A love story for the ages! An intimate confession! An epic quest! And happily ever after on the horizon…
Jason Mirelli loves Colby Kent. And Colby loves him. They’ve told the world. And Colby’s recovered from injury, so they’re back at work and back on set. Jason just might have everything he’s ever dreamed of, with a serious leading role, an epic love story, and Colby safe and happy in his arms—but they only have two weeks of filming to go. He’s afraid of the dream falling apart, and he knows Colby has a secret to confess—one that could transform both the ending of their movie and their future together.
Colby never got around to telling Jason his final secret before the accident on set. Now that he’s recovered, he wants to share his writing and his silent script doctor work with the man he loves. Besides, he’s rewritten this script to give their characters a proper happy ending. But he’s nervous about making changes to a classic novel, and he wants the author’s approval.
Colby’s hoping to seek out the famously reclusive author in question, but first he’ll need to trust Jason with this last piece of himself. If he can, he and Jason might finally find their happily-ever-after both on screen and off—for their characters and for themselves.
About the Series:
An epic motion picture! A gay Napoleonic War love story! Ballrooms and battles at sea! Romantic happy endings on the silver screen! And a film that’ll change everything for its stars …
Jason Mirelli can’t play adrenaline-fueled action heroes forever. He’s getting older, plus the action star parts have grown a little thinner since he came out as bisexual. This role could finally let him be seen as a serious dramatic actor, and he needs it to go well — for his career, and because he’s fallen in love with the story and the chance to tell it.
The first problem? He’ll be playing a ship’s captain … and he hasn’t exactly mentioned his fear of water. The second problem? His co-star: award-winning, overly talkative, annoyingly adorable — and openly gay — box office idol Colby Kent.
Colby’s always loved the novel this film’s based on, and he leapt at the chance to adapt it, now that he has the money and reputation to make it happen. But scars and secrets from his past make filming a love story difficult … until Jason takes his hand and wakes up all his buried desires. Jason could be everything Colby’s ever wanted: generous and kind, a fantastic partner on set, not to mention those heroic muscles. But Colby just can’t take that chance … or can he?
As their characters fall in love and fight a war, Colby and Jason find themselves falling, too … and facing the return of their own past demons. But together they just might win … and write their own love story.
Publisher | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
Publisher | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
Publisher | Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Kobo
10 Trivia Facts!
1 – Jason’s favorite color is dark green—though he also does like blue, and the color of Colby’s eyes just might be his favorite, now. Colby can never pick a favorite color. He’ll start to say, “Bright blue, sort of tropical…” and then stop and change his mind to, “Oh, but I also do like pink, and purple…I love the way Jason looks in green…and then that shade of orange just at sunset, when it’s so lapidary and glowing…” and then just give up. This also happens when asked about favorite books or movies. He just hates having to pick just one. Jason finds this adorable, fortunately, though some interviewers get exasperated!
2 – Colby and George go on to collaborate on a bestselling gay Regency romance novel. George is grumpy about this—he hadn’t planned to write another book—but Colby innocently starts talking about a plot, and characters, and, oh, well, he’s written a lot of screenplays but never a novel, perhaps George has some advice…and suddenly George is saying, “No, look, you’re going to have to deal with the class issues, aren’t you, it’s all well and good this first precious meeting outside a bookshop, but your Marcus is a duke and your Peter might be a soldier but he’s from a poor farming family, isn’t he…” and all at once they’re writing it together. It’s wildly successful, of course.
3 – Jason’s birthday is May 25, because he and I are both giant Terry Pratchett fans! Colby’s is January 2, mostly because I didn’t want it on a specific holiday but close enough that his mother would be annoyed about being very uncomfortably pregnant during holiday parties!
4 – When Colby and Jason finally get married, the location’s someplace elegant, with history—but also relatively small and intimate. George offers gruffly to do a reading at the ceremony, something from Steadfast (his novel, not the film); Sir Laurence, not to be outdone, gets ordained just so he can perform the ceremony. They’ve both essentially adopted Colby at this point, and they adore Jason. George claims he doesn’t dance, and he isn’t in fact terribly good at it—very stiff and braced to get through the ordeal—but he looks at Laurie doing a cheerfully old-fashioned waltz with Colby, all grandfatherly and adoring and so happy as they laugh and try to update the waltz for the current dance-floor music; and George sighs, and gets up, and gruffly scoops Laurie into his arms.
5 – Colby doesn’t actually cry during their wedding. He’d thought he might—the love, the friends and family, the vows and the certainty—but he’s so happy the tears just don’t happen. Jason, on the other hand, absolutely does cry. He knows he sometimes gets teary-eyed at weddings—he’ll admit it without embarrassment—but he was going to try hard not to, to be able to talk and say vows and all of that…but, no, pretty much the second he sees Colby, that’s that.
6 – There’s a really, really good chocolate cake at their wedding. There’re maybe six different cakes, because Colby and Jason both like food and flavors and they couldn’t resist, but the chocolate—with hints of cinnamon and coffee—is to die for.
7 – Do Colby and Jason ever have kids? Probably, yes…eventually. Jason’s always kind of pictured that, vaguely, in his future: kids, his big Italian family, love and joy and holidays, teaching the kids (regardless of gender) about cars and martial arts and science fiction…Colby’s more hesitant about it: he’s still relatively young, he’s had terrible role models as far as parents, he’s still sorting out some of his own healing from trauma, and in any case he’s never spent much time around children, and what does one even do with them? Jason nods, because he understands, and if Colby honestly didn’t want kids ever that’d be okay, Jason’d be a little sad about it but he could live with that, he really could, he’d just go spoil the nieces and nephews and be the best-ever uncle…but Colby also is discovering that he might like Jason’s nieces and nephews, and he’s surprisingly good at singing babies to sleep or playing fantasy pretend games with wizards and lightning bolts with the kids, and he can sort of see this in his future too, and so maybe…maybe, yes. In a couple of years. No hurry. When he says as much—unprompted—to Jason, late one night after they’ve got home from a family gathering, Jason literally can’t talk for several seconds, because of emotions.
8 – Sometimes character names are difficult, but Colby and Jason were always Colby and Jason, in my head! I knew their names right away. I only realized later that I’d also decided Colby likes good cheese. Well, it’s a series full of food puns anyway…
9 – Colby and Jason are fabulous cooks, and throw the best dinner parties. They also like themes and costumes and dress-up. Halloween is always marvelous, at their house.
10 – Colby and Jason are also very, very good at…not quite match-making…but knowing when people could be good together. Which will be important, when their friend Leo gets his own spin-off novel, and his happy ending…
K.L. is giving away a $10 Amazon gift certificate with this tour:
But Colby’s eyes were bright. And Colby’s hand on his arm was exuberant, not frightened.
“—I’ve saved them, you see,” Colby was saying, voice tripping all over itself in excitement, accent rippling and delighted. “I’ve worked it out, the happy ending, and I’m very sorry you’ll have to lose an arm, but that won’t be too dreadful, and your Stephen can come home to Will after all, but if I’m going to change anything that drastic I do want to explain, so I’ll need your help, but anyway, here, tell me whether you think it’s all right—”
“You’re okay,” Jason said.
“Oh.” Colby blinked at him, then smiled. Will’s dressing gown slid off one shoulder; Jason moved to tug it back up, but Colby already was, unselfconsciously graceful. “Yes. Very much.”
“You…saved Will and Stephen?” He took offered script pages. “You changed the ending?”
“Yes, I had to—I couldn’t let them be tragic—yes, go on, read it—”
Serenity the PA had tactfully wandered down the hallway and was pretending to be texting. Night fell like a slowing carousel around them, through tall curtain-framed windows full of stars.
Jason kept an arm around Colby, who believed in happy endings. Found the beginning of the new scenes.
After a minute he said, “Holy shit yes.”
“Yes, I thought so too, did you like the bit when Stephen—”
“Hang on, I’m not done—” It was good. It was so good. He wanted to leap headlong into Colby’s words, to plunge into this imagined historical future. He could see himself playing it out, knowing exactly the quaking weight in Stephen’s steps toward Will’s townhouse, fearful and hopeful, reunion only a possibility until it became triumphantly real…
He knew how Stephen would gather Will close with his one good arm, and how the tears would burn: Will lived, Will still wanted him, they would face the rebuilding of their lives together.
His chest ached, because Colby had written words that reached in and gripped his heart and shook it apart and then soothed it into a soft safe rhythm again.
He looked up, after. “This is right.”
“Yes,” Colby said. “Yes. It’s a good history—two men getting to be happy together, because they did, they could, we have to tell those stories—”
“But it’s also right for them. What they do with the house, with their lives—”
“I wanted it,” Colby said, “to feel like joy.” He looked like joy too, wrapped up in an embroidered period dressing gown.
“It does,” Jason said. “It does.”
“But to make that change…” Colby hesitated, excitement not dimmed but reshaped. “First we’ll have to tell Jillian. It’ll alter the tone of the film.”
“She’ll love it. I do.”
“I think she will—we’d talked about the ending, and I’d said I wasn’t entirely happy—but it’ll mean a longer shoot. I can put more money into it, that’s not a problem, but we’ll be asking the crew to extend their commitment. I’ll understand if some of them can’t, of course.”
Jason mentally skipped over the financing comment. It was a reminder—Colby had a hell of a lot of money even compared to Jason’s action-hero income, enough to casually fling at a production in need—but he’d already made peace with that. He knew Colby used it to help people.
More importantly, he guessed that most if not all of their crew would stay on. If not for the paycheck, for Colby. “Bet they’ll want to. This is big. This kind of story. Telling it.”
“That’s the other part. I know how much the novel means to the people who love it.” Colby squared shoulders. “I think, in order to do this…we should go and find George Forrest and ask. Not permission, precisely—he gave that when we agreed on the rights, and he said he didn’t want to be involved—not bothered by all that nonsense, was how he put it—but I’d like some sort of…”
“Approval?”
“Perhaps. I want to be respectful. I’ll show him my version, and he can comment, I’d not mind, he knows Will and Stephen the best—I wonder if he’d like raspberry tarts as a sort of gift—”
The next realization hit Jason’s brain like a falling ton of Regency-era bricks. “Colby?”
“That’s the bit I’d like your help with, not the baking but the travel, because—”
“Colby.”
“Possibly not tarts?”
“If you do this…if we do this…” He had both hands on Colby’s shoulders. Bracing. “It’ll mean telling people. About your writing. It’ll have to. We could try to keep your secret, I know you and Jill’ve been good at that, and I’ll help, you know I will. But it won’t work for long. If you’re the one finding the author, if you’re showing him this—if even one person says even one thing—with the press we’ve already got…” He gave up, said it again: “You’ll have to tell people. And I know you don’t want to.”
Colby didn’t flinch. “I know. I’m fine with it.”
“You are?”
“I am. I’d already decided that, last night. I thought…yes, it’ll change things, but I’m proud of what I write. And I love Stephen and Will, and I believe in romance, and if giving them a happy ending means being a bit brave about sharing myself, I can do that.”
You can, Jason thought. His hands gentled, holding those slender shoulders; his heart skipped a beat, caught breath, felt awe like sunrise. He thought that even without being in love with Colby, which he was, he’d love Colby: someone who cared about happiness deeply enough to face the price of it with open eyes. With freshly-made raspberry tarts in hand.
With the Professor Hat on, she’s published scholarly work on romance, fantasy, and folklore, including a book on Welsh mythology in popular culture and a book on ethics in Terry Pratchett’s fantasy. She is happily bisexual, married to the marvelous Awesome Husband, and currently owned by a long-legged black cat named Merlyn.
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