Wickedly Charming

by Kristine Grayson

  “Oh, Christ.” LaTisha collapsed on the couch. “Look, do you know how many books get published every year?”

  “No.” Mellie cautiously made her way to one of the dining chairs.

  “Hundreds of thousands,” LaTisha said. “No one knows exactly for sure. Maybe a million. And there are always big books, splashy books, bestselling books, game-changing books.”

  “You said Evil is one of those.”

  “Yes.” LaTisha looked annoyed. “I said that because it was a game-changer, just this morning. But now it’s a crisis book.”

  “Crisis?” Mellie asked.

  “We get one of those every two or three years—statistically insignificant, really,” LaTisha said. “But you’d think from the press attention that it’s every book at every publishing house, and everyone fails to do their due diligence, although for the life of me, I can’t figure out why we would have had to do due diligence on a book that’s just a simple retelling of a fairy tale.”

  “I don’t understand,” Mellie said.

  “Neither do I,” LaTisha said. “I have no idea why Cindy Jordan decided she could resurrect her dying career by attacking you, but the one thing I know about that woman is that she checks her sources before she uses them. So she has something on you from this Dave guy—there were two Dave guys, right?”

  “Um—yeah.” Mellie had trouble thinking of Charming as Dave.

  “She said she had a letter from a Dave…” And here LaTisha checked her BlackBerry, because she’d clearly been taking notes. “David Bourke. Who is that?”

  “A guy I met in a coffee shop,” Mellie said.

  “And?”

  Mellie’s cheeks warmed. “He’s a screen writer for some TV show, something I don’t watch—about some macho guy who goes after terrorists?”

  LaTisha rolled her eyes. “That could be half a dozen shows. I’ll look him up. Tell me more.”

  “I was trying to write the book, and it wasn’t working. He was a writer. I thought I could pick his brain. But he turned out to be a horrible jerk who—he said—just wanted to get into my pants. We had a fight in the coffee shop, and he got thrown out. For good.”

  “So he hates you,” LaTisha said. “And you can prove that?”

  “I suppose,” Mellie said. “The barista was the one who was going to call the police on him.”

  “Crap,” LaTisha said. “This just gets worse and worse. So who is the Encanto guy?”

  “He’s a friend,” Mellie said. “He helped me with the book. He’s the one who sent the book to Sheldon McArthur who gave the book to Mary Linda.”

  “So he’s got ties to the book,” LaTisha said.

  “And he was there, fighting with Dave Bourke, when Dave Bourke got kicked out of the coffee shop.”

  “I suppose your stepdaughter, Miss White, was there too?”

  “I haven’t seen her in a long time,” Mellie said.

  LaTisha frowned at her. “There’s more to all of this, isn’t there?”

  “Everybody’s life is complicated,” Mellie said, not sure what she could say and what she couldn’t say. She wanted to talk to Charming. She needed to talk to Charming.

  “Yes, I know,” LaTisha said. “But now I have to figure out if your life is good-complicated, and the press we get is going to be favorable or if your life is bad-complicated, and we’re going to have to duck every single interview from here on out.”

  LaTisha checked her watch, then reached for the remote.

  “The six o’clock news is five minutes away,” she said. “You want me to order room service?”

  “We’re still doing the signing tonight, right?” Mellie asked.

  LaTisha nodded.

  “Then I’d like to rest for the next hour or so,” Mellie said. “Just come get me when it’s time to leave.”

  “I think we should watch this together,” LaTisha said.

  “I’m sure I’ll hear about it,” Mellie said. She got up and headed to the door. She needed the time alone. She needed to reach Charming.

  She needed to think about everything that happened.

  And she didn’t dare watch that television show beside LaTisha. Mellie fully expected to get angry, and she was apt to blurt something she would regret.

  She had been so close to a success. In fact, she had been having a great success. And then someone had to spoil it.

  Dave Bourke. Who knew?

  And Snow. How had she even heard about the book? And why did she care?

  Mellie stepped into the hallway. It was cooler than LaTisha’s room had been.

  Snow cared because the book revealed what Mellie had done, how Mellie had saved her life. At this late date, Snow wouldn’t believe it. Mellie knew that. And she knew it would make Snow angry, make Snow believe that Mellie was just making herself look good at Snow’s expense.

  Mellie was shaking as she used the key card to unlock her own door. She got inside the big, fabulous room, and realized her original instincts were correct. She did want to stay here forever. She never ever wanted to go outside again.

  She had a hunch everything that waited for her outside this room was going to be bad. She’d been in this position before. She had entered both of her marriages with great hope, only to experience great disappointment. The death of her first husband had hurt. The death of her second had hurt as well, but it was what came after—that horribleness with Snow and Mellie’s loss of reputation, loss of friends, loss of almost everything she believed in—that hurt worse.

  She had just started to recover. This book was helping her recover.

  And now she was going to lose it too.

  In a very public way.

  Chapter 33

  The moment Charming stepped into the reception area of Gussie’s office, his phone started vibrating. He kept it in his breast pocket, and the vibration was startling. He had forgotten that Gussie’s office was a magic-free zone.

  Still, he didn’t look at the screen right away. Instead, he scanned for his daughters.

  Grace sat on the sofa against the wall, legs curled under her, reading her book. She didn’t look up as he came in, so she really was reading.

  Imperia, on the other hand, glanced at him immediately. She was surrounded by books, most of which looked older than he was. On her regal face, he saw a mixture of expressions—impatient teenager and terrified little girl.

  He gave her a reassuring smile.

  William the Younger was digging through a box in the back of the room. He held up a few more books. “How about History of the Fates and the Magical World,” he said. “Or The Law, the Fates, and Magic?”

  “It’s okay,” Imperia said. “My dad is here.”

  Grace still didn’t look up, but she turned the page. She was lost in the story. His girl.

  Charming glanced at his phone and was startled to see that he had missed fifteen text messages and twenty phone calls.

  His heart twisted.

  “Just give me a minute,” he said, and stepped outside.

  Outside was a dense forest, dark and gloomy. The tree canopies, which mostly hid Gussie’s office, touched the ground here, giving everything the scent of green leaves. That was the plus side. The downside was the preponderance of moss, which made his Greater World dress shoes slip with each step.

  He stood just outside the door, and listened to the drip, drip, drip of rain through the leaves. He didn’t mind getting wet. The leaves protected him from the worst of it.

  He looked at the texts first, mostly because he knew that people who couldn’t reach him by phone often sent their messages by text.

  All of the messages were from Mellie. The first was upbeat—she had great news. But the rest got increasingly desperate:

  Need to talk

  Where are you? Call me right away.

  Call me.

  CALL ME.

  She took to leaving her phone number, as if he didn’t already know it. The missed calls were from her as well—all of them, even though she
only left two voice mails. He listened to the first:

  Terrible interview today, she said. My publicist thinks this is the beginning of the end. Maybe it’ll destroy the book. Please call.

  He frowned, then listened to the second.

  I sent you a link in your email, she said. Please watch it, then call.

  He opened his email program, not sure it would work in the Kingdoms. He didn’t get any mail except Mellie’s. Briefly he wondered how the program could know who was a Kingdom native and who wasn’t.

  Then he remembered it was magic, which was answer enough.

  He clicked on the link, which took him to a video on a Boston TV station’s website.

  Two generic anchors sat side by side—the square-jawed middle-aged male anchor, and a perky young female anchor. Off to the side, sat a middle-aged woman with helmet hair, who looked like she had once been a perky young female anchor.

  “I hear you had a surprising interaction today, Cindy,” the male anchor said.

  “I did,” said Miss Helmet Hair, sounding as scripted as she probably was. “You’ve all heard of the stepmother blockbuster, Evil, by now. If you haven’t, then you’ve been living under a rock. Its so-called author has been touting it on various shows and appearances all over the country.”

  Charming’s breath caught at “so-called author.”

  He listened to the rest of the report in disbelief. It was a long segment, maybe eight minutes. Helmet Hair had an interview with the odious Dave Bourke, done “with thanks to our Los Angeles affiliate,” where Bourke sat like a victorious toad, telling the world that Mellie didn’t write the book.

  “She can’t write,” Bourke said. “I read what she put on the page. She doesn’t know grammar or how to spell. Worst of all, she has no sense of story. When I saw her last, she was searching for a ghost writer, and she clearly found one. There’s no way this woman could have written her way out of a paper bag.”

  “Neither can you,” Charming whispered to the image on his phone.

  “I understand she asked you to write the book,” Helmet Hair said.

  “Actually, she wanted me to write a screenplay. But when I told her that most screenplays don’t get produced, and showed her the excellent screenplays I’d already written that hadn’t yet been made into films, she got discouraged. She asked me if I could write a book, and I told her that I was a macho guy who couldn’t get the female perspective right—no real man could—”

  Charming rolled his eyes at the dig.

  “—and gave her information on classes to take to learn how to write. But no one learns that fast, especially when they’re not a reader. And she made no bones about the fact that she didn’t read books.”

  “Not only that,” Helmet Hair said in her voice over, “but she also doesn’t write them. Her stepdaughter, the much maligned Essy White-Levanger, says her stepmother hired a man known for shady dealings, a shadowy man known as David Encanto, to write the book for her and to keep that work a secret.”

  The film cut to a sad-eyed woman with hair so raven-black that the streak of white along one side looked like an affectation. Worse, it made her look like the prototype for Cruella de Vil.

  “Dave Encanto is a well-known ghost,” she said. “He had the ability to write that novel, not my stepmother. She’s a hideous woman who’ll stop at nothing to obtain fame and fortune.”

  The report went on from there, with Helmet Hair saying that the publisher had been duped, that no one had heard of this Encanto, and that there was a possibility that Mellie had actually stolen the book from him.

  Charges, unsubstantiated and salacious, filled the rest of the report.

  And then they got to Mellie. Who, when she was asked if she wrote the book, vacillated between belligerent and dumbstruck.

  It didn’t play well. All of her media skills had failed her there.

  And some of that was his fault. She quoted the words he had given her when she asked what she should say if someone asked if she had written the book.

  It’s my story.

  Yeah, it was. But he wrote it.

  And unless they figured out how to deal with the public relations nightmare, that one little fact might destroy everything they had worked toward.

  Worse, it might make Mellie hate him. Forever.

  Chapter 34

  The signing went better than Mellie expected. Most people hadn’t even seen the news report. Only one person asked about it, and he had said, bravely, that he thought it was a hatchet job.

  Nice man.

  The line snaked around the new arrivals section, went into the bargain books section, and then disappeared out the side door. Most of the people who wanted her to sign had already read the book.

  “You spoke directly to me,” said one tired-looking woman. “I’d love it if we could change every single fairy tale to be more female-friendly. Women are either witches or evil or helpless in them.”

  “I don’t know why we still read fairy tales to our children,” said another woman.

  And a third added, “No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop my own little girl from wanting to be a princess.”

  Mellie had smiled at her. “I think secretly we all want to be princesses,” she said, and a lot of people laughed.

  Mellie stayed until each person made it through the line, which took an extra hour. LaTisha tried to hustle her out, but Mellie wouldn’t be hustled. This was probably the last time she would enjoy one of her signings, and she was going to stay until the bitter end.

  Which she did. As she left, rubbing her sore right arm, and swaying with exhaustion, her phone rang.

  She looked at it. The call was from Charming.

  “I’m going to take this,” she said to LaTisha. “I’ll meet you back at the hotel.”

  “I’ll wait in there,” LaTisha said, and pointed at a bar across the street. Mellie didn’t blame her for going to a bar. If Mellie were the drinking type, she’d be in a bar right now.

  She walked past the bookstore windows, filled with Evil, as she answered the phone.

  “Where have you been?” she asked, knowing she sounded desperate and not really caring.

  “Something came up,” Charming said. “I had my phone off.”

  “Did you look at my email?” she asked.

  “Did that news thing really air?” he asked. “It was awful.”

  His voice sounded thin and tinny. She could hear rain in the background. She knew it wasn’t raining in LA. It hadn’t rained in LA in weeks.

  “You sound funny,” she asked.

  “I’m in the Kingdoms,” he said.

  “Oh, no.” Her knees buckled. It took all of her strength to remain upright. He was gone. She was going to have to do this on her own after all.

  She allowed herself one second of panic, and then reminded herself that she had always done things on her own. She had survived.

  Still, it would have been nice—it would have been great!—to have help. Sometimes help kept you out of trouble; at least, that was what she used to tell her kids.

  She had never experienced that.

  “It’s okay,” Charming said. “My business here is done. I’m coming to see you. We’ll figure out how to handle this.”

  She put a hand on the bookstore’s outer wall. It was brick and warm against her palm. “You’re coming here?” she asked, not sure if she believed him.

  “I’m in the Kingdoms,” he said. “If I take the right portal, I can be there in an hour. Where are you?”

  “Boston still,” she said, and gave him the name of her hotel.

  “Make me a reservation,” he said. “I’ll be there soon. And make sure the room is a suite. I have the girls.”

  Then he hung up.

  She stared at the phone for the longest time. He would come here? He wanted to help? Really?

  Had anyone ever offered to help her when she was in trouble before?

  She couldn’t think of a time that had happened. She’d had help bef
ore, but never when she really, really needed it.

  Like now.

  She stuck the phone back inside her purse. Then she squared her shoulders and headed across the street.

  As she walked, she realized her mood had lightened just a little bit.

  Charming would come here. He would help her figure out how to handle this crisis.

  Just being able to share it took some of the pressure off. For the first time since the middle of the afternoon she felt a little bit of hope.

  And a little bit of hope was all that she needed.

  Chapter 35

  The nearest portal to Mellie’s hotel was in Beacon Hill, in the yard of an ancient house that was once rumored to house a witch. Charming had been there before, and had actually looked up the house’s history. It had housed a witch—if anyone with magic from the Kingdoms could be considered a witch. In fact, that woman was the first recorded Kingdoms member on American soil.

  He would’ve told the girls that, but he didn’t have time for the history lesson. Instead, he had to walk them quietly off the hill to a business district where they hailed a cab.

  Boston was warmer than the Third Kingdom, even though it was clearly much later at night. The streets were empty and the cab drove in and out of streetlight puddles, making the interior of the cab light, then dark, then light again.

  Grace clutched her book like it could save her. Imperia sat upright, back straight, her entire body rigid. They knew they were coming to Boston because he had to be in Boston. They knew that their mother had done something dangerous, which was why they couldn’t go home just yet.

  But he hadn’t told them about the threat to their lives—and he wasn’t ever going to, not if he had a choice. (He hoped that Ella would give him that choice.) His right fist clenched, then he forced himself to unclench it. He had no time to deal with his own anger at his ex-wife, although he wanted to.

  She upset him so much that he found he really wanted magic—the fire-and-brimstone magic that only a few people ever had. He’d even burn it all out in one gigantic spell that would keep Ella and her minions away from his girls forever.