Wickedly Charming

by Kristine Grayson

  “A regular prince charming,” Mellie said dryly.

  “Oh, hell, I don’t think so,” the barista said. “He’s a bit too battered to be Prince Charming. I mean, Prince Charming has to be, like, you know, Zac Efron with shoulders or like, I don’t know, George Clooney but younger. You know.”

  George Clooney but younger? Mellie already thought George Clooney was young enough. And handsome. Although not as handsome as Charming.

  “I mean, Prince Charming,” the barista was saying. “He’s like twenty-five, right? Not married? Square jaw, perfect features, black hair—”

  “Like the cartoon,” Mellie said dryly.

  “What cartoon?” the barista said.

  “I don’t know,” Mellie said. “Take your pick. Cinderella? Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?”

  “Maybe Cinderella,” the barista said. “There’s something off about that prince in Snow White. I mean, what guy wants to kiss a woman in a coffin?”

  In spite of herself, Mellie grinned. “I’ve often wondered the same thing.”

  She took her coffee and her cinnamon roll to her regular table. The coffee shop looked no different, except that Dave Bourke didn’t sit at the next table. The kibitzer guy sat in the corner, engrossed in his computer, his baseball cap on backwards. He didn’t even see her.

  All the other regulars were there too—a couple of men with laptops sitting at one of the bigger tables, chugging their way through half a dozen lattes in the space of a morning; a woman with a pen in her hair, writing on something that looked like a cross between a laptop and a smart phone; and five other people reading, although only three were reading physical books. The other two had some kind of e-reader, something Mellie wouldn’t have even known about if it weren’t for Charming, and his various reading assignments.

  And her afternoon in that book fair.

  If she was honest, she had to admit that day changed her. She was reading more, although she wasn’t really reading fiction per se. Nonfiction and how-to books, mostly. But still, that counted. Or so she hoped.

  She’d brought back six of Charming’s books—nowhere near all the ones he had given her, but still a lot, for her anyway.

  He entered the coffee shop exactly on time. So on time, in fact, that she actually wondered if he had been sitting outside in his car, waiting for the clock to inch up to the appointed hour. Then she reminded herself that that was something she would do. It didn’t mean it was something someone else would do.

  He looked fantastic. He was wearing perfectly creased pants and a white shirt that set off his skin and dark hair. That barista was wrong; he didn’t look battered. And he looked better than Clooney.

  Before she’d gone to the book fair, Mellie wouldn’t even have thought that possible.

  Charming came over, set his briefcase down like he had the last time, smiled at her (what a great smile. What a delicious smile. Oh, how she had missed that smile), and headed to the counter.

  The barista was the one who told him that Mellie had already ordered his food. Then the barista handed him a tray with the warmed up cinnamon roll and freshly poured coffee.

  Mellie smiled, happy that it had worked out as planned.

  She closed her laptop, set it on the chair next to her, and waited for him to return to the table.

  ***

  She looked good.

  No, she looked better than good. Her features seemed softer, and her eyes sparkled.

  Or maybe she had always looked like that and he had just forgotten. Although he didn’t know how he could forget anything about her.

  Especially considering he spent each and every day since he took on this project thinking about her.

  He took the tray back to the table, saw that she had already nibbled on her cinnamon roll, and almost offered to get her another.

  But, he realized, he was stalling. He resisted the urge to kiss her hello. He didn’t want to startle her.

  He didn’t want to startle himself.

  “Hey,” he said as he sat down.

  “Hey yourself,” she said.

  He was shaking. He had never shown his work to anyone in person. He’d always mailed it out, and if someone didn’t like it, they just had to slap a form on it and send it back. No in-person critiques, no need to look someone in the eye.

  It was what made writing different from the performing arts, something he had always appreciated. He had no idea how those people on American Idol (which his girls had discovered and adored) withstood the judges’ comments at all, let along getting them in front of a national audience.

  He would have withered and died of embarrassment.

  Right there, in front of the studio audience, and all of those cameras, beaming everything to television screens all over the nation.

  He was so happy the Kingdoms didn’t allow television. He had no idea how it would have gone if his meeting with Ella—his dance with her on that one truly magical night of his life (a magical night that had led to years of misery [and two marvelous daughters])—had been filmed for the enjoyment of all the Kingdom’s subjects.

  He would have hated it.

  His father would have hated it.

  Although Ella would have loved it. She liked being famous, something Charming abhorred.

  Good thing Mellie was the one who was supposed to do the promotion of their novel.

  If, of course, she liked it.

  “You seem nervous,” she said. She sounded surprised.

  He was surprised. He hadn’t expected to be read as easily. He made himself smile. The smile even felt nervous.

  “I’m not used to showing people my work,” he said. “It’s not—”

  He stopped himself before he could continue. He wasn’t going to apologize for the book. He wasn’t going to say anything that prejudiced her against it.

  “Well,” he said, “you’ll see.”

  Without looking at her face, he opened the briefcase and removed the manuscript. He had put it in a box and then put rubber bands around the box. It felt weighty, and important.

  A tome.

  It hadn’t felt that weighty and important when he emailed it to Shelly.

  “It didn’t take you very long,” Mellie said.

  Charming flushed. She clearly thought he had written the book too fast. Maybe he had. He wanted to finish it. He wanted to see her again. He wanted…

  Well, what he wanted really didn’t matter now, did it?

  “I mean,” she said. “I was surprised when you called and said it was done.”

  “It surprised me when I finished,” he said. “The book really didn’t turn out—”

  He stopped himself again.

  “I mean,” he said, sounding like her, parroting her, “writing a book is different than talking about it.”

  “Don’t I know that,” she said, sounding wistful.

  He made himself look at her. He had forgotten how green her eyes were, how the fringe of lashes around them made them stand out. A man could get lost in those eyes, forget that he ever worried about anything. A man could fall in love with those eyes…

  He closed his own. He didn’t want to fall for her. He didn’t want to fall for anyone. It hadn’t worked the first time.

  It wasn’t going to work this time either.

  He opened his eyes. Mellie was watching him. He couldn’t read her expression.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I’m just, you know—”

  “Nervous,” she said.

  He nodded.

  She took the box, and removed all the rubber bands, wrapping them around her wrist. Then she opened the lid and stared at the cover page.

  “That’s my name,” she said.

  “Yes, of course,” he said, frowning. Had she forgotten that part?

  “Where’s yours?” She asked, looking up.

  “We said it would be your book,” he said. “I’m a ghost. I was just writing it.”

  “Don’t you get credit for that?”

  “No,” he sa
id. “I get money for that, not credit. It’s your story. Your book. A lot of your words are in it, from those phone calls—”

  “Is that why you called it Evil?”

  His breath caught. He had known the title would be a problem. But he couldn’t come up with anything else.

  “No, no, it’s not that I think you’re evil,” he said.

  Her face was blank, as if she had wiped all emotion off of it. He had seen that expression only a few times before, and it worried him.

  He had planned to explain the title before she saw it, but in his nervousness, he had forgotten.

  “It’s that, oh, crap.” He ran a hand through his thinning hair. He was making a mess of this, right from the first word. “It’s a take-off of Wicked. You know, that book was about the Wicked Witch of the West. At least that was what everyone called her, even though her name was Elphaba. And everyone calls you—well, not you, but the character, you know—the Evil Stepmother.”

  “Or the Wicked Stepmother,” she said, with a bite to her voice.

  “Or that,” he said, “but I couldn’t use Wicked, it had already been taken.”

  “So you opted for Evil,” she said.

  “It’s not a good title. I was hoping we could come up with something better. It’s a first draft, Mellie.” God, he was begging. He heard that sound in his own voice. Begging.

  He hadn’t ever begged before.

  He blurted, “Just read it before you make up your mind. We don’t have to do anything with it, you know.”

  There, he had said it. The words that completely negated all of his work from the past few months.

  “I know,” Mellie said, looking down at the manuscript, at that horrible word. What had he been thinking? Evil. Evil indeed. Jeez. “We had talked about that when we finalized the agreement.”

  “Yes, we did. Right,” he said.

  She took the lid and put it over the box, hiding the manuscript. “I don’t like seeing my name under the word Evil,” she said.

  “I know, I’m sorry,” he said.

  She studied him. His heart was pounding. Why was he so nervous? How did he get so nervous? He had no idea he had had so much at stake in this manuscript.

  In this project.

  With this woman.

  And now she was angry at him. He could feel it. He had ruined everything.

  “I’ll read it,” she said.

  “If you don’t like it,” he said, almost before she finished talking, “you can just chuck it. We don’t have to do anything with it.”

  “I know,” she said. “You just said that.”

  Had he? He didn’t remember. He was a complete and utter mess. He hated the feeling.

  He hated the whole idea.

  What had he been thinking when he offered to ghost this book?

  Obviously, he hadn’t been thinking.

  “You know,” he said, reaching for the box, “this was probably a bad idea. I’ll just take it back. We can forget the whole thing.”

  “No,” she said, putting her hand over the box. “I want to read it.”

  “I’ll make it better,” he said. “I’ll change the title.”

  “Charming,” she said, “let me at least look at it before you offer to change anything.”

  He made himself take a deep breath. Then another. And another.

  “Okay,” he said. “But if you don’t like it—”

  “We don’t have to do anything with it,” she said. “I know.”

  “I know you know,” he said, “but that isn’t what I was going to say.”

  She looked at him. “What were you going to say?”

  “Just that you don’t have to tell me,” he said.

  “I don’t have to tell you what?”

  “That you don’t like it,” he said.

  “How is that practical?” she asked.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Well, if I like it, I tell you and if I say nothing, you’ll know I don’t like it,” she said. “So you’ll know no matter what.”

  “Oh,” he said. He hadn’t thought that through. “You’re right. Never mind.”

  “I’ll like it, Charming,” she said and smiled. But her smile was wobbly and she didn’t sound convincing. Or convinced. “Really, I will.”

  He smiled back, then closed his briefcase. “Good,” he said, feeling a little light-headed and a lotta stupid. “I’ll just be going then.”

  “There’s no need,” she said. “I thought maybe we could talk.”

  She moved her hand over some books.

  “No time,” he lied. “I have to meet the girls.”

  He was halfway out the door when he remembered it was a school day and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.

  Mellie would know that he lied. But he couldn’t change that now.

  He had to leave.

  He was too nervous to stay.

  And they both knew it.

  Chapter 24

  Mellie had never seen Charming so flustered. She had thought of him as unflappable. A man who got angry, yes, but a man who could remain in control of that anger.

  But he had been nervous with her. Nervous and worried and uncharacteristically insecure. No wonder he wanted her to do the publicity on the novel: If anyone criticized his writing in public, he would probably faint dead away. And she thought he got too upset when someone criticized the books he read. How would he be on the books he’d written?

  She already knew the answer to that. He would be a disaster.

  She took the manuscript back to the Malibu beach house, made herself some iced tea, and went onto the balcony overlooking the ocean. The day was warm, the breeze light, the sun sparkling on the water. The beach was empty. Since it was the middle of the week, most people were either working or hadn’t come to their vacation homes. Kids were in school.

  She felt like she had the beach to herself.

  She needed the privacy because, if she was honest, this novel scared her.

  She was glad Charming had given her an out. Now that she held the manuscript in her hand, she no longer wanted to do this project. She didn’t even want to look at it.

  Evil, indeed.

  Just like Wicked, which had been a novel she hadn’t even enjoyed. (Although she did like the music from the Broadway show. In fact, the Broadway show made her cry.)

  But a Broadway show, a movie, a series of books like Gregory Maguire had done with Wicked, that would change her image. That would change the image of stepmothers forever.

  She spread out on a lounge chair, put on sunglasses, and opened the box, picking up the offending cover page and turning it quickly so that she wouldn’t see her name with that offending word.

  From the beginning of the book, she felt discombobulated. She and Charming had plotted a basic romance. In fact, they had stolen the plot from some successful novel—something she hadn’t read and could now no longer remember.

  But she remembered the plot: a beautiful but misunderstood woman marries a man whom she thinks loves her, raises his children, and gets accused of magically hurting them. She hasn’t, of course, and must defend her misunderstood self. He leaves her (or dies—she couldn’t remember that part either) and she falls in love with the perfect man who helps her and the children and the world understand what a wonderful and misunderstood person she really is.

  But this book didn’t go that way at all. It actually started in the Kingdoms, told by another stepmother—Lavinia, with a made-up name (Laverne, of all things. Who did he think he was fooling?)—who talks about what fairy tales really are: Tales of Misunderstood (or Twisted) Love.

  That very idea caught Mellie’s attention. The Laverne character explained it—everyone in fairy tales is searching for something spectacular, something important, often finding love and forsaking it.

  But no one notes the love of a mother for her children, says Laverne. That’s missing in the fairy tale.

  And the love of a stepmother for her children is, of course,
never mentioned at all.

  As Mellie read, she felt more and more uneasy. Charming was writing her story. Her life story, narrated by Laverne, the surviving member of the friendship.

  And the novel wasn’t a romance at all. There wasn’t even a sympathetic male character until her first husband appeared a third of the way into the novel. Her father was horrible (and he was; she made no bones about that), and her brothers disowned her, forcing her into her first marriage.

  Charming got all of that right. He got her emotions right too. It was as if he had crawled inside her mind and plucked out her memories, writing them onto the page—more beautifully than she ever could, of course.

  Because that was the other thing: The language here was utterly lovely. Rich and full, the descriptive passages so vivid that she could smell the flowers and see the cracks in the palace walls.

  She almost stopped after the first section to call Charming and find out if he really and truly could read minds.

  But then he would know how uncomfortable he made her, and they would have another of those awkward conversations.

  Instead, she kept reading, engrossed in her own life as told by a man she had met just a year before.

  He caught it: the sense of loss when her first husband died, the need for security, the way that she couldn’t rely on her now-grown children (because that wasn’t fair to them or to her). He showed how her second marriage had been a partnership—she was in charge of the children, he in charge of their well-being, something he had provided for, even after his death.

  And Charming showed spectacularly the prejudice against second wives, against women in general in the Kingdom, how they were mocked and hated and considered inferior.

  She wondered if some of this hadn’t come from his sympathy for Ella—after all, she had been mocked and hated and considered inferior—but that didn’t explain all of it.

  Ella, after all, angered him, and bewildered him.

  And there was none of that in this novel. No bewilderment at a woman’s behavior, and no anger at her behavior either.

  Although there was anger—a lot of it.

  Many of Mellie’s rants made it to the page, word for word.

  And they fit.

  They actually fit.