I Thee Take: To Have and To Hold Duet Book Two by Knight, Natasha (books to read in your 20s txt) 📕

“Cristiano?” she asks when I pull back.

“Doesn’t matter.”

I kiss her again and this time her eyes close and she kisses me back.

I set the flashlight on the shelf beside us, knocking two bottles of water to the ground. They make a thump then roll away into the pitch-black dark.

When she looks back up at me, I take her face in my hands and kiss her deeply. Sliding one hand beneath her top, I slip it up over her belly to cup her breast. She’s not wearing a bra. She’s in an emerald-colored slip. She must have just come out of bed.

I slide my hand lower into her panties as I deepen the kiss. My fingers weave through the mound of soft hair to cup her sex.

She moans into my mouth, hers going slack for a moment. I love how she responds to my touch. How she gives herself to me.

With my other hand, I undo my jeans, push them and my briefs down. I draw back to look at her, brush her hair back from her face again with both hands now.

“I need you,” I say as she raises one leg to my waist.

I lift her up, so she wraps them both around me, the wall at her back and me at her front. I kiss her again while with one hand, I push the crotch of her panties aside and draw back a little to look at her as I take her.

She’s wet. Ready. But the thrust still forces the air from her lungs.

Cupping her ass cheeks, I kiss her, watch her take me, our lips or tongues and teeth in constant contact. I listen to the wet sounds of our bodies coming together, hear our combined breaths sharp and broken with the thrusts.

She feels good. So fucking good. Warm and tight and like home. Like I belong here. Right here with her.

Here inside her.

“I’m going to come,” she says against my mouth. “You’re going to make me come.”

Her mouth goes slack as soon as she says it. I hear her moan and feel her walls throb around me. When they do, I come too, letting the pulses milk me as I watch her. Beautiful Scarlett. Beautiful, scarred Scarlett.

My Scarlett.

I love her.

I know it in that instant. I know it as I empty inside her. I know it as I hear the breathy whisper of my name on her tongue.

I love her.

And this moment, now, us here like this, it’s honest and perfect while everything else is so utterly imperfect. While everything else is a lie.

Her legs go weak around me so I’m holding her up, kissing her as I draw out of her.

She’s out of breath and sweat beads her forehead. I rest mine against hers. I’m breathless too.

“Everything is fucked up. Everything.” I cup her face, kiss her cheek, never taking my forehead from hers as a tear slips from her eye.

“Shh.” She cups my face too, wraps her arms around my neck and buries her cheek in the crook of my neck.

“Everything but you,” I tell her but I’m not sure she hears.

17

Scarlett

“What did you mean when you said you just remembered the tunnel?” I ask Cristiano, thinking how strange the statement had sounded. We’re sitting in a hot bath after the episode downstairs. He’s behind me and doesn’t answer right away so I turn my head to look at him.

He meets my eyes. “I don’t remember things.”

“What do you mean?”

He looks thoughtful, far away, his forehead furrowed. “I don’t remember things. People,” he pauses. “I don’t remember them, Scarlett.”

“What?”

He shakes his head.

“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I say.

“When I woke up, I had no memory of anything before the massacre. Nothing. Like the first seventeen years of my life didn’t happen.”

I feel my forehead wrinkle as I try to follow.

“I can’t remember my own mother.”

I’m trying to process, trying to make sense of this thing that makes no sense.

“None of them.”

Something he said comes back to me then. When he gave me his mother’s dress, he made the comment he’d given it to me to see if he’d remember. I hadn’t understood what he’d meant.

“Oh, my God.” I can’t wrap my brain around the scope of it. He must feel wholly untethered. Lost. What does he hold on to when he has no past?

He shakes his head, moves to stand. I watch the water slide down over him, see the muscle, the scars, the tattoos. The wreck of the jagged script along his arm. I squint to read it, but no, that can’t be right.

He wraps a towel around his hips then holds one out for me.

I stand and he wraps me in it, then lifts me out of the tub and carries me into the bedroom. I’m surprised again by how gentle he can be.

We stand at the edge of the bed as he dries the water from me.

“Do you remember the first day?” he asks. “When I brought you in here?”

I nod, trying to keep up when it often seems like he has half the conversation in his own head.

“You made me remember the Crème Caramel. My mother’s. It was your eyes. They’re the color of burnt sugar.” He smiles but it’s gone in a second. “You made me remember, Scarlett. That’s never happened before.”

“You have no memory of anything at all?”

He shakes his head. “I know every detail from the day I woke up from the coma to now. And that night. The night of the murders. That I can’t forget. Can’t stop seeing.”

“Have you talked to a doctor or something?”

He gives a sad little laugh. It’s more of an exhale. “No. No one can know. Well, apart from my uncle. And I think Lenore suspects.”

“What about your brother?”

He shakes his head. “No. And he won’t know. I can’t let him down again.”

“Let him down again?”

“He had to deal with it alone. I was in a fucking coma. May as well have been dead for all the good I