society Trilogy
Requiem of the Soul
Reparation of Sin
Resurrection of the Heart
Dark Legacy Trilogy
Taken (Dark Legacy, Book 1)
Torn (Dark Legacy, Book 2)
Twisted (Dark Legacy, Book 3)
Unholy Union Duet
Unholy Union
Unholy Intent
Collateral Damage Duet
Collateral: an Arranged Marriage Mafia Romance
Damage: an Arranged Marriage Mafia Romance
Ties that Bind Duet
Mine
His
MacLeod Brothers
Devil’s Bargain
Benedetti Mafia World
Salvatore: a Dark Mafia Romance
Dominic: a Dark Mafia Romance
Sergio: a Dark Mafia Romance
The Benedetti Brothers Box Set (Contains Salvatore, Dominic and Sergio)
Killian: a Dark Mafia Romance
Giovanni: a Dark Mafia Romance
The Amado Brothers
Dishonorable
Disgraced
Unhinged
Standalone Dark Romance
Descent
Deviant
Beautiful Liar
Retribution
Theirs To Take
Captive, Mine
Alpha
Given to the Savage
Taken by the Beast
Claimed by the Beast
Captive’s Desire
Protective Custody
Amy’s Strict Doctor
Taming Emma
Taming Megan
Taming Naia
Reclaiming Sophie
The Firefighter’s Girl
Dangerous Defiance
Her Rogue Knight
Taught To Kneel
Tamed: the Roark Brothers Trilogy
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About the Author
Natasha Knight is the USA Today Bestselling author of Romantic Suspense and Dark Romance Novels. She has sold over half a million books and is translated into six languages. She currently lives in The Netherlands with her husband and two daughters and when she’s not writing, she’s walking in the woods listening to a book, sitting in a corner reading or off exploring the world as often as she can get away.
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www.natasha-knight.com
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Stolen: Dante’s Vow Page 26