Epilogue
Needless to say my dad wasn’t hard to convince. We had a good dinner together that day and my dad even helped us out planning our wedding. We wanted something a little extravagant to get the press’ attention but not too big to avoid being ridiculous. In the end we settled for a wedding aboard a yacht – yep, Adam bought me a freaking yacht – and for our honeymoon we went sailing to the Caribbean.
At first the media was a little cautious not only about our relationship but about Adam Rousseau stepping into the spotlight. However, when it came into light how he was now the sole stock broker that managed all of Marjolaine Durand’s former clients the respect he deserved began to pile up in his favor.
Within a few weeks after our wedding I was back at work completing the three mobile apps he initially hired me for. At the same time, my father and his company managed to recover a vast majority of the data they had lost a few months back. The data that was permanently lost no longer mattered now since my new apps compensated for the damages.
Once all of my apps were completed I didn’t necessarily have to work anymore but I still stayed on working for and with Adam as his new Vice-President. It came with a lot of new responsibilities, many of which were not related at all to my programming expertise, but I did undergo some training and quickly caught up. In just a year I was even named the top rising entrepreneur of the nation by Time magazine and was even listed as a crucial cornerstone for Adam’s ongoing success.
With everything that had happened I couldn’t have been any happier. A common joke I liked to tell these days at dinners is that all of our fortunes were my father’s doing. If his company didn’t screw up their job at the Rousseau firm then I wouldn’t have stormed into his office. If I didn’t meet Adam that day then none of this would have ever happened. It just goes to show that one mistake can lead to a domino effect of fortune.
My father, in fact, became even more famous than he already was. His company started getting hired by some of the biggest international companies. Not only did they work on some of the most widely visited websites these days but he even had to branch out and make a subsidiary company to handle SEO, online marketing and more tasks so that he and his crew could focus purely on web designing and infrastructure.
If only my mom was still around to see all this success. Adam did make it a point to visit her grave and I finally got the chance to tell him of our story. Adam, on the other hand, was still a little protective of his childhood history but over the months I got him to peel a little information here and there. I wasn’t in a rush – I now had an entire lifetime to know more about who he was. All that truly mattered, after all, was who he was now.
Aiden, of course, was always lingering in the background. Every now and then we’d run into him during social events but he never dared cross our paths. It was like seeing a ghost – he was always so pale and scared each time he saw us looking his way. In the end, it never really mattered. We were successful billionaires doing legitimate business while he was now declining in his modeling career. As a matter of fact, there were rumors that he had begun filming gay porn videos just to earn more cash. This does come as a big shock given how homophobic he usually is. Other say he really was gay and was just violently denying it for years.
My former company also got in touch with us too. Of course, my old boss didn’t even dare to flirt with me this time around. The moment he saw Adam’s arm wrapped around my waist he knew I was off-limits. Still, it was good to be connected once more with old colleagues and it turned out the company was now offering their stocks to be traded and they wanted Adam’s firm to handle the deal.
By the end of the day, Adam and I finally got the life we wanted. We were always working, sure, but we could spend time every day just to be with each other. We spent as much time as we could with the staff as well. Chip was going to school now while his mom, Mrs. Potts, had hired more kitchen crew workers. Plumette and Lumiere announced they were officially dating – much to our surprise – and Jacques Cogsworth held off from retiring to make sure he’d be around to take care of our kids once we actually had some.
On our free days we tended to just sit back and relax in our room, ecstatically having sex like bunnies or bumming around eating snacks while watching a movie. However, I did rope in Adam to my hobby and every weekend we managed to go out to the hobby shop for more tabletop gaming. A lot of the folks at the shop were really proud to say that they were friends with Adam Rousseau and his wife.
This was exactly what my life should be. I was happy. My father was happy. My husband was happy. Despite everything that came between us and all the trials that we had to face – his past, Aiden and my own disparity between perception of Adam and what was true – we found our happy place.
Although the world still called him a wolf, a beast, those terms no longer carried such a negative essence to them. Adam wore those names with pride now. He should, because he had his own nickname for me – belle, which meant Beauty. He said he derived it from my last name, Verdandi.
Together we were indeed the Beauty and the Beast.
THE END