Epilogue
Kaitlyn stepped out of the shower.
After wrapping her wet hair in a towel, she pulled on her favorite
fluffy pink robe and padded barefooted into the living room. It was
good to be in her own house again, to sleep in her own bed. Her
parents had gone back to the Fortress a few days ago, with plans to
return to Wolfram in the near future. Stefan’s romance with Scherry
was heating up and he had decided to stay in Tahoe indefinitely.
Kaitlyn had no doubt that there would soon be another wedding in
the family.
Construction had started on the new
nightclub.
Life was back to normal, and she was
blissfully happy.
“What are you smiling about?” Zack
asked as she curled up on the sofa beside him.
“Nothing much. You still owe me another
wedding, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah. How about waiting until
our anniversary?”
“Don’t you want to marry me
again?”
“Sure, but, let’s wait until the club’s
built. We can have a grand opening, get married, and go away for a
few weeks, anywhere you want to go.”
She pretended to think it over, then
nodded. “All right.” She grinned at him. “Maybe we’ll have a double
wedding.”
Zack chuckled. Stefan had fallen head
over heels in love with Scherry. A blind man could see
that.
“You’ve lived a really long time,”
Kaitlyn remarked thoughtfully.
“Yeah.”
“Even longer than my dad.”
Zack nodded, wondering where this
conversation was heading.
“Existing for such a long time, you
must have seen everything, done everything. Do you ever get bored
with it all?”
“From time to time, but, hey, who
doesn’t?”
“That’s true.” She slipped her hand
under his shirt and ran her fingertips over his chest and across
the rockhard ridges in his abdomen. If he wasn’t a vampire, he
would have made a great underwear model. “Zack?”
“Yes, love?”
“Six hundred years,” she murmured.
“There must have been a lot of women in your life in that
time.”
“One or two,” he admitted with a wicked
grin.
“More like one or two hundred, I’ll
bet,” she said with a pout.
“Kind of late in the game for you to be
jealous, isn’t it?”
“Yes. No. I don’t know. Maybe. Were
there a lot of women?”
“Not near as many as you seem to
think,” he said with a grin.
“Even one would be too many.” She knew
it was unrealistic to think he had lived like a monk for six
hundred years, but still, she hated the thought of him with another
woman. Any woman.
“Darlin’, even if there were
thousands—which there weren’t!—they’re all gone now.”
“You’re laughing at me.”
“I’m sorry, love, but, really, what
brought this up?”
“I found an old copy of
Romeo and Juliet when I
was putting some of your things away. It was signed ‘I will always
adore you, and no one else. Colette.’”
“Ah.” Not everything had been destroyed
in the fire. The construction crew had discovered his casket,
intact, along with the iron box he had kept in his
lair.
Unable to think of a plausible way to
explain why there was an empty coffin in a cement underground vault
beneath the club, Zack had wiped the memory of his lair and its
contents from the minds of all those who had seen it. He had
destroyed the coffin and thrown away all the contents of the box,
save for the book.
He ran a hand over his jaw. “Do you
remember when we first met and you asked me if I’d ever been in
love?”
Kaitlyn nodded.
“And I said once? Well, it was
Colette.”
“You must have loved her very much to
have kept that book all this time.”
He shrugged. And then he cupped
Kaitlyn’s face in his hands. “Think about it, Katy. In six hundred
years, I never married. Why do you suppose that is?”
“I don’t know.” He was a remarkably
handsome man. Sexy as all get out, with a smile that could melt
iron. He was fun to be with. And great in bed. And . . . She
frowned. “Why haven’t you ever married?”
“Don’t you know, Katy darlin’?”
Swinging her into his arms, he carried her swiftly into the
bedroom, lowered her gently to the bed, and stretched out beside
her. “I was waiting for my Juliet. I was waiting for
you.”