Title: WITH THIS RING
Series: To Have and To Hold Duet #1
Author: Natasha Knight
Genre: Dark Mafia Romance
Release Date: February 2, 2021
When I rescued Scarlett De La Cruz from her tower it’s not like her prospects were looking so great.
You’d think she’d show a little gratitude. Thank me for putting my ring on her finger and marking her as mafia property.
My property.
I’ll keep her safe. And the trade-off isn’t so bad. Most women would jump at the chance to sleep in my bed.
Not Scarlett, though.
My Cartel Princess has a big mouth and an even bigger attitude. But it’s her furious caramel eyes that keep me coming back for more. That and the way her body bends to mine like it already knows it belongs to me.
Scarlett is my enemy. She’s also the one woman I can’t keep my hands off.
But if I don’t keep my head on straight, everything I’ve worked for all these years will have been for nothing.
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Lace falls across my face. It’s yellowed over the years and the smell that clings to it is musty. Old. But it’s my mother’s. The one she wore on her wedding day. Baby’s breath and discarded lilies litter the stone floor as the woman grumbles behind me. She’s annoyed at having to work with the old veil when a brand new, prettier one sits unused in its box. I move my foot, crush the delicate baby’s breath, impaling the fallen petal of a pale pink lily with my heel.
Funeral flowers for a wedding. An omen.
Not that I need one.
The stink of them turns my stomach. This isn’t how I imagined my wedding day.
“Finished,” the woman announces.
I stand, the petal sticking to my heel. I don’t care. I look up to meet my reflection in the mirror.
“He won’t like the veil,” she says. She’s a blur beside me.
I shift my gaze, letting my eyes focus on her. She’s plump and short and has a wart on the side of her face with a thick black hair growing out of it. Don’t judge a book by its cover has nothing on this one. She is as much a bitch inside as she looks on the outside.
“I guess he’ll have to get over it.”
“You should wear the one he sent.”
I don’t bother to answer her, although I agree. The veil was a gift from my brothers.
Gift.
No, not a gift.
Just another cruelty to make me wear my mother’s veil for this sham wedding.
She snorts, turns to gather up the dress, the keys jangling on her belt. I could take them. Overpower her. That part would be easy. It’s the men with the guns outside the door who’d be the problem.
Noisy footsteps on the hundred stairs announce the approach of soldiers to my tower room.
A tower. They locked me in a fucking tower. My own fucking brothers.
From the sound of things, they’re expecting me to put up a fight. They’ll take me kicking and screaming if I do. Besides, I know better than to waste my energy on them. I’ll need it after. For the wedding night.
A man says something, another one laughs, just before I hear a loud crash, like something smashing hard against the wall.
It’s then that it happens. Gunfire explodes just beyond my room. A bullet splinters its way through the thick wooden door and shatters the mirror, breaking my reflection into a thousand pieces, sending me backward into the stone wall.
The woman with the wart screams.
I right myself. Touching the back of my head with one hand, I somehow still manage to keep hold of the lilies. Suddenly, the door is kicked in, banging against the wall as heavily armed men in military fatigues raid my room. A cloud of smoke follows behind them, seeping into my circular tower.
They fan out, a dozen of them and I don’t recognize a single one. These aren’t my brothers’ men.
The woman is on the floor blubbering something, sobbing.
I just stare at the door as another set of footsteps approach, quieter now. This one isn’t in a hurry. And I know the instant he steps into my line of vision that he’s in charge.
He’s the one to worry about. The only one who’s masked.
He stops just inside the room, surveys it, eyeing every soldier, every stone, every cobweb. And when deep blue eyes land on me, a weight drops in my belly, a hundred-pound cement block.
The woman with the keys stands, tripping over her words as she walks toward him. He looks down at her like he’s irritated, and she doesn’t get far. An echo of bullets shuts her down, splattering blood like paint on my neck, my face. The shots put her back on the floor.
Fuck.
I don’t spare her a glance. I don’t need to, to know she’s dead.
The man’s eyes return to mine. They narrow. And when he takes a step toward me, I take one back, knocking the chair behind me to the floor, panicking then. Animated then.
I turn to run but see a dozen sets of eyes staring back at me. The masked intruder, the biggest of them all, blocks the only exit. I can’t even jump from the window. They’re barred. Suicide was never an option, not for my brothers. They needed me.
But something’s gone wrong.
And before I can decide what to do, before I can make up my mind to try to charge him, to risk bullets putting me down like they did the woman on the floor, he’s got my wrist in his right hand and he’s squeezing it.
My hand opens. Flowers scatter to the floor. I watch them, then watch him lift my hand to his face. His thumb comes to my ring finger where the hideous diamond catches the waning sun. For a moment I think he’s going to break my finger. But he twists and forces it off. It’s tight but he manages. He pockets the ring then shifts his gaze to mine again.
I swallow hard.
He cocks his head to the side, one hand still locked around my wrist. He spins me around.
I scream as he jerks me to him, his body a solid wall at my back.
He releases my wrist and bands his arm beneath my breasts. With the other, he pushes the veil off my neck, his hand rough against my skin, fingers digging, bruising. I think he’s going to snap my neck. One quick twist is all it would take. He’s a fucking giant.
But he doesn’t.
Instead, the moment I turn my face up to his, he squeezes and instantly, my knees give out. My arms drop uselessly to my sides. He shifts his grip and as I slip, he lifts me up, hauling me over his shoulder, turning the room upside down before it goes black.
Are you afraid of me?” he asks more quietly but no more gently. “Yes.”
He leans in close, inhales deeply. “Good. Because you should be,” he says, his lips brushing my cheek, the corner of my mouth when he does. “Because you don’t know what I want to do to you.”
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again; Natasha Knight books are my crack. She writes some of the most sizzling and addictive mafia romance and this one may be my favorite of hers to date!
Cristiano is a man set on bloody revenge and Scarlett the beautiful woman that gets caught in the crosshairs of a year old war in the making.
What I love about Knight’s duets, is the way she really sets the stage with book one. The slow burn, the tension, the secrets, the questions that are burning through your brain. I couldn’t turn the pages fast enough.
Scarlett has been collateral for ruthless man for almost all of her life. Being forced to marry a man she hates by her vicious brothers is one thing. But being rescued out of the marriage only to see another guided cage is another thing.
Cristiano has been waiting to avenge the murder of his family for years and now the cards are finally falling into place for him. Even if it means a marriage to the woman whose family took center stage in the ruination of his. It doesn’t matter that she’s an innocent. He’ll use her for what he needs.
There’s just enough character development in this book to get you completely hooked on both characters while still leaving you burning with questions on their past. The tension between Cristiano and Scarlett is so thick, you can practically taste it. This is the ultimate enemies to lovers catnip. Scarlett may be young, and her past may be riddled in pain and demons that she tries to forget, but she’s a fighter through and through. She protects her youngest brother with a type of ferocity that a mafia princess should have. But she’s no princess. She’s been through hell, even if we haven’t fully learned the extent of it.
THis story had me eagerly turning the pages well into the night only to be slammed with a cliffhangers to beat all cliffhanger and desperate for my next hit. I can’t wait to get my hands on the conclusion. This had everything I love in a mafia romance; grit with just enough dose of darkness, sexual tension, plenty of action, secrets and betrayal. I need the final book IMMEDIATELY!
COMING SOON
#2 I Thee Take – Releasing February 23
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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SILVER LINING
NOT WHAT I EXPECTED
PRETTY WHEN SHE CRIES
RIFTS & REFRAINS
Genre:
Devney is a USA Today bestselling author who lives in Washington with her husband and two sons. Born and raised in Montana, she loves writing books set in her treasured home state. After working in the technology industry for nearly a decade, she abandoned conference calls and project schedules to enjoy a slower pace at home with her family. Writing one book, let alone many, was not something she ever expected to do. But now that she’s discovered her true passion for writing romance, she has no plans to ever stop.
OUT OF LOVE
Holy mother of all plot twists, what did I just read?!
GOLD MINE
UNHOLY INTENT
Raise your hand if you stayed up way past your bed time binging on this book and could barely function at work the next morning and no amount of coffee helped but yet you still couldn’t find two f’s to rub together because this book was totally worth it….
No but seriously though. I think this may have been my favorite from Natasha Knight to date. We already know that her antiheroes are my favorite sort of book crack. But Cristina and Damian’s story was simply on a whole other level.
THE DEVIL’S CROWN
You know what I love? Seemingly irredeemable villains. Anti-heroes that you almost don’t want to root for and yet you can’t help but ultimately fall head over ovaries for. And it just doesn’t get any more delicious than Aleksei Popov. The ultimate villain in 
Now first of all, if you haven’t yet read All The Pretty Things trilogy, I HIGHLY recommend that you do. Yes, this is a spin off with a new couple, but there’s a lot of story that carries over and you wouldn’t have the same appreciation for all those nuances if you haven’t read the trilogy first.
Alek once lost everything for love. His empire and his name all went out in a fiery blaze of bullets and betrayal. But Alek is not the same man he used to be either. Yes, he’s still the ruthless killer and calculating criminal. But beneath the cold stare and cigar smoke lies the heart of a man that no one expected, not even the man himself.
HARD TO HANDLE
