Epilogue

~ FREYA ~

Biting my lower lip, I click through the form on the self-publishing website, ready for my characters to exist someplace other than my laptop.

Title: Twenty Thousand Sunsets

Author: Freya Hansen

My heart beats at a mile a minute as I upload my cover created for a bargain price by one of Mason’s neighbors who happens to be a graphic designer.

There are no images of restraints or a shifter hero or the bulge of a thick wallet in some hot model’s shorts. There’s no need.

My characters are as real to me as the people I’ve come to know in the military since I met Mason, minus shifter powers or fetishes (or at least none they talk about in polite company).

It took two months to turn my book back into something I cherished again, and now that I’m engaged to a SEAL, I found my characters have changed and grown in the process. Today, my book is something that I would want to read myself, an escape to a world where love never dies.

My characters kiss on my cover; I see the passion in their eyes, and I can feel the love they have for each other. (Seriously, for stock photo models, they’re really good at faking it.) And even though Mason was quick to point out that the male model’s got the wrong kind of camo on his pants for a SEAL, I’m willing to bet readers will be too busy checking out the guy’s greased-up abs to notice.

I feel a hand on my shoulder, giving me a gentle squeeze.

“Finally ready to pull the trigger?” Mason asks me.

“I figure I better do it before you go and deploy somewhere.” I say, even though I’ve been told that it won’t happen till his Team is on rotation next summer. “Or I’ll use it as an excuse to delay publishing it till you get back.” My heart pinches, talking about him leaving me one day.

Pushing away the thought, my eyes are drawn back to my screen, compelled to triple-check the formatting and chapter breaks on the book previewer.

“Aw, you dedicated it to me,” Mason observes behind me, reading the first page.

“Of course.”

He presses his lips to my neck and I can feel his smile against my skin. “Now, stop checking it,” he advises. “Dinner’s nearly ready.”

From his kitchen I can hear the faint sizzle of Grandma’s chicken parmigiana in the oven, and I smile. Two months ago, I never would have imagined Mason mastering my cooking techniques, but he’s proven to be a remarkably skilled sous chef.

And a damn sexy one at that.

“Okay,” I say. “Here goes nothing.” I click the Publish button on the bottom of my screen, my heart lodged in my throat.

“Congratulations, beautiful,” he whispers, his breath tickling my ear as he gives me a little nibble. “Now maybe we can start focusing on our future—rather than Zander’s and Genevieve’s—and set a date for the wedding.”

I bite my lip, pulling my eyes from my laptop and soaking in the sight of him, storing away the memory of this moment for when I need it. “My mom would like that. I swear she’s going to have a stroke hearing about me coming down here so much. She thinks we’re shacking up, you know.” I laugh, remembering the texts she sent this morning before I left for the weekend to come to Mason’s. Mom finally stopped using her voice recognition app about a month ago. But even now, thanks to the tiny keyboard on her phone’s display and a poor auto-suggest feature, she’s still sending texts that make no sense, unless she really wanted to ask me this morning, “Why buy the cow when you get the millwork for free?”

 “You know,” I begin, “I was thinking since you’ll be going on rotation next summer, maybe we could pull off a spring wedding. If you don’t think that’s too soon.”

“Today isn’t too soon, as far as I’m concerned,” he murmurs, his lips touching my neck again.

God, I love this man. Unlike Genevieve and Zander, we’ll spend many sunsets apart, I know. But, even though he can’t tell me where he’ll be when he’s deployed, Mason says that he’ll set one of my clocks to whatever time zone he’s in, so that I’ll know when the sun is setting on his side of the world.

Then, I can watch our midday sun and know that the same brilliant star is stretching out glorious crimson rays of light as it sinks beneath the horizon where Mason is watching it, thinking of me.

It won’t be the same. But it will be enough.

I look at the eagerness in my fiancé’s eyes, which always lingers there at the mention of a wedding.

“A spring wedding it is.” His lips brush against mine and it makes my breath catch today, just like it did that first time… tied up to a bed. A giggle escapes me at the thought.

He pulls his face away from mine just an inch. “What?”

I shake my head, unwilling to taint this perfect moment with talk about my manuscript and all its various mutations over the past years. I love my book, but I’ve found it less important in my life in recent months, as though it’s only one aspect of the life I want to have, the way I want to define my future.

And my present, I ponder, pressing a kiss against him again, letting the familiar heat build inside of me at the feel of his lips against mine. “Nothing,” I finally say when our mouths part.

“Let’s have dinner. I even bought champagne. And now that we’re setting a date, we have even more reason to celebrate.”

Turning in my chair, I watch him leave the room, retreating to the kitchen, and I tuck the memory of this moment safely away—the smell of garlic and basil in the air, the feel of his presence so close to me, the warmth of his cozy apartment with fiery autumn leaves fluttering outside the window.

I watch them, appreciating how the late evening sun seems to set their colors ablaze, knowing that their peak of beauty right now only means they will fall when winter comes. But they’ll be back again, shortly after the robins start to appear and fill the air with their song at the first breath of spring.

And I know somehow, deep in my soul, that Mason will always return to me.

Because every romance has a happily ever after.