Why I NEED an HEA

With: Rebecca Brooks

Congratulations to "Bn100", the winner in Rebecca's giveaway. Please contact JUST CONTEMPORARY ROMANCE to claim your prize!

The HEA.

Somehow it’s a controversial subject, with people regularly popping up all over social media to claim romance doesn’t need a happily ever after. AHEM. Let me jump up on my soap box, grab my microphone, and loudly declare that those people are WRONG.

Romance needs a happily ever after in order to be romance. Without that guaranteed happy ending, it might be a love story, but it doesn’t deliver the final satisfaction that’s so essential to the genre.

And this rule is there for a good reason. Not because us lady readers with our feeble lady brains can’t conceive of bad things happening in life and in fiction. But precisely because bad things do happen—they happen all the time! So we need to know when we’re reading that those bad things are leading somewhere. That after the storm, there’s going to be the best freaking rainbow that’s ever been seen.

The best part about romance is knowing that no matter what happens, it’s going to work out in the end. That doesn’t mean life will be perfect. In fact, I always try to include a conversation where my hero and heroine remind each other that “perfect” is a fantasy. It’s never going to happen. It doesn’t even exist. Any couple is going to hit downs as well as ups, and they’ll need to learn to keep working together to weather each storm.

But in romance there’s always the promise of togetherness—that nothing will be so bad as to break them apart.

I always feel like a happy ending is only as strong as the challenges the couple has faced. The lower the fall, the higher the climb back up—and the sweeter the reward at the end. When Wrong Bed, Right Man opens, Rose has hit some serious lows.

Wrong Bed, Right Girl, Jason is now her fiancé, and let’s just say that things aren’t looking a whole lot better. Her friends are getting nervous. Is she happy? Is she really happy? 
What’s going to happen if she goes ahead and marries the guy?

But by the time Rose gets her story in Wrong Bed, RightMan, a lot of things have changed. Rose is back at Jason’s apartment—only this time, it’s to take all her stuff back, now that she’s pawned her ring and is reclaiming her life. She’d had to face that the HEA she thought she was going to share with Jason isn’t going to be part of her story.

But as we know in romance, if it isn’t happy, then it’s not the end. We can’t have the high points without first going through those terrible lows. Now that Rose has moved on with her life, she’s finally open to finding real love—and a real happy ending—with a hero worthy of her heart.

It was so hard making Rose suffer with her lousy ex in books one and two. Readers would ask when she was getting her story, and if she was really going to stay with her fiancé, and why did I have to give her such a lousy boyfriend?!? I’m so relieved that her story is finally here, and I hope you’ll agree that it was worth the challenges. When things seem hopeless, and life has completely changed, we never know what’s coming. That’s the promise that the HEA gives us. There’s a reason this series is called Accidental Love—because we never know what wonderful surprises are waiting.

Giveaway:

Rebecca is giving away a digital copy of Wrong Bed, Right Roommate, Accidental Love to one lucky person leaving a comment or email entry.

Giveaway ends 11:59pm EST February 20th. Due to GDPR regulations you no longer need to submit your email address in the comments. If you have been selected as a winner your name will be posted at the top of the post. You may then contact maureen@JustContemporaryRomance.com to claim your prize. Your email address will be shared with the author/publicist providing the giveaway.