Totally Inappropriate *UNDER EDITING*

Epilogue

*Chapters 12, 13 and 14 were uploaded on the same day as this, so you may not have read them.

Epilogue

“Daddy, you’re frozen again!”

Arizona pouted at the iPad in one of my hands, the other holding one of her many storybooks.

“One second,” I said, ending the call. After waiting a few moments, Benjamin’s disgruntled face reappeared again.

“I hate technology,” he grumbled. He sat on the bed in the guest room of Noah’s father’s house, moving the device around so often that he often appeared no more than a blur of dark hair. “And I hate wedding formalities. Would it really be that bad if I slept in bed with you tonight?”

I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t want you to leave. She’s your mother.”

“Unfortunately.”

I laughed at the sarcasm dripping from his voice, though I was abruptly cut off by a poke in the leg from my six year-old daughter. “You’re meant to be reading me a story!” she chided us, just about the only mature one of us around here. Benjamin and I shot each other the wide-eyed looks of naughty school children before I carried on reading Zoltan the Magnificent.

“‘On the last night,’” I read, “‘they all climbed a hill overlooking the water.’

“‘“Imagine,” said Jack, “that we are all sitting in the nose cone of a massive rocket...”’”

“Let daddy read now!” Arizona commanded, “before he freezes again!

I sighed, putting the book on my knee and switching hands with the iPad. As Benjamin finished the book, Arizona having no desire for her mother to read to her anymore, I couldn’t help but let my eyes stray to my engagement ring. It was stunning, the intricate carvings of the band so beautiful complimented by the decent-sized blue sapphire that was set in the middle. It had been passed down for generations in the Rendenville family following their ability to produce sons with each marriage, and now it would sit nicely below my wedding band.

We were going to try again for a baby after the wedding, and I knew Benjamin secretly wanted a boy now he had a girl. When I had first told him I’d been pregnant at the age of twenty, he’d been hoping for a little Princess who he could protect and ban from the male species, and now he wanted somebody to watch over her while they were at school. I’d pointed out she would be at the very least seven years older than, something he chose not to dignify with a response.

I could still remember how everyone had been shocked at us having a child so young, but it didn’t matter. It especially didn’t matter when the father owned the town you lived in and could have his pick of a few homes that his ancestors had owned for centuries. Living rent-free and with a hefty trust fund had meant that there were no financial problems for us while he went to college to do Exercise and Nutrition Science. After that, we’d shipped up to New York with Malia and Noah, where he started the chain of gyms that were all over the city today. We co-ran it together, both of us often teaching a few classes here and there.

“And that’s the end of the book,” Benjamin said now, snapping his own copy shut on the other end of the line. Well, not his own copy; it just so happened that his best man’s son, Jude, happened to have the same one and took it with him when he came down to his grandpa’s house. We’d all come back to Rendenville because we both wanted a moral rural landscape as the setting of our wedding. “Not that you need reminding after having read it a million times, Zona.”

She giggled at him cheekily, pulling up her covers to hide half her face. Unlike her mother, she was the most adorable thing to walk the earth. She loved pink and Barbies and dressing up like Cinderella, though her taste in books was unusually random. One minute she was getting me to read her a book about a magician dad and the next Peppa Pig’s in high demand! “Night, daddy.”