Epilogue
“Back to your own bed.”
Maddie staged a cough. “Daddy, I’m still sick.”
“No, you’re well now.”
She stamped her foot. “I’m not.”
“Well, okay.” In the spill of moonlight, he pulled back the covers. “I guess we could leave a note for Santa on your bed. Maybe he’d find you.”
She stopped climbing onto the mattress and slid down, her feet hitting the carpet with a thud. “What?”
“Or,” he pretended to reflect deeply, “we could send a letter to the North Pole telling him you’ll be in our bed. But would it get there in time?” He ignored the muffled snort behind him. “It’s only ten sleeps to go. And even if it did, Santa only knows where every kid’s bed is. He’s not great on the location of grown-ups’ beds.”
A small silence. “I’ll leave him a map.”
“Yeah, that’s a good idea. Except you’re so little, he’ll probably glance in, see Mommy and me and think, ‘Nope, no Maddie here.’ But if you want to take the risk…”
His daughter was already halfway out the door.
“Night, baby girl.”
Rolling over, he stripped the covers off his silently laughing wife, looked at the corset and said, “Where was I? Oh yeah, unwrapping my present.”
* * *
Thanks for reading PLAY. If you enjoyed it, sign up to my newsletter at www.karinabliss.com to read ALL the series bonus scenes and receive a free prequel to the Rock Solid world.
Read REDEMPTION, the next book in the Rock Solid Romance series.
From rock icon to house husband.
From academic historian to tell-all memoirist.
They changed their lives for each other.
Now they need to change them back.
He gave up the world for love. The world isn’t ready to let him go.
Fame is a destroyer.
Which is why Zander Freedman quit music.
These days its moderation in all things, except Elizabeth Winston.
But building an ordinary life with an extraordinary woman isn’t easy.
For one, she’s deep in the snake pit he left behind.
For two, he has a stalker that stops him being by her side.
Loving her is easy. Letting her love him is something he works on every day.
How hard does Elizabeth’s life have to be before she regrets choosing him?
What follows happily-ever-after? Love gets real.
Like every woman emphatically in love, academic Elizabeth Winston figured she’d fix her rockstar lover’s emotional problems with her shiny, all-encompassing acceptance.
Oh boy.
Even though she’d heard her minister father counsel couples throughout her childhood, she forgot the take-away. You can’t force someone to heal before they’re ready.
Now she’s five thousand miles from the man she loves and hawking intimate details of their relationship to salvage his iconic legacy. Struggling to keep her own identity, and increasingly unsure whether Zander’s even on board.
Can she redeem his reputation while holding onto her career, or is she making things worse on all fronts?
And that’s before she makes a mistake that changes everything.
Chapter One
At 12.45 p.m. on Friday, Zander Freedman faced death with the realization that the woman he loved would remember his last words as, “Give me space.”
He stood in the library of his Calabasas mansion on an LA winter day. It was his favorite room in the house, his haven, his sanctuary.
Deep bay windows angled midday sun away from the book-lined walls, the rare editions protected in deeper, darker recesses. Sumo-sized couches squared off in the middle of the room, their rich maroon leather polished by shafts of sunlight.
One beam glinted off the gun pointing at his chest.
His stalker had a steady hand to match a steady gaze. Whatever madness lay behind this invasion was well hidden.
Zander curled fingers over the couch-back to steady himself. The leather was warm. When the interior designer had fretted about sun damage he’d said, “Furniture can be replaced, many of the books can’t.”
“Then why let sunlight in at all?”
He’d replied, only half-joking, “Because I need the spotlight.”
And now he had it.
He forced himself to release the couch and stepped into the open. Because he knew how to disarm an obsessive fan with a wry grin that acknowledged that, ‘Hey, we’re all crazy here,’ until his security stepped in and provided the circuit breaker. “Let’s be sensible about this.”
The muzzle flashed. A bullet ripped through the couch and splintered the mahogany wainscoting to the left of his desk.
He froze. We’re not going to be sensible about this. And he was alone in the house for the next forty-eight hours.
Handcuffs skittered toward him across the parquet floor. “One on your left wrist, attach the other to the lampstand.”
The side table had curlicue wrought iron legs that merged to pierce the marble top and became a built-in lampstand. By sliding the handcuff up and down the pole, he’d be able to sit and stand, but he couldn’t move forward without dragging close to two hundred pounds of marble and iron.
When this is over, he thought numbly as he snapped one cuff shut through the braided metal neck, you’re going to Goodwill. Assuming you’re alive when this is over.
Horror pieced his shock. Elizabeth. Would she know he was sorry? The metal cuff clanged against the lampstand’s neck as he sank onto the couch and stared at the assailant he’d invited into his home. “What do you want?”
“I want you to tell me why.”
“Why?”
The hand on the gun trembled.
“Why you have to be punished.”
The ROCK SOLID series (in story order):
Click on the title to discover more.
WHAT THE LIBRARIAN DID (Devin and Rachel’s story)
RISE (Zander and Elizabeth’s story)
* FALL (Dimity and Seth’s story)
* PLAY (a novella) (Jared and Kayla’s story)
REDEMPTION (book 2 for Elizabeth and Zander)
RESURRECTION (Moss and Stormy’s story)
Note: You can also buy the first three books in the series as a box set HERE.
* FALL and PLAY happen simultaneously and can be read in any order.
There are other Rock Solid novels in the pipeline. Check for updates on my website. www.karinabliss.com