This story is about the events which unfolded after Newborn ( please read first!). Bella had recently been re-united with her family after a spell of absence where she tried to adjust to becoming a vampire. The new life wasn't easy for her, but with the help ( and sometimes hindrance !) of her new vampire friend Etienne Lucier she became stronger and more able to resist the blood thirst. She returned home to her family; to the love of her life Edward Cullen and her daughter Renesmee. But Sam Uley and the wolf pack were determined to make her pay for biting her best friend Jacob Black and breaking the treaty. Luckily Etienne re-appeared just in time and saved Bella from her imprisonment. Now we pick up the story a year later...
PROLOGUE
The scent of her skin drove me crazy with hunger and desire; the beating of her heart delicate like the sweet throbbing of silky butterfly wings. The sound was music to my finely attuned ears. I listened to the beating quicken and heard the rush of blood in her veins. I tried to rein in my monstrous desire to slake my all-consuming thirst, but the touch of her skin and the sighs from her perfect lips were too much for me and I felt my fangs brush her neck with acute longing. It was very apparent that I should not have let myself get into this predicament. How will I stop now? How can I stop now? She is all I've ever wanted and needed. Time stood still for one precious second before my vampire brain kicked in and the red mist descended before my deep topaz eyes.
CHAPTER ONE
CONFESSION
LEAH CLEARWATER:
I, Leah Clearwater have a confession to make. It's deliciously secret, it's devilishly controversial, and it's also very surprising! No one would ever expect me to do this. It's virtually unthinkable!
I'm in love...with a vampire.
Etienne Lucier is his name. He is immortally eighteen; devastatingly beautiful, dangerously exciting and forbidden.
Yes, I thought I'd been in love before: Jacob Black. But I was only fifteen then and Jacob was an exciting seventeen year old. I thought he and I would end up together. It was a teenage crush, everyone gets them right?
Then Renesmee Cullen came along. Bella and Edward's beautiful infant daughter, a half human, half vampire child. Jacob looked into her eyes when she was born and instantly imprinted upon her. That was it. Jacob Black was out of bounds...forever.
To my shame, I threw myself at him and tried my hardest to win his heart. But he loved Nessie in inexplicable ways, unfathomable ways; he would always love and protect her, always.
A year later and this hasn't changed. In fact his love has become stronger and deeper.
Renesmee has grown into a young lady in the space of a year. Such is the way of a hybrid. Luckily when she reaches eighteen this growth should slow down to minute proportions. The only other hybrid in this world's growth spurt had stopped at age eighteen – that was over one hundred years ago!
So in human years Nessie was fifteen, in a couple of months she would reach eighteen.
Jacob Black was now eighteen; so handsome and muscular. He was beautiful inside and out. His love for Nessie had never wavered or faltered. Now she was on the brink of womanhood and everyone expected a happy ending for the pair.
They adored each other. It was sweet.
My feelings for Etienne were far from sweet. He had awakened passions and lusts in my body which had just been simmering under the surface. We had taken things slowly at first; he was very old fashioned ( well he was actually 407 years old !) and gentlemanly. My sixteenth birthday had happened just days after meeting Etienne.
It was the first day I spoke to him. I will never forget that day.
I promise I will tell you everything soon, but for now I must hurry. A year has passed and tonight is my seventeenth birthday party. I am determined that this is my last night as a girl. Tomorrow I want to wake up a woman; in the arms of my soul mate, my destiny, my reason for being in this world.
Etienne Lucier.
