Once Upon a Fairy tale: A Collection of 11 Fairy Tale Inspired Romances

by Danielle Monsch, Cate Rowan, Jennifer Lewis, Jeannie Lin, Nadia Lee, Dee Carney

  Langley slid out of her and collapsed next to her with a soft kiss to her cheek.

  Then, with a sigh, he rolled from the bed. “I’ll be back day after tomorrow.”

  She blinked. Cold, she struggled with the covers and threw them over her while he drew on his pants.

  The door clicked behind him.

  “Run, prince Gothel, run,” she whispered.

  She curled into a ball on the bed and glared at the window, darkening as the sun went down.

  The damned man was going to that fucking bio rally. He didn’t care about her. How could he?

  This stalemate had come to a head. She’d let herself be distracted by Langley Gothel for too long. With a glance to be sure she was truly alone, she dug under her pillow. Her hand closed around the follicle hand laser. That first day, she’d knocked one of them off the instrument cart and sent it flying under the cabinet. After a week of docile behavior, it was easy to get to it and shove it in the waistband of her yoga pants. Now was the time to use it. Better she get rid of all her hair than let it go to the bitch who’d put her in this tower.

  Chapter Three

  ‡

  Rapunzel shaved her head.

  The follicle laser dropped to the floor from her slack fingers with a thunk. Rubbing the top of her unnaturally smooth scalp, she fought back the sting in her eyes and the burn in her nose. Strands, never sheared before, now lay at her feet.

  Willing her vanity at bay, she blinked rapidly and steeled herself. She had to gather all the strands and pitch them out the window of her room in the top tower of the floating island, far, far above the city of New Castle. She’d dump all that hair to rain down on landers, people who toiled so the rich in the sky never had to touch the ground. The landers would never see it coming.

  “What have you done?” The deep baritone from the doorway startled her.

  Hand pressed to her chest as if it’d calm her racing heart, she stared out the window at the passing clouds and didn’t turn to the door she hadn’t heard open. The door she’d tried and failed to escape through. The laser skidded across the floor and against the wall where her visitor kicked it.

  “I see. So you managed to steal the laser from Mère’s lab.” Langley pulled a chair from the hall with a screech along the cold stone floor. “Sit.”

  Langley lowered his voice and said again, “Sit. Let me see the damage.”

  As all their assignations started, she ignored him. Ignored the zing of lust that trembled through her. Ignored the longing to stay wrapped in him, a longing nearly as fierce as the one to escape. And as it always progressed, he entreated her again, as if daily he courted her in an accelerated fashion of gentling, wooing, and taking. “Turn around. Face me. I didn’t put you in here.”

  He knew just how to make her spin around, rage snatching at her, heating her skin, and snarl, “You didn’t get me out.”

  His luscious mouth frowned below deep pools of bottomless eyes that his glasses did nothing to detract from. His hand sifted through his black curls, the texture of which she knew by heart. She’d clutched at the shoulder length silken threads and given herself over to the bliss of forgetfulness. He had her whenever he wanted her, and she gave it to him, melted for him with one touch. Willingly. Even if she hated him for it, hated herself for it. They’d started the affair in a desperate clash of groping hands and impatient mouths but now, she faltered, admitted to herself that they’d settled into a consuming, fiery intimacy.

  “Uppity ass.” She sneered the insult at him. The helpless anger propelled her forward. By instinct, she swung a hand back to swipe her mass of long hair behind her. The course strands weren’t there. She ignored the sense of loss and pinioned her body, rotating on one heel, and brought her other foot around.

  Langley ducked. The harsh sound of his grunt as he reached for her thrummed through her belly. She swirled away from the heat of his fingers as they brushed across her waist.

  After that first sparring match, it’d turned into routine. Sparring then sex. Today was different. Now, she wanted to hurt him, to block the pain he caused her. She needed to staunch the loss she’d caused herself by killing off her hair. Her imprisonment had to end. So did their affair.

  “Get me out of here.” She thrust out. Her palm connected with his chest and knocked him back.

  “I won’t do that.” He spun away and circled.

  “You know it’s not right—” she whipped around to keep his flushed face in view—“to keep me here.”

  His chest rose and fell, his sensual lips half curved, and the sun spilled through the window to sparkle on his glasses. A curl of hair fell across his forehead, and she battled the urge to push it back.

  He lunged. Spinning her, he gripped her close from behind and pinned her arms to her body. She fought against him but couldn’t break free. The scent of salt and warm, clean fabric clouded her senses.

  His hold loosened. She dove away, sliding across her bed, away from the window, to crouch in front of the door. Panting, she grudgingly admitted, “You’ve gotten better. You didn’t telegraph that move.”

  “I had the best teacher.” He slid up out of his stance, a graceful, sleek movement that made her knees weak. Then he glanced at her head with a frown and did something different, unexpected. He stepped back. It went entirely against the usual give and take before they fell to her bed in a heated thrashing. His gaze dropped to the floor at her hair scattered like golden strands of synthetic hay beneath his shiny dress shoes.

  His head tilted, and he didn’t look at her. Her nose stung again with unshed tears. He moved to the window, face averted. Visibly fighting to calm his body, he swallowed hard. She tracked the smooth glide of his throat as he talked, rich and sultry, convincing. “Zel, I haven’t helped you escape, but you aren’t my prisoner. I didn’t bring you here.”

  She didn’t answer. She stared at him in profile during this rare, quiet moment between them. They’d never simply been in her room. Not just being together without exchanging stories of their ludicrous lives. Fighting. Arguing. Sliding off the bed to the floor and not noticing, or caring.

  With a greed that frightened her, she fisted her hands and let her gaze take him in, memorize him, because she’d shorn her hair and there would be retribution when her kidnapper found it missing. Her time here was at an end. And she knew he had his own reasons for not freeing her—reasons he did not share with her—but she couldn’t keep herself from asking.

  “Why? Why don’t you get me out of here?” she whispered, the enormity of what she’d done weighing her tongue.

  “Mère will have no use for you now,” he muttered, still not facing her as he spoke of his mother. “She stole you for your hair. Now she’ll have nothing to do with you. She’ll discard you. Like the others.”

  Now that Zel was no further research use, she’d likely never see the outside of this room again. “What do you expect from a girl they named after a plant and then trained as an agent? They kept me out of the field. Even as a researcher, I’m not much use to anyone.”

  “That’s not true.” With no elaboration, he whipped around. A fire lit in his expression, and he ripped the sheet off her mattress and gestured to the floor. “Help me. We need every strand.”

  His determined air suited his handsome appeal, even though he wore those fancy slacks only Islanders could afford. The tan of his chest peeked through at the top of his silky button-down shirt. His clean male scent drifted to her, teased her.

  She knelt beside him, breathed deeply, and croaked, “Why should I let you have it? Why not pitch it out the window?”

  He was the reason she’d taken this chance at freedom. Her feelings for him had clouded her judgment and when she saw the laser, she’d realized it. She’d stopped trying and she had to start again. The only way to get out of this room was to get rid of her hair. She had to leave, before this gorgeous man destroyed her from the inside out.

  His shoulders tensed, and he frowned at the floor, still not look
ing at her. He whispered, “We have to do something. You’ve made a mess out of everything.”

  Twelve weeks, over. Even during their most personal moments together, his emotions had been closed from her, Zel the creation, someone beneath him, not human. But he’d made her body feel alive, as fertile as the spring soil, if not loved.

  They were done though it’d never really started for him. He was a good man, at heart. If he didn’t see her as a real woman, he’d still free her since she was in real danger, much like he’d set an abused dog free. She could see it in his demeanor. Whatever secrets he had, whatever reason he hadn’t helped free her no longer mattered.

  “Get me out of this room, Langley.”

  He looked at her, then. Deep brown eyes, full of secrets, thick lashes, dark slashes of brows. The angles and planes of his face fascinated her. “Do you trust me?”

  She shook her head, leaned in to whisper against his full lips, “No.”

  “You will. Now. No questions.” He kissed her. Engulfed her senses with his essence. Male. Masculine. So potent, the first time she’d seen him, incredible as it seemed, he’d made her mouth run dry with want. The absolute frenzy to mate—so strong she couldn’t think straight until she’d climaxed beneath him—became less crazed after the first encounter, but he still made her burn with his presence.

  With an effort, she pulled back from the tangle of tongues and panted, all her muscles tight against the urge to jump his bones. She’d never understood what it was about him that made her nipples tighten to smell him, hear his deep voice, or feel the heat of his body.

  “I can’t.” She sat back on her heels to put some distance between them.

  “You’ve had sex with me. A lot of sex. Good sex.” Her heart thumped hard in her chest as his voice deepened. “You know the danger of my being here with you.” He frowned, and the expression seemed real, as if she’d hurt him. “Yet, you still can’t trust me. I didn’t put you here.”

  “But you didn’t get me out of here, either.” She squelched the inner voice she let slip out. Now wasn’t the time to put him on his guard against her. They were enemies. They never should have started this crazy affair.

  After pushing his glasses back up his nose, he kept sweeping her hair onto the sheet while a shame weighed on her more and more with each passing second. With a shaking hand, she palmed strands of the tech that until moments ago, had grown out of her head as if it were actually hair. It was coarse but shiny. Langley had loved to run his fingers through it.

  “You still heading to the ground to go to your anti-bio rally?” Though she shouldn’t want to repair the connection between them, she broke the stony silence.

  That he’d had the convictions of his belief proved he had a core of goodness inside him. Even if his convictions meant they’d never have anything together outside this tower.

  All visible signs of her hair now lay collected on the sheet. Langley gathered the edges of the fabric into a bundle and stood.

  “I’ll be back tonight. Be ready to go.”

  Without another glance, he walked out. It wasn’t as if she had anything to do, anything to prepare. The small room held the narrow, hard bed she’d slept on, books, a game station, and a treadmill. None of it hers. She wanted to forget everything about this room. The only thing she wanted to remember had walked out the door.

  She should trust him, but somehow, she knew tonight would be a disaster. And even if she left this room, she had nowhere to go—except back to Mother.

  *

  “Plans have changed.” Langley walked through his suite, to his desk, and carefully put down Zel’s bundled hair.

  His valet, Bennet, appeared as usual—as if out of thin air—with a concerned frown set all over his typically stoic countenance. “This looks like hair.”

  “Zel’s.” He fingered a strand and couldn’t put it back with the others lying in a glittering coil on the plain white sheet. “I need you to make this into a rope somehow.”

  Bennet, the only man he could trust on this floating island, stroked a hand gently over the strands. A surge of jealousy and rage roiled in Langley’s stomach. He clenched his hands to tight fists. To see anyone touch even her hair left him seeing red. The realization he didn’t want anyone—not one single other man—touching her, even in this way, made the room spin around him.

  Stunned all the way to his core, he came out of the haze of brutal possessive need with Bennet’s continued questions. “I can make a braid, I suppose. If I take several strands and twine them together then braid them, I can splice in the next section. With this much hair, it can be pretty long. What are you doing with it? How in the world did you—”

  “Enough for now.” He spun away, unable to see Bennet touching the golden tresses. “Zel has caused too many delays in our mission. For weeks, we’ve been altering our tactics.”

  Denying the guilt that he’d been using Zel—not just sexually—but as a distraction for Mère so she wouldn’t notice his betrayal, he swallowed hard and couldn’t deny he’d also used her as another example in his mission to make bio-creations illegal. He’d been watching Zel intently, trying to find her flaws, what made her different from the natural born. So far, all he’d found to be different was her hair and her depth of compassion, something he’d never found in anyone else.

  “We haven’t made much progress in studying her.” Bennet’s naturally soothing voice sounded like it came to him from a great distance, as if Langley were stuck inside the sensory deprivation chamber Mère had used in a research trial. “The only thing we’ve been able to find that sets her apart from humans is this hair. Now we have it. You can turn it over to NOMBIO.”

  “No,” Langley snarled, and spun toward Bennet, who only raised his brows at him in the imperial fashion that always got his attention, even as a boy entering manhood. He blew out a long breath and rolled his shoulders. “No.”

  “You love her.” The soft statement from Bennet didn’t come with condemnation, but it settled heavily on Langley’s shoulders.

  “I can’t love a bio-creation.” That was all the truth he understood. But it wasn’t everything. “How can one love a being who has no right to exist? They have no rights, no birth certificates, no parents.”

  His mind continued the litany as Bennet nodded serenely and bent over the hair, gently braiding it with amazing dexterity. When he got to the end of the section he worked on, he gathered more strands and weaved them in, taking the mass of hair and making rope that grew longer and longer. His valet reaffirmed Langley’s point, “It is true, if NOMBIO knew about your affair, they wouldn’t take your evidence, and Madam Gothel would continue her unconscionable research.”

  It was nothing but the truth.

  NOMBIO would ban any new mods or bios, and protect the ones in existence from the atrocities they were frequently victim to. If NOMBIO had its way, Rapunzel would be the last of her kind and would live her life out of sight. This was the mission Langley had dedicated his life to and it’d gotten all muddled in the past few weeks.

  The need to run his hand over Zel’s shorn head had sucker-punched him with a longing so intense it caused a sweet ache in his chest to look at her, the pinch so keen it threatened to bring him to his knees. He’d never felt the like.

  Something about the way Bennet moved his nimble, mod-enhanced fingers put Langley’s teeth on edge. He couldn’t watch his valet do this work. Crossing to the other side of the desk, he reached beneath the drawer and pulled the hidden data button from the hollowed-out shelf he’d made for it. With one finger push, it slid across the glossed surface of the desk toward Zel’s hair and Bennet, who stopped his motions and stared at it.

  “Finish the braid. I’ll use it to get Zel out of here. Take the button with the evidence and once we’re on the ground, retrieve the braid and meet me at the condo.”

  Ever the one who knew Langley’s intent before he did himself, Bennet nodded and bent over his task again.

  Langley resisted the urge to sa
y something personal to Bennet, to thank him. The man didn’t want his thanks. Langley’s fingers curled around a bit of silk in his hand. Surprised, he opened his fingers and stared. He’d braided the strand of hair, not even knowing he’d done so. Pocketing it, he left his suite with purpose in his stride.

  Zel was in real danger from Mère’s anger. There was no doubt. Once Mère was done with Zel, she’d do the same as she’d done to the other bio-creations. She’d decommission Zel, all the life drained from her before being discarded. Some Mère killed outright with an injection. Some, she took apart for other uses. Langley shuddered.

  Until today, he’d denied Zel’s pleas for freedom. She was a bio-creation. She didn’t require freedom. Her existence here was as good as on the ground, actually had more purpose here because he could use her to stop the factory process of creating bios, but the sure knowledge Mère would now dispose of Zel changed everything.

  Moving through the long halls of marbled floors, he stared sightlessly out the tall windows opening to endless sky. This mansion in the clouds symbolized everything wrong in New Castle. Megacorps ruled everything, including the de facto government, GOoSE. He couldn’t do anything about that. He couldn’t join Mother, the spy organization that investigated the megacorps, but he could stop Mère’s cruelty. Squelching all softness for the woman who’d given him birth, he had set his life purpose to gathering the evidence to shut her down and take over Gothel Island. He’d even decided to use Zel to do it.

  Collecting evidence of Mère’s past experiments, he’d built a persuasive case against the creation of bios at Cupboard Labs. He’d humored Mère’s discussions of research for weeks, all the while planning to take over Gothel and ban all use of bios and mods.