by Sylvia Frost
Sleeping Beauty and The Lion
Sylvia Frost
Contents
Copyright
Also by Sylvia Frost
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Epilogue
26. Afterword
27. Cinder’s Wolf Sample
Copyright © 2015 by Sylvia Frost
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover by Sylvia Frost of Sfrostcovers.com
Edited by Dee Editorial & Mary Novak
Acknowledgments:
Thank go to my patient readers and supportive author friends. I can only hope that I’ve written a book worth reading.
Also by Sylvia Frost
Shifter Fairy Tales
* * *
The BBW and the Beast
Cinder’s Wolf
A FULL-LENGTH shifter retelling of Cinderella.
Werewolf Rex West may be one of the richest men in Manhattan, own the luxurious Plaza Hotel and date a different model every week, but he’s far from content. To live in the human world, he’s trapped his inner wolf in a gilded cage of control and lost any hope of finding his mate.
Until he meets her...
Curvy Cynthia Cinders doesn’t have time to fall in love. Focused on growing her organizing company, Boxes & Broom, and getting out of her stepmother's basement, her one goal is to find investors. So when she gets an invitation to a masquerade hosted by a man known as the “Prince of Wall Street”, she’s more interested in percentage points than playing princess.
But this prince isn’t just a prince, and he has plans for Cynthia…
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Prologue
DANIEL
The Rocky Mountains
Ten Years Ago
I lived for this month in the Rockies. A jagged horizon of mountains stretched out forever in front of me, blue hazed and glorious. Up here, the rabbits burrowing between peeling roots still scurried back to their holes when they smelled me coming, and the air was as clear and thin as it would’ve been two hundred years ago. Up here, my father never lectured me on the territory wars. Up here, a werelion could still be a king.
Most of the time I was no king. My brother and I went to public school where we earned Bs, played second string on the lacrosse team and dated girls we knew weren’t our mates. If we didn’t act normal, the consequences were clear.
I can’t protect you or your brother, Daniel, and if the humans see you, I won’t even try. You have to blend in.
Shaking my lion’s mane, I snorted a plume of indignant air out of my wide nostrils. Father was a liar. Right now he was with my younger brother, Henry, somewhere in the forest, helping him through his first shift, protecting him. I watched the plume of air fade as it matched the temperature of the rest of the atmosphere. That was when I saw the helicopters.
Three black specks swung between the two nearest peaks. My lungs tightened and turned as cold as the snow-tipped mountains in the distance. My claws gripped the cliff’s edge.
Maybe they were fire-fighters. Except I smelled no smoke. The choppers grew from pin-pricks to dots. I weighed the possibility that they were from the army base forty miles south and scrambled backward into the shadows.
“Mamma, can we take a break so I can read?” A voice wafted through the trees behind me. A teenager. A girl.
My tail curled. Why was she so deep in the woods? Why did I care?
“Baby, now’s not the time for books,” an older voice answered.
“But you said we’d be back at the cabin hours ago. Aren’t you supposed to stay put when you get lost?”
“We’re not lost. Don’t sass me.”
Judging from the volume, the hikers were three minutes away. I leaped from the rocky out-crop, and in my wake pebbles clacked. The helicopters were probably search and rescue.
I crouched lower to the ground but my pelt was the color of the parched grasses of the savannah and stuck out against the rocky soil. Worse, claw marks so deep that wood shavings curled up around them scarred the nearby trees. I was an idiot to mark territory that didn’t belong to me.
The thwapping crescendoed and an edgy twitch rippled through my haunches. I drew back to sprint in the other direction when I smelled the girl. Fresh lilacs. Saliva thickened on my tongue, and my heart clenched, like it could wrap around this moment and squeeze it until time stopped.
Ours, my lion whispered.
No, it wasn’t possible. I hadn’t graduated from high school yet and if the timber of her voice was anything to go by the girl was younger than me. My claws dug into the dirt to keep from throwing myself in the girl’s path, but her scent was too strong. She was lost. I had to help her. My clothes were on the other side of the trail. I’d shift, get dressed and then lead her to safety.
I bounded up the slope. With every step, my claws shrank and my vertebrae folded up into each other like an accordion. Pain blazed through my skull as my synapses reknit themselves into human patterns. Blood roared in my ears.
Except it wasn’t blood. It was the helicopters.
Thwap. Thwap. Thwap. Thwap.
The boughs of the pines bent back from the air pressure and sent a storm of needles flying into my face. Through the debris I saw the black belly of the chopper. I fell to my knees. Completely human.
One man in body armor jumped off the side of the helicopter and then another. They both carried automatic weapons. Rangers didn’t carry automatic weapons. Fuck.
Through the stench of the helicopter’s gasoline, I caught the promise of my mate’s scent. Dewy leaves and purple blossoms. I lurched toward it.
“Stop!” One of the men called.
I pushed myself up against a tree. Bark roughened my palm, and pine-needles pinched my bare, human feet.
“Hands on your head!” another yelled.
“What do you want?” I screamed back, just to be heard.
“Put your hands on your head, sir, or we will shoot.”
They called me sir. Werebeasts weren’t given honorifics by humans or arrested. We were just shot. I put my hands on my head.
The blades of the helicopter quieted. Now I could pick out the mens’ boots breaking through the underbrush.
“Look down,” one of the men ordered.
“Please, just tell me what�
��s going on.” Goosebumps rose up on my skin, and I stiffened. Let them see my naked body, but please let them not notice my fear.
“We told you to look down, sir,” the men said again, and with the cold muzzle of the gun now pressed up against the back of my skull, the sir felt irrelevant. “This is your last chance.”
Ham sandwich lingered on the soldier’s hot breath. At least it wasn’t the burning stench of silver nitrate. The bullets in his gun probably weren’t silver. Werebeasts had been declared officially extinct in the late nineteenth century. There weren’t silver bullets for automatic weapons.
I looked down.
The other man yanked at my scalp. I could’ve opened him spine to sternum with a flick of my claw, but I didn’t.
He pushed away my hair from my neck. Too late I realized what he must’ve caught a glimpse of as I ran. His fingers brushed over the solitary patch of tawny lion’s fur left on my body, right under the nape of my neck. My matemark. I’d had it since birth. One day my mate would grow one, too. A knot of certain dread twisted around my stomach, and bile pushed up my throat.
Before I could so much as twitch, a gun shot cracked, ringing in my ears, so loud it almost blocked out the pain, which was thinner and sharper than I expected. It hadn’t been a bullet in the gun. A needle lanced my skin. My hand rose to pull it out but only made it halfway there before flopping to my side.
The corners of my vision fuzzed, blurred, then darkened. My thoughts followed soon after, but I could still taste newly blossomed summer lilacs. I could still taste my mate.
When I woke up, I was in a cage.
Chapter 1
ROSE
New York City
Now
Hello, world,
My name is The Book Addict. That’s not my real name, but you don’t need my real name because I’m not going to tell you my real story. I’m not going to tell you about how my daddy died in a car crash or how my mamma single-handedly brought us out of poverty. Instead, I’m going to tell you about my daydreams. Trust me, in the long run, they’re a lot more interesting.
When I was thirteen, I grew this patch of orange hair right below the nape of my neck. Now, I’m black, so sprouting carrot-colored body hair isn’t in the column of “things that typically happen to me in a week.” The special doctor I went to labeled the hairs as symptoms of a hormone imbalance, gave me a bottle of pills so big I was convinced he as trying to choke me, and called it a day.
I didn’t think much of the hairs at the time. Then I moved away from home to New York. There I got a job working for a very important and very attractive man. On the off chance anyone besides the Google search bots read this post, I won’t say any more.
What I will say is that sometimes I spend a whole day managing my boss’s emails, but when I bring him his mid-day espresso, he still looks at me like I’m a no-name intern. On those days I like to pretend that the tawny hairs on the back of my neck aren’t just hair at all. But fur. I pretend that one day I’ll walk into my boss’s office and he’ll notice the mark, smile at me, and say, “Oh, it’s you, Book Addict. As the last werewolf on earth, I’ve waited so long for my true mate and here you are. How could I have missed you all this time!”
I know it’s ridiculous. But I don’t care. That daydream is what keeps me from buying a plane ticket home and giving up on my dream of making my own life without my mother’s help. Not because I think that one day my boss will transform into a wolf, but because doing something as simple as visualizing my a handsome billionaire smiling at me allows me to get through my days.
Yours,
The Book Addict
* * *
I slammed my thumb down on the enter key. One second later the page refreshed, showing my first ever blog post. In the corner of my screen, my view counter ticked up from zero to one.
Okay, so no one would describe my post as “viral,” but that was fine. I just wanted one or two people to read my blog, think “Hey, I daydream about my boss, too,” and realize that they aren’t as weird or alone as they thought they were.
Right now, I felt pretty alone. In the offices of Rom Investing, I was an island among the sea of empty white desks and dark, glass walled cubicles. I’d come in late to copyedit emails and catch up on work, but it was almost 10 p.m now. Even the die-hards had left. Except one.
A soft glow emanated from the conference room at the edge of the office. Prowling inside was my boss, a billionaire named Rex West who the tabloids called the “Prince of Wall Street.” He stopped in the corner of the conference room near the brass bar cart and unstoppered a decanter. Then he grabbed some glasses and carefully measured out two tumblers of whiskey.
One for him and one…
For me?
Biting my lip, I allowed myself a little smile. I knew Rex would never actually ask me out, but a “good job” shared cocktail and a peek behind his corporate mask would sure be welcome right about now.
Absentmindedly, I lifted up my thin, waist-length box-braids over my shoulder, exposing the back of my neck and the collection of hairs I liked to pretend were a matemark. Orange and thick, their silky smoothness was a very different texture from the rebellious kinks on the top of my head that I’d tamed into my many braids. I was just about to reach out and feel the “mark”, when my phone buzzed.
“Hello?”
“Rose.”
“Don?” I recognized the voice of Rex’s driver.
“Cynthia is about to arrive at the office. You should let Mr. West know.”
“Cynthia?” Three clicks later and I was pulling up my to-do list from yesterday. Her name was in big, red block letters at the top. “As in the businesswoman who was at Mr. West’s party the other night that he couldn’t find?”
“You couldn’t find. Mr. West found her. They’re having a meeting tonight.”
“Right.” I cradled the phone against one ear as I highlighted her name and changed it from red to crossed-out yellow meaning, “done, but not on time or in the right way.” Color coding helped me do my job despite the focus issues I sometimes had. “I’m sorry. Thanks, I’ll let him know. Do you know—”
He hung up.
Great.
I stood and wiped my hands off on the space-age desk then rubbed my pendant for luck. Sheathed inside the steel scabbard was a miniature magnesium sword, a tiny replica of Naomi’s magic weapon from my favorite series, Mates of Darkness. Courage gained, I walked to the conference room and opened the door.
Rex saw me and his eyes narrowed. “Rose?”
The door slipped from underneath my sweaty palm, swinging back in my face. I dodged it and stepped inside. “D-don said Cynthia Cinders has arrived.”
Rex’s gaze stayed cool, and he didn’t reach for the other Manhattan on the bar-top. With his hungry blue eyes and perfect cheekbones, he could’ve been a model for a luxury whiskey brand. But if he was, I was not part of the same commercial.
“You can leave now,” he said. No smile.
I felt my blush in each of the freckles on my nose. It spread all the way to the tips of my ears. “Oh, of course, sir, I’m sorry—” In his world, I didn’t rate so much as a thank you.
His close-fingered hand sliced through the air in a curt wave. “It’s fine. Just let Ms. Cinders know I’m in the conference room.”
Right. Cynthia. Work.
Feeling like a bobblehead, I nodded a few times and returned to my desk. My glossy monitor loomed with my blog post still front and center. I exed it out with a vicious command + alt + please go away. My fingers felt numb against the plastic keys until I gripped my sword necklace so tightly it dug into my palm.
In Mates of Darkness Naomi never had any trouble being brave. Then again, Naomi was also chosen by the gods to fight evil. Getting fired wasn’t really an option in her line of work.
The elevator dinged, startling me into standing, and the doors parted to reveal a beautiful blonde woman. She looked to be in her late twenties, but her plus-sized curves and bount
iful hair belonged on a southern belle not a Manhattan businesswoman.
Cynthia Cinders.
Cynthia didn’t see me but sashayed straight to Rex. When she opened the door, her hand didn’t tremble.
Rex noticed her and raised his eyebrows along with his glass. Then he did something I’d never seen him do before. He smiled. God, that expression melted the glaciers in his blue eyes and softened the sharpness of his cheekbones. It made him look human. Young. In love.
Just not with me.
Cynthia took the drink he offered her and the closed the door, blocking my view of Rex’s smile. I slid back down into my seat. My eyes were hot. They shouldn’t have been. All my dreams of Rex being my secret mate were just that—dreams.
Leaning over, I yanked open the bottom drawer of my desk and pulled out a worn library book titled Beasts, Blood and Bonds. It was after I checked out this book that my imaginings had reached a fever pitch. The laminated spine creaked as I flipped the book open. Dust wafted up from the yellowed pages, but the booky smell didn’t comfort me today. I flipped to the page I had earmarked and read:
“Usually growing a few months after a human female is exposed to a werebeast or their territory, the matemark is the defining characteristic of a werebeast’s mate. It appears in the form of a patch of fur, scales, or feathers — depending on the beast —and has been documented on the wrist, ankle, hand, and back.”
A daguerreotype photograph from the 1840s followed the text, showing a pale woman in a high-necked Victorian gown. Fur coated her skin all the way up to her rolled up sleeve.
I closed the book and draped my braids over my arm, as I felt with two fingers for my “matemark”. When I reached it, I gritted my teeth. Tingles shockwaved through my body, like I had bumped my funny bone but without the pain. Spreading my fingers I measured the diameter of my patch of hairs at about one and half inches. Too small compared to the picture and in the wrong place.