Wickedly Charming (3 page)

She straightened, then sashayed toward him, trying to figure out how, exactly, she would approach him. Maybe she'd pretend to be an expert on the building. Or better yet, someone who was as lost as he was. They'd have something in common, a bit of instant camaraderie.

As she approached, she saw him turn slightly. He reached for the door, then stopped as if he thought the better of it. He glanced over each shoulder quickly, as if he were doing something wrong.

He didn't see her.

Which was a good thing.

Because she stopped walking, her heart in her throat.

He wasn't an anchor at all.

He was a Charming.

Charming slipped inside the main function room and shivered. Someone had turned the air conditioning on “icicle,” probably in anticipation of large crowds for the various speeches. This room was huge—as big, if not bigger, than most hotel ballrooms. At least five hundred seats had been placed too close together, and a bit too close to the makeshift stage.

The room had already been set up for a panel discussion. A long table sat on top of a dais, with microphones in front of four seats. No names yet—someone always set the name placards out just before the thing started—but an ice-filled pitcher of water along with four glasses sat on a little coaster in the middle of the table.

It was so cold in here that ice probably wouldn't melt.

He rubbed his hands together. Someone had taped x's to the floor on either side of the table, a suggestion for the camera operators—a suggestion that would probably irritate them. A sound board sat near the door, already hooked up, which was good for him. That meant that no one from the media would be anywhere near the back.

He walked to the back of the room, realized there was space for at least another two hundred chairs (some of which were stacked against the far wall), and glanced up at the lighting. It was regular conical lighting—more flattering than fluorescents—but also good for him. Conical lights created circles. Circles overlapped, but they also created shadows.

The door banged.

He froze, glanced over, not wanting to be caught in the room alone. Not that there was anything wrong with it. He just hated the hassle.

But no one had come in.

He let out a small sigh, then looked up again, double-checking what he already sensed. He walked over to the farthest chair deep in the shadows, and took out the extra program he'd filched off one of the doughnut tables. He set the program on his chair, and wrote “reserved” across it in Magic Marker.

Even if someone moved the program, they'd only move it a seat or two away. He had his spot for the first panel discussion.

Now all he had to do was find similar spots in the other function rooms. By the time he was done, the exhibition hall would be open.

And he'd be ready to enjoy the book fair.

Like he always did.

***

A Charming.

A Charming in the middle of a book fair.

What was a Charming doing here?

He was trying to get in the way of Mellie's message, that's what. Charmings benefited from the archetype. Charmings were the flip side of the Wicked Stepmother motif. Charmings were desired and desirable.

Charmings were the bane of her existence.

Now there was one in the middle of her book fair, about to destroy her carefully laid plans.

And she couldn't stand for that.

Mellie hurried to the door as it eased closed. She managed to catch it before it latched.

She peered through the opening.

He was surveying the room, probably going over his speech, dammit.

She finally saw him full-on. He was breathtakingly handsome—all of the Charmings were—albeit a little older than the last time she had seen him. She could at least pinpoint that date.

The end of what the Greater World called the nineteenth century. Those horrible Grimm brothers had already published their lies for the entire world to see. The lies had seeped into the Kingdoms, and they were making life difficult for everyone concerned.

Well, not everyone. The younger women came off rather well (if they didn't mind being considered beautiful victims) and the Charmings had become heroes. None of them were called Charming then; they were “the king's son” or “the prince”—always single and perfectly willing to marry beneath them, unlike most princes now.

If she was really being honest, the people who came off poorly were the older women (evil stepmothers, witches hiding in the woods), the ugly men (Bluebeard—who really was indefensible; and the cursed Beast, who wasn't), and Those Who Were Different.

Some of Those Who Were Different got a pass, even if they didn't get the girl—the so-called Dwarfs in the so-called Snow White tale; good old Tom Thumb (who was small, but not as tiny as everyone said); and that conniving little tailor. All of these men were abnormally short (she later figured it was probably due to a failure of nutrition in the Kingdoms), but somehow positive role models.

Unlike her old friend Rumpelstiltskin, who was also short. And loud. And a bit of a con man. He didn't deserve to be the bad guy any more than she deserved to be a witch and a murderer.

But so it went in storyland.

Those who didn't mind the lies told about them felt that no one should do anything about Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. Or Hans Christian Andersen for that matter. Or Oscar Wilde (although, if she told the truth, she had to admit she liked the wry tone of some of his fairy tales).

She held a meeting way back then, and nothing had come of it, except the first (and only) meeting of all of the so-called fairy tale characters in one place.

All those Charmings. They looked so different—Sleeping Beauty's self-assured Charming; Cinderella's handsomer, slightly shy Charming; and of course, the Charming Mellie knew well, her former son-in-law, Snow White's Charming. Who was charming on first glance, and got more and more creepy as time went on.

Mellie sighed. She knew the man in the room wasn't Snow's Charming. But she wasn't sure if he was Beauty's Charming or Ella's Charming. He could've been one of the lesser Charmings—the Goose Girl's Charming or Rapunzel's Charming. They all had that bit of look-at-me glamour, whether they wanted it or not.

The hundred-plus years had changed this Charming just enough to make him hard to recognize. At the meeting, none of the Charmings had silver highlights, and none of them wore glasses. This Charming's glasses accented his square face and strong features, making him look intelligent and oh-so-handsome all at the same time.

In fact, his front was much better than his back, and his back had been spectacular. It had been a long time since she'd seen a man this desirable and—

She backed away from the door. It banged closed and she cursed.

The last thing she wanted to do was interact with a Charming. They were all so handsome and so sure of themselves, and so dismissive of older women—even though all of the Charmings were more of an age with the stepmothers than with the girls they married.

She wasn't sure what to do or how to confront him. Or even if she should confront him at all.

Maybe she should just follow him around and see what subversive activity he was up to.

Of course, if she did that, she'd never accomplish her mission.

Better to stop him in his tracks now, to let him know she was here and she wasn't going away.

No matter what lies he told.

One function room down, two more to go. Charming pulled open the door and stepped into the hallway, checking his watch as he did so. Twenty minutes before the main exhibit hall opened. Then he'd scurry through it, looking for the best galleys and free giveaways before he filled up his first four book bags. Then he'd head back to the car, and sprint back for more.

He'd worn sensible shoes at least. He'd learned that much from previous book fairs, which had left him with blisters.

Air moved around him. He looked up, expecting a security guard, but didn't see anyone. Still, the air smelled faintly of roses. Delicate, sun-warmed roses—the old-fashioned kind, the kind you could only find on ancient rose plants or in the Kingdoms. Not the kind you got at stores here in the Greater World. Those roses had almost no scent at all—which, as far as he was concerned, defeated the whole purpose of roses.

He turned, and collided with the woman from the parking lot. He put his hands on her arms to steady her, felt the smoothness of her skin, and was surprised when he realized he didn't have to look down to see her face.

She was even more beautiful up close than she had been from far away. Her eyes were filled with intelligence, accented by her very good bone structure. She would be lovely even into old age, so long as she didn't let that mouth of hers remain twisted like that.

“Charming, right?” she said, sounding disappointed. “The question is which one?”

He let go of her arms and stepped back, his heart pounding. Her beauty made it hard for him to focus on her words. He blinked, thought, remembered, and then felt startled.

She recognized him.

Worse, she recognized him as a Charming. Not just Prince Charming, but one of many Charmings.

Which meant she wasn't a native of the Greater World. She came from one of the Kingdoms. But again, the question was which one.

“My name is Dave,” he said trying to sound calm when his heart was pounding, and his hands still felt the softness of her skin. He couldn't quite get past how beautiful she was.

He hadn't been attracted to a woman in a long time.

“Yeah, I see that your name is Dave.” She grabbed his prized purple badge, looked at it, and then dropped it against his shirt. “Dave Encanto. You're not fooling anyone, ‘Dave.' Why are you here? To shut me down?”

Her bitterness surprised him. Clearly—and not unexpectedly—she was not as attracted as he was. He was slowly getting used to women who weren't interested in him as a matter of course, but he didn't expect bitterness.

Obviously, he had met her before, but he couldn't remember when. He had probably been rude to her. He used to be rude a lot more often, before he realized how much words could hurt.

That still didn't help him understand her comment. He didn't have the power to shut down anyone. Not in the Greater World, anyway.

But he did remember her PETA sign. She had probably been at that protest at the Met. His mother had sounded deranged—at least to the people in the Greater World who had been on the sidewalk that day.
My son will punish you all
, she'd shouted after a haughty
How Dare You!
No one angers Prince Charming
.

The woman in front of him must have remembered the entire incident—although he didn't know exactly how that translated into the question she'd asked about the Princes Charming. Maybe she was being sardonic.

“Listen,” he said, “I know everyone has a right to their opinion, but I do think tossing paint on little old ladies going into the opera takes things a bit too far. When I said I would shut you all down, it was only because I was angry, and it was, after all, my mother's fur coat that you ruined—”

The woman made a sound of disgust. She crossed her well-toned arms. She looked almost amused. “You don't know who I am, do you?”

“No-oo,” he said. “Just that you're with that animal rights group.”

“Clearly we need a new acronym,” she said more to herself than to him.

She seemed serious. And with that look, and the mutter, she seemed almost familiar. He had a sense of who she was, a half a memory, just out of his reach…

She sighed and straightened her shoulders, catching his attention. Her movements were graceful, almost dancelike. He hadn't seen a woman this elegant in a long time.

“I am,” she said, “the founder of PETA which stands for People for the Ethical Treatment of
Archetypes
, not animals. We had the acronym long before those animal people stole it from us. They were just better at getting press coverage like everyone else on the planet, including you, ‘Dave.'”

He tilted his head slightly. What was she talking about? Archetypes? Press coverage? He wasn't good at press coverage. It wasn't his fault the media filmed him at book signings.

“I'm not interested in the press,” Charming said. “I don't vie for their attention.”

“Of course you don't,” she said. “That's why you're so very famous.”

“I'm not.” He hated having to explain the camera thing, but he was going to try. “I didn't ask—”

“You
are
famous. You're the most famous of all of us.” A flush rose in her cheeks, accenting her startling emerald eyes. She leaned toward him. “Everyone wants to find their Prince Charming.
Everyone
, ‘Dave.' Women. Gay guys. Even real men because they want what Prince Charming has. What
you
have. You don't need a publicist. You just need to bask in your princely charmingness.”

He hadn't expected the attack. It had come at him sideways. He wasn't quite sure he understood it—the press and his “princely charmingness”? What was that all about?

“I don't bask in anything,” he said.

“I'm sure you don't realize it,” she said. “You're one of those people who glides through life. Everything goes well for you all the time because you're so handsome and charming.”

He felt a half-second of surprise at the word “handsome.” She thought he was handsome. No one had used that in connection with him for a long time. But charming? He hadn't been charming to her. He hadn't even tried to be charming.

“You're making assumptions,” he said.

“Am I?” She raised her pencil-thin eyebrows. He usually hated manicured eyebrows, but on her, they looked appropriate. They matched her thin, angular face.

“You're not one of the fairy godmothers,” he said, deliberately changing the subject. He had to take the focus off himself. “The fairy godmothers are always unbelievably happy for no apparent reason. Disney got that right at least.
Bippidi Boppidi Boo
and all that.”

Her breath caught, and she leaned back just a bit, as if she were seeing him for the first time.

He'd gotten her, and he felt a bit of disappointment at that. He was using his best weapon—his only weapon, really. Charm. He was so very good at charm, and one part of charm was to focus on the person you were talking to.

Not that it was hard, focusing on her. He wanted to focus on her. Despite the bitterness of her tone, despite the sarcasm she used against him, he wanted to be closer to her.

He wanted to kiss her.

And he knew that wouldn't go over well at all.

“You can't be one of the old crones either,” he said, making himself concentrate on the charm and not on the woman. Although he couldn't help focusing on her a little. Real charm was based on truth, and truth came out of opinion, and opinion came out of personality. “Because the crones do look like the witches in
Macbeth
—Shakespeare had clearly been to one of the Kingdoms, maybe more than once.”

The woman's delectable lips curved upwards slightly. That twisted, bitter look was gone, and with it, at least ten years, maybe more. She looked younger and even more striking than she had a moment ago.

So more truth:

“And you're beautiful, more beautiful now than you probably ever were as a girl.” He didn't want to sound like he was coming on to her. He didn't dare, not with her being so bitter. So he made it sound like he was stating a fact.

Which he was.

“You're probably one of the stepmothers,” he said. “I would guess Snow White's, because one of the stepmothers is my mother-in-law.”

Whom he liked, truth be told. She was just a woman who had gotten a raw deal—her beloved husband had died, leaving her to fend for herself, and she hadn't known how.

“And the other stepmother…” He stopped himself before he said something he would regret. Sleeping Beauty's stepmother, Eris, was a witch in the classic sense of the word. And he really didn't want to think of her. So he kept talking, which he tended to do when he needed to work out a problem.

“Which means,” he said, “you and I met at a party, gosh, a century or two ago, when someone decided we should clear up the Charming mess and the stepmother gossip and see if we could take care of those Brothers Grimm.”

That look of almost-amusement the beautiful woman had vanished as if it had never been. Her eyebrows met in the middle as she mustered a truly formidable frown.

“
I
decided,” she said. “It wasn't
someone
who decided we needed to clear up what you so politely call ‘the Charming mess and the stepmother gossip.' It was me.
I
decided. I hosted that party.”

He nodded, remembering now. It was one of the first large scale events ever held in the Greater World. There had been too many arguments about which kingdom would host the gathering, so someone—this woman maybe?—decided to rent a castle in Germany of all places, that white one with the towers along the Rhine that Disney later used in one of its films.

Nothing had gotten settled, and in fact, he could point to the entire event as the beginning of the end of his marriage. Ella met the wives of the other Charmings, and they started talking about their marriages, and Things Got Said. The other Charmings apparently treated their wives like princesses. Not that he hadn't. But he also expected Ella to think for herself, and do something other than spend the king's gold.

He'd said that more than once, and he'd made the mistake of saying it in front of his father, who then harped on it forever. Apparently—at least according to Charming's ex-wife, the other Charmings never said anything bad about their wives.

Charming thought that was just one-upsmanship. People—charming or not—said things they regretted. Maybe the other wives just hadn't been as sensitive to slights as Ella had been. Either way, Ella had been dissatisfied with the relationship ever since.

Charming looked at the beautiful woman before him. Now the memory was becoming clear. He had noticed how stunning she was in Germany all those years ago. He had noticed and thought she had gotten a bad rep, considering everything. All she and the other stepmothers wanted was a little respect.

“You never answered me,” he said. “Are you Snow White's stepmother?”

“Are you Sleeping Beauty's Prince Charming?” she asked, apparently not willing to show him hers until he showed her his. But in asking the question, he got his answer. She was Snow White's stepmother.

“I married Ella,” he said. “The fairy tales still call her CinderElla, which really isn't fair. She was only covered in a light dusting of ash, mostly because there was something wrong with the flue—”

“Thin and shapely and beautiful and oh, so young.” That bitterness again.

What had made her so bitter? It was awful to see on a woman as beautiful as she was—as beautiful and as obviously intelligent.

“Why is it,” she was saying, “that men like you always go for women like her?”

“Women like her?” He wasn't feeling defensive, exactly. More curious. “What do you mean, women like her?”

“I saw her,” the woman said. “Petite and delicate and so pretty. She talked about clothes and jewelry, and I remembered thinking that she didn't have a thought in her head.”

Oh, Ella had thoughts but she worked at suppressing them. And she did enjoy her wardrobe and her jewels, primarily because they'd been denied her as a teenage girl. She didn't want to put her mind to use. She'd used it too much—she said—to escape her wicked stepmother.

Charming wasn't going to lie (although he could have. What would it matter? He probably wasn't going to see this woman again [and that thought made his heart twist a little, but really, when had he pursued a relationship? He hadn't even pursued the relationship with Ella. That had been his father's idea]).

He didn't feel like defending Ella either. Or himself, really.

But this woman had asked, and despite her bitterness, he wanted to continue the conversation. She was the first person who had seen him—really seen him—in years.

And somehow that made her even more attractive.

“I was a boy when I met Ella,” he said. “And she was a girl, not a woman. We weren't really old enough to commit to anything.”

The woman let out a small
huh
. “So all three of the best known Charmings have divorced now.”

That news made him grunt with surprise. He hadn't known that. He thought the other Charmings lived in perpetual wedded bliss. Happily ever after and all that.

Lost in her surprise, the woman didn't seem to notice his. She was saying, “Isn't that just the way of things? I suppose you blame the women's movement as well?”

“Excuse me?” It took Charming a moment to understand what she meant, and when he did, he almost let out another grunt of surprise.

The other Princes Charming had blamed the Greater World's women's movement for the failure of their marriages? Seriously?

He knew where the fault in his marriage was, and it wasn't with some amorphous movement in another world.

“Ella and I weren't compatible from the beginning,” he said. “She's very into the social whirl, the dresses, the dancing, and me, well…”