Total pages in book: 85
Estimated words: 80283 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 401(@200wpm)___ 321(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 80283 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 401(@200wpm)___ 321(@250wpm)___ 268(@300wpm)
Epilogue
Elizabeth
Six months later…
“Hurry! Blow them out before the ceiling catches fire.” Andrew, the orchestrator of our triple birthday surprise—three cakes, with twenty-six candles each, all delivered to our ski lodge suite after dinner—motions urgently my way. “You first, Lizzy. First out of the vagina, first blowing out the candles. These are the rules.”
“Ew, gross,” Sabrina says, rolling her eyes at her husband, “Don’t talk about my mother’s vagina. What’s wrong with you?”
“So many things. As you well know.” Andrew winks, Sabrina blushes, and Zan makes a disgusted sound from her chair on my right.
“Stop. We don’t want to talk about Sabrina’s vagina, either.” Zan sniffs. “And we were born via C-section, so…”
“Either way, Lizzy came first,” Nick says with a good-natured laugh. He claps his hands. “Come on, Lizzy, you’ve got this. Big breath!”
Zan glares at him. “Don’t rush her.”
I squeeze her leg under the table, reminding her of her promise to play nice for the weekend. Not long after Jeffrey and I returned home from our camping trip last summer, she discovered she was wrong about whatever she thought Nick was involved with, but for some reason, she still can’t stand the man.
I honestly have no idea why. Nick is the friendliest of the Von Bergen brothers, kind and delightful, a natural-born charmer with a gift for putting people at ease.
Everyone but Zan.
The more he tries to win her over, the more she shoots daggers at him with her eyes and says she wishes she’d drowned him in the lake when we were children.
But then, Zan is Zan. Once she makes up her mind about someone, it’s very hard to change it. It might take an act of God to knock the chip off her shoulder and give Nick a fair shot. Or, maybe, an act of magic.
Just like that, I know what to wish for.
Pulling in a deep breath, I lean in, silently wishing for Zan and Nick to become good friends, happy to invest my birthday magic in my sister.
I don’t have anything else left to wish for personally.
All my wishes have already come true.
I look up, finding Jeffrey across the room as Sabrina blows out her candles, admiring how handsome he looks in a thick, cabled sweater the same shade of murky green as his eyes. My skin flushes beneath my dress when I find him watching me with that look in his eyes.
The look that means he’s thinking about my little red suitcase and the fresh-off-the-production-line lingerie I brought to model for him this weekend.
My collection has already sold out online—in barely forty-eight hours, in fact, the fastest any Princess Intimates line has ever sold out after launch—but being the designer has its perks. I have corsets in every color, panties in every style, and a nearly transparent robe I wore to wake Jeffrey up this morning.
I’d brought coffee, but by the time he’d finished unwrapping me, it had been stone-cold.
I can’t wait to wake him up again tomorrow, this time with see-through panties and a tiny pot of honey I stole from our room service tray this morning.
“Your turn, Zan,” Andrew calls. “Feel free to wish for a transfer to Baden Bergen. I have it on good authority the King of Gallantia can make your immigration process an absolute breeze.”
Andrew was sworn in as king three months ago, after he and Sabrina renewed their vows to each other at a lovely church in the capital city.
Jeffrey and I were in the front row. I cried and so did he, a little, though he swears it was just the dust in the church curtains that made him sniffle. And then we went back to the castle for a big party and danced until midnight before retreating to the library to read excerpts from sexy books aloud to each other and make love against the bookshelves.
He proposed to me a few minutes after, with both of us naked on the floor with books lying open on the carpet around us.
It was perfect.
I said yes, and have been saying yes every day since.
In the past six months, I’ve grown very good at saying yes. So good, in fact, that I’ve barely worried at all today. Yes, it’s my twenty-sixth birthday. Yes, for years, I assumed this day would also be my last day. But things are different now—Rafe is alive, we’ve become good friends, and all the darkness of the curse is behind me.
I believe that. I have faith.
So much faith that even when Nick says, “Better hurry up, Alexandra. It’s bad luck to let the candles go out on their own,” my pulse doesn’t speed a bit.
I make my own luck now.
“Thanks for the warning,” Zan says wryly, shooting Nick another glare before she inhales. Thankfully, it’s impossible to shoot eye daggers and blow out candles at the same time, and then Zan’s distracted as we get busy pulling the candles off the cakes and licking the icing from the ends.