A Gift of Matrimony (Lover's Gift Book 2) Read online

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  Copyright © 2019 Adom Sample.

  All rights reserved.

  Published by Adom Sample

  Edited by Erin Foster & Nikki Mentges

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

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  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Epilogue

  Dear Reader

  Author

  Chapter 1

  Isabella

  The ocean was warm here, and the light from the sun shone down on the glistening water of the beach, giving me hope for the future. I hadn’t been to Palm Coast for five years, and sitting on this beach had me reminiscing of my childhood. Our house was unchanged and my mother hadn’t altered my room in all that time. It was still the same as I’d left it thirteen years ago when I started college at Berkeley.

  Being home made me nostalgic; however, it also gave me memories of Nathan. We both grew up here. Despite that, I still longed for home. I needed to go back to the beginning. His parents no longer lived here, and their house was up for sale. That gave me a little pleasure, as I knew he wouldn’t ever be back here. It was so hard to get over how he treated me.

  What happened from the time we enjoyed each other’s company here, alone on the beach, to him becoming an abusive psychopath was beyond my understanding. Then again, as I sat back and allowed the warm air scented with the ocean to cleanse my soul, I found a new peace. Nathan was the last thing I needed to think about.

  “Are you okay, honey? You look dispirited about something,” my mother said. She was holding two glasses of orange juice, homemade. Just the way I remembered from childhood. I had been here three months, but I had yet to tell her about Nathan and what he did to me. My parents advised me not to marry him in the first place. I wished I’d listened to them. My mother always sensed there was something off about him, but I’d never seen it.

  Even when he asked me to the prom, my mother and father didn’t want me to go with him. She told me he would flirt with all the girls in our neighborhood. I didn’t believe them or the rumors. I was so naïve and stupid back then, and to be honest, not much had changed. I should have listened to my inner voice. There was a reason I never wanted him to be my boyfriend growing up.

  “Here, I brought you some orange juice, honey,” she said, placing it by my side and sitting next to me. “Is everything well with you? You came to visit so suddenly. You’ve been here a while and you haven’t said much. Sorry, your father could be here; he left for Cuba last night. He went to visit some of our relatives in Havana. He’s been going on and on about seeing them.”

  “I thought most of them migrated back to China.”

  “A few stayed. But enough about your father—he’ll be back sometime next week. Tell me, sweetie, is everything going well with you? You don’t look too happy. You’ve been here for months and you haven’t said a word about what’s going on with you.”

  I sighed. “It’s Nathan, Mom.”

  “What did he do?” She looked into my eyes as if she knew this day would come.

  “Its—” I was hesitating to say anything and I was stuttering. I put my head down and shook my head.

  “It’ll be all right, Izzy. Just tell me what happened,” she said.

  I tried to keep from crying as I laid the whole story on her. I told her about the lies, the cheating, his abuse, and our divorce.

  Her jaw dropped. “He hit you and he tried to steal from your business! Do you want me to hire a hitman? We still have connections in China,” she said nonchalantly. I thought she was joking, but she looked deadly serious. I hugged her and burst into tears on her shoulder. I’d been avoiding telling her, but it was time the truth came out. How could I have been such a fool not to see him for who he was?

  “I’m such an idiot, Mom! I’m so freaking stupid!”

  She rubbed my back. “Now, you look at me and listen when I tell you this, Izzy. There is nothing stupid about wanting to be loved. These are noble traits for any woman. You opened yourself up to someone and put all your emotions and all that you are out there. I don’t see how that can be considered foolish. It’s probably one of the bravest things a person can do.”

  “But Mom, I gave myself to someone who never loved me. He hurt me so much. He said he never loved me and that he just used me to get what he wanted.”

  “So you got hurt. That tends to happen in life. True strength comes when you’re able to do it all over again until you find that one man willing to love you with the same amount of passion that you love him. Otherwise, you’ll end up a bitter, angry woman with a hole in her heart, closed off from the world. I raised you to be strong and brave in the face of adversity. He knocked you down, so get back up, and use that experience to make yourself stronger. There’s always someone out there waiting to treat you the way you deserve to be treated.”

  I wiped my tears on her shoulder and looked into her face. She was right. Someone out there loved me for me, and I had already found him. I just needed to learn how to love him the way he deserved to be loved.

  “Everything will be fine, sweetie. Someday, someone will come into your life and love you so strongly that you’ll forget Nathan ever existed.”

  “Actually, Mom, there is a little more to the story.”

  “Oh?” She sipped her orange juice.

  “Yes. There’s this guy named Dante, and—”

  “Are you talking about Dante Alonso?” she said, cutting me off.

  “Yes, the businessman. He runs the Cayman Roth Conglomerate.”

  “Are you honestly going to sit there and tell me you don’t remember who he is?”

  I gave her a confused look. “What do you mean?” She sat back and started laughing. “What is it, Mom?” I asked again.

  “Dante was such a sweet little boy. He lived here for about two years before his family moved to New York. He was so in love with you, he even asked for my permission to take you to the junior high prom.”

  Within seconds, it felt as if my heart were trying to claw its way out from my chest. “Wait a minute. What are you trying to say? That Dante and I have known each other since we were children?”

  “I’m shocked at you, Izzy. How could you have forgotten the kind-hearted little boy he once was? I remember when he got up the guts to speak to you once. Nathan in his boyish jealousy pushed him off his bike and told him never to talk to you again. It was a good thing your father was there; otherwise, they would have started fighting over you.”

  “Oh my God, Mom, that was him!” I exclaimed in disbelief. “I remember h
im. I had a crush on him, but he never tried to talk to me. I was too shy to approach him, so nothing ever came of it. He looks so different now. I would never have thought the Dante I know now was him. Why didn’t you ever tell me he asked to take me to the junior high prom?”

  “Your father didn’t want you to go, so he told him you weren’t going. You were in the sixth grade and he was in the eighth. He felt that you were too young to attend proms. Since your father answered for you, I saw no reason to tell you he came by that day. It probably would have made you feel worse since you couldn’t go anyway.”

  I was stunned. That explained how he knew so much about me. I’d always wondered how he could have fallen in love with me so quickly, but to think he knew me all these years was just unbelievable. Why didn’t he tell me all this? Did he know himself?

  “Well, I guess since you only spoke to him once the day he and Nathan almost got into a fight, I can see why you would have forgotten. He would always leave little letters in our mailbox for you.”

  “For the love of God, Mom! I never got any letters!”

  “That’s because your father hid them from you. I probably should have told you about all this sooner, but you and Nathan were such close friends I didn’t want to start another fight between those two.”

  “Why in the blue hell would Dad hide them from me?”

  “Honey, you know how overprotective your father was.”

  “Did he throw them away or what? Does he still have them?”

  “I don’t know. You can go look in his . . .” Before my mother could say another word, I rushed into the house to my father’s study, looking for those letters. All these years and all this heartache could have been avoided if I’d known who Dante was from the start. I wreaked complete havoc on my dad’s office space, but I couldn’t find anything. No letters, notes—nothing!

  My mom followed behind me and gasped at the damage I’d caused when she entered the room. “I don’t think he would have kept them in there, sweetie,” she said.

  “Then where, Mom? Where?” I was jittery as if I had just consumed two pints of coffee in one sitting.

  “Let’s go look in the basement.”

  “How about I go look and you get Dad on the phone so I can ask him myself? You have no idea how pissed I am with him right now.”

  “Calm down, sweetie. It was close to twenty years ago.”

  “Yeah, twenty years too late!” I ran down into the basement. He probably thought I had forgotten all about him since I didn’t respond to any of his letters. How long had he been in love with me? Had he been watching me this whole time? He’d said that he’d only been following me for two years. I had to get to the bottom of this. But first . . . the letters.

  “Honey, I have your father on the phone,” my mom shouted from upstairs. “He says the letters are in a little red box next to the wall on the right side.”

  I snickered. “Thanks a lot, Dad. I’m going to little red box you the next time I see you,” I whispered to myself. I went to the right side of our basement and dug through all the rubble my family had collected over the years. And there it was, the little red box. I opened it only to find that moths had eaten away most of the letters. The earliest letter still intact was dated May 3, 1995.

  I was only eight years old then. That would have made him ten. Could this be a childhood crush that blossomed into adulthood love? There had to be more to it. I’d come here to get over Nathan, but now it seemed more secrets were coming out for me to deal with.

  I opened the letter, and it was nearly indecipherable. He’d written it in pencil, which caused most of the words to fade away. I could tell it was his since his handwriting was almost identical to the letters he’d sent me at home. It really was him. All these years, he had never forgotten me. How could I have been so blind? I only remembered speaking to him once in the summer of 1994 when we were children.

  That little encounter wouldn’t have made me remember who he was almost twenty-four years later. Could that be the reason he never met with Nathan? Would Nathan have recognized him? These questions needed to be answered the instant I got back to him. I dug through the other pieces of paper so I could see when he’d written his last letter.

  I found one dated in early 2003 where he talked about going off to college. It also spoke of him giving up on me since I had never responded to any of his letters. It was a letter of lost hope. I guessed he thought by now I would have received them, but that wasn’t the case. If only Facebook or Twitter or any other form of social media had existed back then. We could have kept in contact easier.

  Why would my father hide these from me? I kept wondering if I should text Dante about this or wait until I got back and confront him about it. Perhaps, I’d wait until I got back. I still had to focus on myself, as selfish as that sounded. Nevertheless, I kept thinking how this all made sense. It seemed as though Nathan, my parents, and life circumstances had held us apart for years, decades even.

  I would not allow him to slip through my fingers again. This ring and necklace he’d given me would be sealed to my heart in life and death. Any man willing to wait decades and hold on to a single love, no matter the obstacles, had officially won my heart. If I wasn’t sure before, I certainly was now.

  “Did you find what you were looking for?” my mom said from the hallway of the stairs.

  “Yes!” I shouted in an annoyed voice. I walked back up the stairs with the box in hand to confront my mother about all the secrets.

  “You look angry.” She stepped aside as I closed the basement door.

  “Of course I’m angry. You hid all these letters from me for years. What I don’t understand is why.”

  “He only wrote you once or twice, sweetie. It was just puppy love.”

  “Does this look like one or two letters to you?” I asked, showing her the box full of paper and half-eaten letters. She took the box and was just as surprised as I’d been when I’d first seen it.

  “Dear Lord, Izzy, I had no idea he wrote you this many letters. Honestly, I had no idea.” The look on her face showed she was telling the truth. If I had never come back here, I wondered if Dante would have told me about this.

  “I’ll ask your father about it when he gets back.”

  I shook my head. “No. Ask him now. Call him,” I demanded. She went into the kitchen and asked me to follow. I saw she had cooked me some lasagna with steamed asparagus and apple juice. My mother didn’t drink and wouldn’t allow alcohol in her home. I had no choice but to drink juice or water while I was there.

  “Please sit down, honey, and don’t worry about those letters right now. You’re with him now and that’s all that matters.”

  “Yes, but I could have been with him sooner if you all hadn’t hidden those letters from me.”

  She tried to ease my mind by asking me to talk about the time we were in Korea and when I knew I had fallen in love with him. It was complicated to explain because the entire time I was in a state of confusion. My heart was being twisted in all directions, and I didn’t know what to feel. I had begun developing feelings for him the first time I’d seen him.

  It wasn’t what I would call love, but a sort of infatuation when he told me he wanted to be business partners. The night I was drunk and told him to stay with me, infatuation slipped into lust. I wanted him, but being the gentleman he was, all he did was hold me tight until I fell asleep.

  That was the first time I had been that drunk in years, and never had a man made me so nervous that I would drink so much. I felt like a little teenage girl who had just been asked to the prom by the most popular guy in school. That feeling lasted the whole night.

  But that moment, that moment he jumped on a plane and rushed to be by my side after Nathan had abused me, forsaking his business deal just to comfort me. That was the moment I knew I was in love with him.

  Despite me still being in love with Nathan at the time, my love for Dante had grown by the day. And when I saw him shed a tear trying to hold ba
ck his feelings for me, it made me love him even more.

  “I want to talk about Nathan,” my mother said in a stern tone.

  “It was just a couple of scratches when he tried to force me to have sex,” I said as if it were nothing. Not wanting her to worry, I withheld the real extent of damage that bastard did to me.

  “Why didn’t you call me immediately after it happened?”

  “Mom, it only happened once. Besides, our marriage dissipated after that incident. A few weeks after it happened I caught him with multiple women in our home. After that, I had divorce papers ready.”

  “May he rot in hell,” she said, fixing me a plate of food. I strategically left out the part about Valentina and Nathan. Neither my aunt nor my mother needed to be put through that sort of headache. Even though I just wanted to blurt it out, I kept it hidden. I took a bite of the lasagna. The basil with Swiss cheese she used tingled my taste buds. It brought back so many memories of my childhood. She would cook this for me every Friday with a glass of water or apple juice.

  As I sat there recalling all the things Nathan had done to me, I couldn’t help but become enraged. How could I have put up with all that crap for so many years? I looked back at everything and thought about it, only to become more frustrated with myself.

  To think I stayed around long enough for that to happen to me. Maybe I should cut off all my emotions to keep from getting hurt like that again. That was what I felt like doing. I would absolutely die if Dante were to hurt me like that.

  Just look at me. I had to stop thinking that way. I couldn’t let what Nathan did control my life and future relationships. Dante was the one man I should have been with from the start. What I couldn’t wrap my head around was how a powerful man like him could still love me after all those years. Was I really worth that?

  No, those were my insecurities talking again. Years of Nathan tearing me down had me doubting my own self-worth. It wasn’t unbelievable that Dante would still love me even now. I was a wealthy business owner and I didn’t need anyone to take care of me financially. I was strong and independent. I spoke three languages and I could cook like a champion chef. All right, I might be exaggerating about my champion chef skills, but I was an excellent cook. Any man would be lucky to have me.