Wickedly Charming by Kristine Grayson Read Free Book Online

lovely, intelligent daughters who he didn’t see enough.
    He found the stairs and took them two at a time, putting some distance between him and Snow’s stepmother. He wondered what she would say if he told her he understood her bitterness, if he told her that he understood the weight of all those expectations.
    Just because the expectations were good didn’t mean they were harmless. He had been handsome and charming and where had it gotten him? Certainly not to a happily-ever-after.
    He wasn’t even sure he believed in happily-ever-afters.
    The doors to the main exhibition hall were opening as he walked past, and his heart took a small leap. He was still unsettled—he really hadn’t expected to find someone from the Kingdoms here—but he was getting past that. And considering how big this place was, he probably wouldn’t see her again.
    Which bothered him more than he wanted to admit.

Chapter 5
    Mellie leaned the back of her head against the function room door, feeling unbelievably stupid. Charming had just shut her down. As if she were nothing.
    I don’t understand people who like to fight , he had said, as if she were one of them, as if she didn’t have a cause .
    She had cause to be angry, surely he could see that?
    But she had been angry at him, partly—if she were truly honest with herself—because she was so attracted to him.
    How clichéd was that? Being attracted to Prince Charming.
    She shook her head and stood up. The worst thing she could do was go to the interview room right now and try to charm her way in. She could barely charm anyone on a good day, and at the moment, this wasn’t a good day.
    She had just embarrassed herself in front of a Charming.
    A Charming she was attracted to, which had never happened before. She hadn’t found a Charming attractive ever in her life (except this one, that day more than a hundred years ago). But then, she had blamed it on her exhaustion. Right now, she had no such excuse.
    She headed back to the parking lot.
    It was full now, cars stretching as far as the eye could see, glinting in the bright Los Angeles sun. It could be anywhere in Los Angeles—a huge parking lot filled with late-model cars, a warehouse-sized building filled with people doing something important, a few sickly trees, an unused sidewalk, and wide roads where the cars sped by too fast.
    As she strode across the asphalt, she saw her people gathered around her minivan. They weren’t in any order—it was hard to organize archetypes. And none of them were leaders. The leaders either remained in the Kingdoms or they had vanished to the winds here.
    So she liked to think. Since it was clear, even from a distance, that only about half of the members of the California branch of PETA had shown up. Half of the ones who had RSVPed, that is. If Mellie had gotten half of the members of the California branch of PETA to show up, her people (if you could call them that) would have outnumbered the people in the book fair.
    California had the largest number of archetypes in the United States, and in the top ten for archetypes in the Greater World. Most of the archetypes who had left the Kingdoms in the past fifty years had come to California. Most of the archetypes had to find work here because they needed money to survive. Kingdom money didn’t translate, unless it was gold, and most of the archetypes couldn’t get gold.
    Mellie had had more gold than she knew what to do with, and she had sold a great deal of it in her first foray into the Greater World back in the nineteenth century. She had claimed she found it in California, in the so-called Gold Rush, but mostly she had brought it with her when she moved.
    Mellie sighed and surveyed her troops, such as they were.
    She had ended up with fifty-one protesters, fifty-two if she counted herself. They gathered around her van, picking at the signs, and quarrelling amongst themselves.
    Some had been in