Modern Wicked Fairy Tales: Complete Collection
eXcessica publishing
Modern Wicked Fairy Tales: Complete Collection © December 2011 by Selena Kitt
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First Edition December 2011
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Modern Wicked Fairy Tales: Complete Collection
By Selena Kitt
Get EIGHT STORES—ALL seven modern retellings of fairy tale classics in Selena Kitt’s Modern Wicked Fairy Tales: Complete Collection—Beauty, Briar Rose, Goldilocks, Rapunzel, Red, Alice and Gretel—for one GREAT low price!
PLUS a BONUS STORY previously unreleased: Modern Wicked Fairy Tales: Wendy, a modern take on Peter Pan!
In Beauty, former beauty queen Jolee Mercier finds herself in big trouble, locked in the trunk of her husband’s BMW on her way to a remote location in the woods of northern Michigan where she’s going to be killed. Her crime? Knowing too much. An anonymous letter arrived addressed in her name with proof that her husband, Carlos, a state logging and mining mogul, had been the one responsible for her father’s death years earlier, killed for supporting the unions at a local logging camp. When a terrible accident ends her husband’s plan to kill her, Jolee wakes up alone in a cabin in the middle of the woods, rescued by a masked man they call “the beast,” with a husband who wants her dead, and miles of state forest between her and civilization.
In Briar Rose, although her dreams are filled with sensual imagery, and she’s often awakened with a throbbing sense of release, Rose has never had a sexual climax—at least, not while conscious. When she’s forced to confess her faked orgasms to her fiancé on the eve of their wedding, she finds herself alone, abandoned and suicidal—until her aunt gives her a business card with the name of a special clinic. Rose has undergone all sorts of physical and mental examinations in the past, but her aunt assures her that this place is “different.” Desperate for a solution, Rose decides to give it one last try, and finds that Dr. Matt, as he insists she call him, is indeed very different from any other person she’s ever met, and he’s determined to get to the bottom of her problem—one way or another.
In Goldilocks, Goldie Lax is a safecracking prodigy who learned her craft from her father and her grandfather before him. When she pairs up with Richard Campbell, who can hack any system, together they make the perfect team, mixing both business and pleasure. When Goldie’s grandfather, who survived the holocaust only to end up a nursing home in his eighties, tells her about a horrific crime that robbed a good friend of his family’s inheritance, Goldie enlists Campbell’s help to recover the diamonds. The three Behr brothers have stolen something too precious for words and Goldie, safecracker extraordinaire, and Campbell, their head of security, have hatched a foolproof scheme to get it back, but the long, involved plan may just complicate their relationship beyond repair.
In Rapunzel, Rachel runs Rapunzel’s, a high-end salon on the lower level of a downtown Chicago high rise and lives happily in self-imposed exile in an apartment at the top of the tower—that is until Jake Malden walks in with his teen daughter, Emma, and presents Rachel with a dilemma. Young Emma is determined to defy her mother’s wishes and get her long, beautiful, untouched hair cut off so she can donate it to charity to honor a friend with cancer. Rachel’s decision to cut the girl’s hair starts a snowball of drama, turmoil and hidden secrets rolling downhill on a course with destiny that no one is able to stop, one that ultimately threatens not only Rachel’s livelihood, but her slowly melting heart as well.
In Red, recently orphaned Mae finds herself taking care of her ill grandmother and trying to negotiate the big, wide world of New York. Aside from Griff, a drifter she’s befriended on the long walk to her grandmother’s, she is alone, a frightened country mouse in the big city. Mae can’t believe her good fortune when she meets Lionel Tryst, a charming and charismatic real estate agent, who arranges the miraculous sale of her grandmother’s expensive apartment in the horrible buyer’s market of the Great Depression so they can both move out of the city. But is Mae’s luck too good to be true—or is there a big bad wolf lurking in the shadows?
In Alice, Alice is madly in love with a man who taps into her naturally submissive nature and introduces her to the pleasurably painful delights of the BDSM world. When her Wade Knight sends a car to take her to a strange and wonderful new place, Alice finds herself in a very sticky situation where everything is upside down and nothing is as it seems.
In Gretel, Gretel has never understood her father’s choice of a second wife, and she and her brother Hans have high hopes of getting out from under the suspicious, spiteful eye of their penny-pinching stepmother once Hans graduates from college with his degree in chemistry. But on Gretel’s eighteenth birthday, when their stepmother insists they go on a month-long cruise around the coast of Australia with a rich candy-heiress grandmother neither of them has ever met, the siblings’ plan, in fact their whole world, is turned upside down. Hans is drawn into the lavish, opulent lifestyle on the yacht, easily seduced by their grandmother’s riches and her plans for his future. Wary Gretel, on the other hand, finds herself seduced instead by Andrew, their grandmother’s bodyguard and assistant. And when their grandmother reveals the real reason for taking the two siblings on the voyage, it may be too late for either of them to escape her greedy grasp.
In Wendy, Peter finds his Wendy while looking for a rare book on “shadow” in the library. After hearing Wendy’s tale of woe, he invites her and her two little brothers, Michael and John, to come live at his house in south Florida—a place he calls Neverland. But although a large cross-dressing blonde named Tink, who lives with Peter and his band, The Lost Boys, isn’t too happy about Wendy’s arrival, it’s Peter’s nemesis, James Hook, who proves to be the new couple’s greatest challenge.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Beauty
Goldilocks
Briar Rose
Rapunzel
Red
Alice
Gretel
Wendy
About the Author
Bonus Excerpt!
More Books by Selena Kitt
More from Excessica
BEAUTY
Jolee could never stay out of trouble for long and being locked in the trunk of Carlos’s black BMW was no exception to that particular rule of her life. She’d given up trying to kick the
side of the car to make noise—luxury car makers practically sound-proofed their trunks. Who knew? She wondered if engineers considered scenarios like this one—after all, any rich husband might have to enlist his hit men tie up and toss his troublesome wife into the trunk for easy disposal, right?
Besides, her feet were secured with zip ties, as were her hands, which stretched painfully behind her back. They didn’t use duct tape—too easy to wiggle out of—except for the pieces over her mouth. And even those weren’t just slapped on—they’d used the roll to wrap the silver stuff around and around her mouth and jaw in layers. Carlos’s guys knew exactly what they were doing. Of course they did. It was their job.
There was just no way out of this bit of trouble. That realization finally hit her in the darkness, the car’s wheels crunching gravel a long time now, off the highway, she surmised, the suspension bouncing her violently up and down. This was going to be the last batch of trouble she ever got herself into in the whole expanse of a life that seemed suddenly very short.
She’d been so focused on escaping or finding a way out since Carlos’s goons had grabbed her out back—zip-tied and duct taped before she could even raise the snow shovel she’d been using—that this final realization hit with such terrifying force Jolee actually wet herself, urine staining the crotch of her jeans with spreading navy blue darkness.
She was going to die.
“No,” she whispered, feeling herself giving in at the same time as she denied the notion. “Please, no.”
She had no one left to mourn her. Her mother had been gone since she was a baby, her father dead for years, killed in a logging accident. And her husband—Carlos was the reason she was facing this end, a betrayal she still couldn’t wrap her head around. But for the first time in her life she was glad for the miscarriages, that she had no baby or child to leave behind. Her only real regret was that she had never really loved a man who truly loved her back.
Jolee wailed, a muffled cry that wouldn’t have been heard over the pounding bass of Ted Nugent through the car’s speakers even if they’d been stopped in traffic somewhere, but they were far from civilization. She knew where they were. Not exactly, but they’d driven a long way on this back, bumpy, winding road and there was no doubt in her mind they were in the middle of nowhere, deep into the wild, far from the logging camps, but still on the thousands of acres of land Carlos’s father had left him.
That was where Carlos buried the bodies.
Jolee thought of her husband, the way he sucked on a Wintergreen Lifesaver and tied his tie in their dresser mirror every morning as if he was going off like any other man to a regular job living a regular life, the way he ruffled her hair and called her “chickie” and kissed her cheek before he left. How could that man be the same man who had ordered her kidnapped and killed?
As much as she wanted to deny it, she knew it was the truth. Her husband killed people. No, he had people killed. If they got in his way, if they threatened him or his little empire, Carlos had the money, the power and the influence to simply make them disappear. She hadn’t wanted to believe it, for years she had suppressed her intuition. But when proof had arrived in her mailbox, when she had confronted Carlos with the information and he had petted and placated and pacified her, she had still denied it, hadn’t she? She’d believed his lies. Because she wanted to? Because she had to? What woman wanted to believe her husband would have her father killed?
It had been over a week since the blow-up, since the unstamped white envelope with proof of Carlos’s crime had shown up in their mailbox with just her name—Jolee Mercier—scrawled onto the front. She’d thought things had gone back to normal, that Carlos had forgotten, that they could live out their lives as they always had, separately together. How could she have let herself sink so low? How could she have believed for one moment that the man she married wasn’t the monster he’d been revealed to be?
But she had found that living with something, day in and day out, numbed you to its power. Now she was going to pay for that denial, with her life.
“No!” She didn’t know where she found the strength. Maybe it was the thought of Carlos telling his next conquest that, sadly, his last wife had run off on him. Maybe it was the injustice of being interred beside her father somewhere in the middle of nowhere, a mass grave for Carlos’s enemies—men who had defended the union, women who had turned him down, people who had made Carlos’s life uncomfortable. How many bodies were buried out there, she wondered? If he would order his own wife killed—who hadn’t he gotten rid of?
Jolee wiggled around in the trunk. There was nothing back there—made more room for bodies, she assumed dismally—just a tire iron and a jack and a set of jumper cables. All great weapons if she could have gotten her hands free, but the zip ties were drawn so tight behind her back the circulation had long ago disappeared from her fingers. She could still feel her feet though, and that was what she used, slamming both of them against the latch of the trunk.
There was no way to disguise what she was doing. She knew the guys would hear her. The music stopped blaring almost immediately. She was probably denting the hell out of Carlos’s car. The thought, he’s going to kill me, crossed her mind and she gave a strangled, crazed half-laugh, kicking again, again, again.
“What the fuck? Bitch! Knock it the hell off!” She recognized the voice. One of the guys who’d grabbed her, an older man, her father’s age, someone she remembered seeing around the logging camps and later, at her husband’s office.
She heard him yelling but didn’t stop. If they pulled over now and shot her in the head it wouldn’t matter. This was her one chance, her last chance, a last gasp for a final breath.
When the trunk popped open, Jolee screamed in triumph behind her duct tape mask. She had time to see a gun metal expanse of winter sky and fat flakes of snow still falling outside, her nostrils flaring as she filled them with a sharp, cold intake of air, before the car stopped.
But it didn’t just stop. The impact was so sudden Jolee was tossed toward the front of the BMW, hitting her head against the car jack. She felt something floppy on her forehead, wetness flooding her eye, stinging, but then she was flying and couldn’t think about that anymore, thrown out of the open trunk into a foot of heavy snow.
The landing was hard, so hard she couldn’t breathe, but her head hurt the most and the last thing she remembered was hearing a scream, a wild animal cry of pain and death and horror, and she wondered briefly if she was making that awful noise before the world went black.
* * * *
Silas had been following the animal for over a mile. His father taught him long ago that hunting should be something a man did honorably, so tracking in the snow seemed a bit unfair, but he was carrying a bow, not a gun, and the elk had a good quarter mile head-start. Besides, the animal was a thousand pounds and bulls were known to charge any hunter forced to get too close. Silas was careful to stay downwind. He had two arrows ready—elk often ran, even after a kill shot, and he was ready to track it for the second if he needed to—but it turned out he only needed one.
The first shot was good, clean, a chest hit, surely puncturing the animal’s lung, possibly piercing the heart. And still, the big bull ran, bellowing as it bounded through the trees, heading for the old logging road. It wasn’t much of a road at all, just a two-track, and very few people knew about it—most of them dead. His brother, Carlos, only had it plowed or graded for “special occasions.”
It all happened far too quickly for Silas to do anything but bear witness. He heard the animal cry, a horrifying, sorrowful squall, but by the time he’d reached a clearing near the road, following both the elk’s tracks and the blood trail, events had already been set in motion. The first thing he noted, setting aside a rising anger at the sight, was that the two-track had been freshly plowed. The foot of snow they’d received overnight—nothing compared to the two more they were supposed to get over the next few days—had already been cleared from the narrow road.
> The elk had bolted across the gravel path, not afraid or cautious of anything that looked like a road this far from civilization, and probably too weak from the arrow to jump far out of the way of the oncoming vehicle. Instead, it had tumbled sideways onto the hood of the BMW, its huge rack—calcified this time of year and sharpened to dangerous points on tree bark—shattering the glass, puncturing the air bag, and skewering the driver of the vehicle to his seat.
The other airbag had either malfunctioned or was nonexistent, because the passenger had gone airborne through the windshield, his body sprawled over that of the elk on the hood, limp and unmoving. There was so much blood Silas couldn’t tell from an immediate assessment which was human and which was elk. But the elk was still alive, the arrow rising out of its side as it struggled to free itself, the pulling and tugging of its head making the driver do a bloody dance in his seat.
Silas moved to the front of the car and raised his bow, making it quick and fast, easing the animal’s suffering and silencing its cries. He surveyed the scene, understanding immediately. He monitored the old two-track regularly, even though it was miles from his own cabin, knowing Carlos’s penchant for using it, but he hadn’t been down this way in a few weeks. He recognized the two men as Carlos’s, in spite of their disfiguring wounds.
Probably the same men who had taken Isabelle, he thought, a slow heat burning in his chest as he assessed the damage. The memory of his wife was always close to the surface, and although his life out here was full and far from idle, it was also quiet and lonely and left him a great deal of time to think about her. He couldn’t help imagining them carrying her out of his house while they left him, drugged and duct taped to a chair, in their burning cabin. What had they done with her? Where was she now?
There was no movement from either body, and they were probably dead—or would be soon if they weren’t already—and he was glad. He might have killed them himself if he’d found them barreling down this road, off to carry through with Carlos’s orders. God only knows what he had them doing.