Beauty Conquers the Beast Read online

  I stretched up and covered his mouth with my hand. “You’re an idiot.”

  The furred ridges of his eyebrows rose.

  “You’re an idiot because every king is different. King Hugo is who the kingdom needs now. Who’s to know if a very different kind of king, your kind of king, will be needed in the future?”

  His mouth moved beneath my palm.

  It was tantalizing. But this was too important—Alex was too important—for me to be distracted. I continued earnestly. “My grandfather has told me tales of your great-grandfather. He was like you. Big and imposing. He fought for the kingdom. King Hugo can maintain peace in the region because his grandfather fought for and achieved it.”

  Alex licked my palm.

  I squealed and snatched my hand away.

  “Can I talk now?” A smile gleamed in his eyes.

  “Yes,” I said breathlessly.

  “I think maybe I could be a good king, if I had a queen smart enough to tell me when I was being an idiot.”

  I blushed. “Prince Alexander, are you flirting with me?”

  “If you need to ask, I need more practice.” He caught my hand and raised it to his lips.

  You know when I said that hand kissing wasn’t passionate? I was wrong. As Alex’s lips teased my skin, shivers of desire skittered through me. Then he sucked my thumb into his mouth and swirled his tongue around the tip. I swayed into him, and he wrapped an arm around my waist.

  “We need to break your curse,” I whispered.

  He released my finger. “Do you have any ideas?”

  I nodded while I stared at his mouth, remembering how it felt to kiss him. “We should become betrothed.”

  Chapter 6

  “A kiss didn’t break the curse,” I explained my reasoning to Alex as he led me to the castle’s chapel. “So maybe we need to try something with more commitment. A betrothal is almost as binding as a marriage.”

  “We can’t marry,” he said seriously. “There’s no priest at the castle, and none are willing to risk the Sighaway Forest. The servants occasionally venture through the forest into town to attend services.”

  “A betrothal will be sufficient,” I said absently. “Mother would kill me if I got married without a grand wedding.”

  A small smile parted his lips, revealing sharp teeth. “A valid consideration,” he teased me.

  I swatted his arm.

  A sense of awe and solemnity, and the weight of what I would promise, settled on me as he opened the chapel’s main doors.

  It was built of the same honey-gold sandstone as the castle. Inside, the light was multi-colored as it streamed through stained glass windows. Dust motes floated on the still air.

  “Do you have a ring?” I asked Alex.

  He jolted to a halt. “No.”

  I reached into my pocket. “I thought we might need to try a betrothal to break the curse, so I came prepared. I wasn’t sure how large your beast form was so I took a thumb ring from Father’s treasury—with his approval.” I showed him the simple gold ring with its wide gold band.

  An unhappy growl rumbled in his chest. “I should have a ring for you. Wait here.”

  “Alex!” But he was gone, moving inhumanly fast. I left the second gold ring, one sized for my finger, in my pocket and sat on a pew, turning over and over in my hand the thumb ring.

  How much my life and future had changed in a day. Alex wasn’t the man I’d thought him. He was far more sensitive and gentle than I’d guessed. And he liked me. That was the biggest surprise: that he’d been awkward with me because I was important to him.

  Three years ago, he’d wanted to court me!

  Now, in a few minutes, we would bind ourselves in a betrothal. “Dear God, bless and keep us.” A shiver of fear and hope slid down my spine.

  I heard the scuff of Alex’s footsteps and stood to join him at the front of the church with its fine engravings and the painted biblical scenes on the walls and ceilings all around us.

  His focus was solely for me. “Is there a ritual we need to follow? Certain words we should say?”

  I shook my head. “I think we just need to mean our commitment.”

  “I do.” He took my hand and we knelt together. His voice was deep and low. “Nora, I don’t have fancy words, but I give you all that I am and have. I give you my heart and body, my dreams and fears. I will be faithful, always.” He slid the ring, a delicate yet strong, woven gold band onto my finger. “I am yours.”

  I could feel tears shimmering in my eyes and blinked them away. “That was beautiful.” I sniffed, and he handed me a crisp white handkerchief. I smiled, laughed, and used the handkerchief before tucking it in my pocket. “Alex, I give myself into your keeping.”

  Emotion burned in his eyes.

  “I will be true to you, always.” I tried to find more words, as beautiful as his, but couldn’t. I slid the ring onto his finger. Thank goodness the thumb ring fitted. “Alex, I am yours.”

  His mouth crushed mine. He tasted of passion, wildness and hunger. He was my future.

  He rose, and using his beastly strength, lifted me with him. He carried me out of the chapel, only to trap me against the trunk of a nearby oak tree and kiss me with a desire so lusty and needy it had no place in a church.

  A keening noise of equal need sounded in my throat.

  He stopped. His claws dug into the trunk on either side of my face. His breath was warm and arousing against the sensitive skin of my throat. Then he straightened to his full height and pulled away. “The curse is unbroken.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it.” I’d thought only of Alex.

  “Nora.” Anguish vibrated in his voice. “You’ve bound yourself to the beast.”

  “To you, Alex.”

  But he was gone, running with his unnatural speed across the garden in the direction of the distant briar hedge. He ripped through it, into the forest, and vanished from my sight.

  Chapter 7

  Lunch was a lonely affair. Dining alone in the room where I’d breakfasted, I stared out the window, hoping for Alex’s return. But the elegant garden remained empty. Even the swans had flown away from the lake.

  Then a scream echoed across the garden and into the peaceful room. Before my astonished gaze, the briar hedge tore apart. A gigantic ball of whirling mayhem barreled through and into the garden. It rolled and raged across the manicured grounds, flattening hedges and knocking into statues.

  In the frenzy, even at that distance, I recognized Alex’s beast form.

  But what was it that he fought? Bronze scales glinted and smoke erupted in angry bursts.

  Dear heaven. How had Alex found a dragon? Wasn’t battling one curse enough for the man?

  I ran through the castle’s empty corridors and out the main door. A dozen swords moved purposely toward the fight, clutched in invisible hands.

  “Stay back!” Alex shouted.

  The swords halted in an arc around where beast and dragon strained against one another.

  Alex had forced the dragon to the ground and now lay over it, pinning its giant leather wings. “Get me rope.”

  The dragon scrabbled at the gravel.

  Alex snarled.

  For an instant, the dragon froze. Its iridescent eyes swirled with all the colors of the rainbow, plus the strange hues of magic.

  “This is what I’ve been hunting in the forest,” Alex panted. “Its wings are damaged, so it travels in short hops. Confused me. And it’s far from home.”

  Dragons roosted in the remote Chyssin Mountains. They were little more than legend to me. Probably the servants and guards around me knew even less.

  “It’s a youngster,” Alex said. “When it’s older, it’ll be able to communicate telepathically. It’s panicked. Don’t trust it, but treat it kindly.”

  The rope arrived.

  “Place a lasso around its muzzle and be ready to bind its legs. Like you would hog-tie a steer,” he added as he looked around, observing his people who were invisible
to me. “Swords down and help.”

  Swords dropped to the ground.

  Two minutes later the dragon was secure and Alex swayed where he stood.

  I ran to support him. My hands touched his shirt and I flinched. The black color of the shirt had hidden the blood that stained it. “Alex?” I was scared. When I pulled aside the shirt, his side was torn open, the white bone of his ribs exposed, and two or more were shattered.

  “The dragon needs to live and be returned to its kin,” he said quietly. “Dragons make bad enemies. Promise me.”

  “I promise,” I said distractedly. I cared nothing for dragons.

  He sank to his knees.

  “Someone help!” I screamed.

  But what could anyone do? This was a death wound.

  Alex knew it, too. His eyes, so human in his beastly face, held mine. “You’ll be free.” He looked around. “You’ll all be free.”

  “No, Alex. No. I don’t want to be free.” I felt invisible hands helping him, guiding him to lie on the ground. Cloths pressed against his side.

  “Nora.” His fingers flexed, but he couldn’t lift his hand.

  I cradled it against my breasts.

  “I love you,” he said.

  His breathing stopped.

  The world erupted in flames of magic. Alex’s body twisted and shook. His hand was torn from my grasp.

  Then the flames vanished and my vision cleared.

  Two dozen or more people surrounded me. And I noticed not a one of them because Alex stood in front of me.

  Not Alex, the Beast of the Sighaway Forest, nor Alex the mortally injured, but a completely human and wonderfully whole and alive Alex.

  I leapt into his arms.

  He hugged me tight, and kissed me hard, and covered my pretty daffodil-yellow dress in the blood from his stained shirt—not that I cared!

  “You’re alive. Alex, you’re alive.”

  The crowd around us babbled with equal excitement. Then went quiet.

  Alex and I looked around.

  My godmother Morningstar stood by the young dragon, one hand resting on its quiescent head, and smiled at us.

  “There ought to have been an easier way of breaking the curse than dying for it,” Alex growled.

  “Your death didn’t break the curse.” Morningstar’s smile was fond. “It was admitting your love for Nora that did that. You were never as alone—nor as beastly—as you imagined you were, Alex.”

  I cuddled into him. “I told you so, my idiot prince.”

  His chest shook with silent laughter. “Such loving words, my beautiful betrothed.”

  We smiled at one another, happy beyond expression. Knowing he was with me, alive and safe, filled my heart with joy and gratitude. And when I remembered how his last words as beast had been to say he loved me, the emotion in my heart spilled over. I stood on tiptoes and kissed him.

  Alex responded enthusiastically.

  “Ahem.” Morningstar cleared her throat. When she had our attention, she stroked the dragon’s gleaming head. “I will take this one home. I have no idea how she came to be so far from the Chyssin Mountains. Perhaps blown off course in a storm? Be good, children. I’ll see you at the wedding.” Morningstar—and the dragon—disappeared.

  The wedding! Our wedding.

  Alex and I stared at one another. “I’m not waiting months and months to marry you, while our mothers plan a grand wedding.” The growl in his voice was as impressive as when he’d been the beast. But his hand tracing circles in the small of my back was gentle.

  I shivered with desire. “We’ll give them one month.”

  “One day would be better,” he grumbled. Then he kissed me, again, and we forgot everything, including our audience of happy, now visible, servants.

  Chapter 8

  The music swelled to a crescendo. Alex spun me in a careful circle. The white silk and lace skirt of my wedding gown flared slightly, weighed down by a hundred and seven carefully sewn on crystals. With many sighs for our intransigence, but an unspoken eagerness for the challenge, our mothers had accepted our insistence that we marry within the month.

  The wait had been painfully long. However, Alex and I were now man and wife, and his arms were strong and secure around me as we completed our formal wedding dance. His nose was too big, his mouth too wide, and his jaw too brutally square for anyone but a liar to call him handsome, but the love in his eyes was so much more important to me.

  Alex might think himself lacking in kingly ability, but he’d been the only one of us at the castle to recognize the importance of keeping the lost and injured young dragon alive. I’d learned that for all that he downplayed his studies, he was exceedingly well-informed on the dangers and potentials within our kingdom and beyond its borders.

  The dragons had been so grateful for their youngster’s return that they had sent a wedding gift to Alex and me via Morningstar. We were the somewhat bewildered owners of a flying carpet that refused to fly higher than a foot off the ground. Alex had rolled it up and stashed it in a cupboard at his castle. As he’d said, when we had children, they’d enjoy playing with it, crawling onto it and tumbling off it over the castle garden—which would have many more flowers in it than it did now. I had plans!

  Right now, my plans and anticipation were for our wedding night.

  The music finished. Alex bent his head, and against all protocol, kissed me in the middle of the ballroom. Laughter and applause greeted his action.

  When I emerged flushed and happy from his embrace, Morningstar’s smile caught my attention. “Thank you,” I mouthed. The curse had been more gift than suffering. My godmother had known Alex and my hearts before we did.

  He swept me up in his arms.

  I giggled. “Your mother is going to kill you for disrupting the celebrations.”

  “No, she’s not.” He swung around so that I could see his parents standing beside mine, both couples smiling, our mothers teary and our fathers looking proud. My brothers looked as embarrassed as only teenage boys can.

  Alex carried me from the ballroom. Then he set me down and we ran together through the maze-like passages of the palace till we reached his room. There, our laughter fled. As I leaned pantingly against the door, he stroked his hands from my breasts to my hips. His touch was familiar now, but even more arousing. He kissed the soft upper curves of my breasts, pushed into prominence by the wedding gown.

  “Turn around,” he ordered tenderly.

  I obeyed, and with painstaking, tormenting care, he undid every single, tiny, hidden button along the back of the gown. Then he turned me to face him and pushed the sleeves from my shoulders. The weight of the crystals stitched to the skirt pulled the gown down in a rush, pooling it on the polished floor. Alex lifted me out of it.

  The heat of his hands burned through the thin silk of my petticoat. So fine was its weave that it clung to every dip and curve of my body.

  “You’re overdressed,” I whispered, moving my hands restlessly over his broad shoulders.

  He kissed me, continuing with the kisses as he stripped off his jacket and shirt. He was so powerfully muscled, all-male. All mine. He stepped back long enough to shed his breeches, and for the first time ever, I saw a naked man.

  “Alex.” All the love and longing I felt was in my voice, and undoubtedly in my eyes.

  He couldn’t doubt my approval and need. We had promised ourselves to each other in our betrothal, and formally stated our vows at the wedding this afternoon. Now, we would make those promises real.

  “I love you, Nora.” His voice was rough and deep, but his big hands trembled as he gently took the last of my clothes from me.

  Shy but proud, strengthened by the almost worshipful look in his eyes, I stood before him. Only for a second. Then he held me close as if I was beyond precious.

  “I love you, Alex.” I kissed him as he lowered me to the bed and followed me down.

  There was some fumbling and hushed, breathless laughter as we learned each other
’s bodies. But then he slid inside me, and the slight pain of his entrance was lost to the overwhelming sensation of being one body.

  Pleasure built in waves, and exploded suddenly. More pleasure than I knew how to handle. I screamed “Alex!” as he drove into me a final time, finding his own release. He rolled over, keeping me with him, so that I lay over him like a blanket. He smoothed my hair as it fell messily over us both.

  “I think I’ve finally found a job I’m suited to,” he said.

  I blinked and raised myself up on my elbows to stare at him. What was he talking about, and in our marriage bed, on our wedding night?

  “Husband,” he said smugly.

  I smiled and collapsed onto him again. “Absolutely.”

  Want More?

  If you enjoyed Beauty Conquers the Beast, I have a number of other short, fun romances available on Amazon, and free to read in Kindle Unlimited.

  Up In Flames

  Fantasy Man

  The Lion and the Mouse

  Release the Djinni

  Dark Oasis

  Fire Rose

  Embracing the Ghoul

  Denying the Dragon

  The Crocodile Virgin

  I also have two paranormal romance series of mostly novel length books in Kindle Unlimited. The first, Old School, is my focus in 2017. Each novel is a stand-alone read.

  Phoenix Blood

  Fantastical Island

  Storm Road

  Fire Fall

  Desert Devil

  Amaranthine Kiss

  Shangri-La Spell

  The second series, The Collegium, is complete. Magic, mystery, shifters and demons.

  Demon Hunter

  Djinn Justice

  Dragon Knight

  Doctor Wolf

  Plague Cult

  Hollywood Demon

  Alchemy Shift