Werewolf fairytales

Epilogue

Several months later

*Theo*

I look down at my bride, a surge of joy flooding me; it happens every time I see her face.

Paisley lies supine on our bed. We retired to our bedchamber after luncheon, and now she lies in a patch of sunlight, her cheeks pink, her chest still heaving.

“I like our house,” I say, picking up a few strands of silky hair and curling them around my finger. “I like this bed. I’m sorry we’re leaving for Edinburgh.”

“I’m not sorry,” Paisley says, squinting at me. “You’re driving our poor butler out of his mind. I know you were an astonishingly competent majordomo, Jonas, but you can’t expect the poor man to ascend to your heights.”

“All I asked was that the silver be thoroughly polished on a regular basis.”

Paisley closes her eyes. “I cannot imagine how you did all that you claim a butler should manage in one day, and neither can poor Ribble. At this rate, you will know all there is to know about medicine in six months rather than a year.”

“Did you see that your father sent another letter?” I inquire.

She nods. “He has launched into a ferocious battle with a benighted professor from Cambridge who had the temerity to disagree with his reconstruction of Napoleon’s first campaign.”

“I like your father,” I say. “He is a model of perseverance.”

“He’s too rigid,” Paisley says. “He will never accept that anyone else is right, even about the trivial detail.”

I grin down at her. “And yet… here I am.”

“Well, that’s true,” Paisley says. “He did change his mind about you. And I still smile every time I think about his insisting that I go to the village merely to return that silly book. It was very unlike him to participate in your charade.”

“What you should smile about is the image of me practicing that horse business,” I say. “I could have been at your side a full two days earlier had it not been for the hours and hours I lost, sweeping the knife boy up before me in the saddle.”

“Oh dear,” Paisley says sleepily. “I hope you didn’t drop him.”

“Often,” I say. “But he didn’t break anything. I came to you the moment I felt reasonably certain that I wouldn’t drop you.” I touch her nose lightly. “You are the most precious thing in the world to me.”

The corner of her mouth quirks, and she whispers, “Love you,” then she is asleep.

I lie beside her, watching as the sunlight shifts across the bed, making stripes over the bare skin of my exquisite mate. The doctor side of me catalogs the tiny swell in her stomach, and the way she drops asleep at any time of the day. The man side of me notices that her bosom is even more enthralling than it had been when we married, three months ago.

And the child side… the small boy inside, who was never quite sure of his place in life… That small boy has vanished.

I belong here, next to a she-wolf whom I love more than life itself.

Though how that happened I don’t know. In fact, I don’t really understand my own luck until years later when my eldest daughter Clara grows old enough to discover fairy tales. Then, with stories of knights, dragons, lovely maidens, and magic beans swirling through the house, I realize who I am. Not an illegitimate son of a king. Not the best doctor in the country. I am the stable boy who won the princess.

The stories never say much about the stable boy’s birth. They just say that the princess was as beautiful as the sun and the moon.

But most importantly, those stories all end the same way.

They lived happily ever after.