Authors: Kristine Grayson
It cost a lot of money for Bluebeard to stay here. It wasn’t that unusual for the magical who lived in the Greater World for a long time to have money, but it did strike Jodi as odd that a falling-down drunk would have kept enough money to afford anything, particularly a place like this.
An employee opened the main door for her and, as she expected, Jamison Hargrove was waiting for her.
Hargrove looked like a therapist out of central casting. He had a weathered face that settled into an expression of compassion, warm brown eyes, and dark hair silvered at the temples. He wore a light cotton shirt, white pants, and expensive sandals.
When he saw her, he extended his hand. “Ms. Walters.”
She shook it. “Mr. Hargrove.”
“I thought you might want a tour of the facilities before you saw Blue,” he said. “In particular, I thought you might want to see the area I’ll be observing from.”
She shook her head. “I’m on a tight schedule. I hadn’t planned to make this trip in the first place.”
Hargrove’s lips tightened just a bit, probably an expression his patients didn’t even notice.
“Is there some problem with Blue?” she asked.
Hargrove blinked once, clearly trying to decide what to tell her, maybe trying to decide what he
could
tell her. “He—um—doesn’t want to see you.”
She bit back anger. She had driven a long way for this.
“But you believe you can get him to talk with me,” she said. Otherwise, she suspected Hargrove would have called.
“Yes, I do. Let me take you to the meeting room. He’ll join you in just a few minutes.”
She pointedly glanced at her phone, both so Hargrove thought she was checking the time and also looking for messages.
“I promise you,” Hargrove said. “It won’t be a problem.”
“I hope not,” she said as she followed him to the meeting area. And she didn’t add the rest of that thought. The last thing she needed was some kind of problem when the man she was meeting was Bluebeard.
Chapter 4
The yoga class near the pool had ended. Normally this was Blue’s time; he swam for nearly an hour, alone, in the heat of the day when no one wanted to be outside, not even sunbathing. He was of the private opinion that the midafternoon yoga class was an endurance event, even though he had no firsthand knowledge of it. He simply watched from a distance, waiting for everyone to quit so that he could swim.
He didn’t sign up for group activities. He only interacted with people when the interaction was required as a term of his incarceration here. Not that he was really and truly a prisoner; he could leave at any time. But he always felt a bit stifled when he followed the rules—any rules—even though this rehab center was the safest place he had ever known.
He rather liked that people watched him 24-7. He rather liked that they were there to protect him from his darkest self.
Of course, they had no idea how dark that self really was.
The pool water glistened and he wished he could dive into it. The pool was Olympic-sized and well maintained. The cabana to the left was open on both ends and had what the staff called a bar in the center. Even though it wasn’t really a bar. A bar would serve alcohol, and that would defeat the purpose.
Still, he could go in there and order a drink with ice in a cool tall refreshing glass as practice for that day in the future when he would be on his own again. As if this kind of nonsense ever worked. When he got out of here two months from now, he would go on a bender that would last at least three days.
He’d found it took at least three days of solid drinking to make his clothes truly foul. It also took three days of solid drinking to ruin all the “good work,” as Dr. Hargrove called it, and make Blue look like a die-hard alcoholic.
He wished he was. He wished he liked the taste of booze. He didn’t. He hated the stuff and the way it made him feel.
It was only the alternative that kept him drinking.
The fact that he was thinking about a drink was telling: he almost never thought about alcohol while he was here. He stopped pacing near the door of the guest facility and realized his hands were shaking. Not hard like he had the DTs, but as if he was terrified.
And maybe he was. It had been a long, long time since he let himself feel any emotions about anything.
He glanced at the glistening water, saw the bottom shining in the sun, the center’s healing hands logo in multi-colored tiles on the bottom. He stared at those hands when he swam above them, thought about those hands as he did his laps, wished that hands could truly be healed, particularly hands that had done horrible, awful, terrible things.
Like his hands.
He shoved them in the pocket of his khaki pants, then squared his shoulders. He had to go through with this or leave the center.
Dr. Hargrove had told him that someone would be watching the interaction with this Jodi Walters at all times. Someone would monitor, security would be outside, nothing would go wrong.
Right. As if Blue believed that. He hadn’t spent any time with a woman alone in decades, maybe a century or two. And never had he done so sober.
He was terrified. He tried to tell Dr. Hargrove that he was making a mistake, but Dr. Hargrove wouldn’t listen. He blathered on about change and fear and conquering fears, not really knowing who he was talking to about what.
Then Blue pulled out the center’s regulations: No visitors in the first sixty days of incarceration. (He actually used the word “incarceration” to annoy Dr. Hargrove; Dr. Hargrove made mistakes when he was annoyed.)
Dr. Hargrove had nodded sagely and said, “I’m aware of that, Blue, but we’ve had you here several times before and our normal methods haven’t worked. Perhaps trying something out of the ordinary will make a difference.”
Dr. Hargrove had an answer for everything.
Which meant that Blue had a choice. Either he could do what Dr. Hargrove wanted, or he could leave the center. If he left, he wasn’t sure he would ever be allowed back. Not that they had threatened him; they hadn’t. He just had a sense that at some point, they might tell him to try somewhere else.
He rather liked it here. It was one of the few places where he felt like he could be himself (or rather, the part of himself that was tolerable) and not worry about the effect he was having on others. The center itself kept him organized, and because of the adamancy of his own requests, the center protected vulnerable people from him—women and children (not that he had ever hurt a child, but he had never thought himself capable of hurting a woman either, and he had done so, repeatedly).
The center also set up a schedule for him and helped him follow it. An early morning run (on the grounds, with security near him), breakfast, therapy session, lunch, rest, swim, dinner, group session, entertainment (movies, books, music—anything solitary, since that was what he chose), lights-out. Then it would all start over again. The rhythm of it was predictable, soothing, and there was always someone to protect him from himself.
Except right now. It would be so simple to walk away, so simple to give up. But he wasn’t the kind of man to give up. If he had been, he would have killed himself a long time ago.
He just had to find a way to comply with Dr. Hargrove’s admonition and yet somehow stay away from that woman.
He had to go back to who he had been a long, long time ago, before the name-calling, before the murders, before
Bluebeard
.
He had to go back to the days when he was a Charming. More than that, he had to go back to the days when he was a prince and used to getting his way.
It felt like putting on a costume. He stood a bit straighter. He felt a little taller.
Then he grabbed the glass door handle and stepped inside.
Chapter 5
The meeting room that Hargrove led Jodi into didn’t look like a standard meeting room. Instead of a conference table with uncomfortable chairs, there were couches with soft cushions and standalone upholstered chairs that were built for comfort. The brown rug was so plush that she wanted to take her shoes off and rub her feet into it. Big square multicolored pillows, the size of the chairs, were piled in one corner of the room. That section of the room had no furniture at all, and she knew from what she had seen from the center’s welcome video years ago that that part of the room was used for group meetings.
Someone had put fresh coffee and healthy snacks on a sideboard. Before he left, Hargrove told her to help herself.
She wouldn’t be staying long enough to consume anything. She didn’t want to sit down either. She wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself. The room had no windows (so the paparazzi can’t see you, my dear) and no art on the walls. The walls themselves were a soft beige, which someone somewhere had probably decreed a soothing color.
She hated the lack of diversity in the room itself.
Then the door banged open. She whirled. The man who stepped in was no one she knew. Tall, well built, with clothes so perfectly tailored they looked like they had been designed for him. He wore khaki pants, but they didn’t seem casual, perhaps because of the sharp crease running along the center. Even his shirt—a short-sleeved cotton thing that most men would wear wrinkled—looked like it had been freshly ironed.
He was clean-shaven with perfectly cut black hair. He was, bar none, the most handsome man she had ever seen.
And she had seen a lot of handsome men. She worked in a city, in an industry, that attracted the most handsome men in the Greater World and some of the handsomest men from the Kingdoms.
She knew handsome men.
And this guy, this guy beat them all without a contest. This guy was
stunning
.
“I was supposed to see you,” he said, his gaze not quite meeting hers. In fact, it took her a moment to realize he wasn’t looking at her at all. “I’ve done that. I’m going.”
Her breath caught.
This
was Bluebeard? This man? This unbelievably gorgeous specimen of a man was
the
Bluebeard? Really?
Well, then, she finally understood—on a very deep visceral level—how he had had fifteen wives.
And she saw where the nickname came from. As the light caught his hair, it filled with dark blue highlights.
He was backing out of the room when she found her voice.
“You haven’t watched the news, have you? The Fairy Tale Stalker? He identifies himself as Bluebeard.”
He closed his eyes and bowed his head. “It’s not me. I can’t get out of here, even if I wanted to.”
And it sounded like he didn’t want to.
“That’s what Tanker Belle says, and I didn’t believe her until now.”
He looked up, his gaze finally meeting hers. He had the most electric blue eyes she had ever seen. Stunning, adding to that amazing face, making him almost irresistible. How the hell was that possible? Was this what the full power of magical charm felt like?
“Tank sent you?” he asked, then looked down as quickly as he looked up. Suddenly Jodi had the sense that he was afraid of her. Why would the most notorious man in all of fairy tale history be afraid of her?
“Yes, Tank sent me,” Jodi said. “She can’t get in here anymore. There are wards against fairies around this place.”
“What?” He seemed genuinely shocked. “No there aren’t. She dropped me inside just over a month ago.”
“There are now. She can’t talk to you.”
“I didn’t put up any wards,” he said, threading his fingers together. “I can’t do that kind of thing.”
He spoke so softly that she could barely hear him, almost as if he was speaking to himself. Yet he was being defensive. This was not at all what she had expected.
Nor had she expected him to have such beautiful hair, rich and thick and glistening with that hint of blue in the artificial light.
“I know you can’t,” Jodi said. “You can’t do anything except Charm.”
He looked up at her again, those blue eyes connecting with hers so strongly that it took all of her strength to keep from stepping backward. Or forward.
He literally took her breath away. No man had ever done that.
“What makes you so sure?” he asked. The question wasn’t menacing; it was almost needy.
“I knew it from the moment you walked in the room. You have only one kind of magic, although you have that in abundance.” Somehow she had managed to tear her concentration away from his physical beauty long enough to glance at his magical aura. Blue, which was expected, but the blue belonged to his charm magic. And he had no other kind of magic. None, not a thread of anything else. Although he had more charm than anyone she had ever met, and that included a man named Charming, who ran The Charming Way Bookstore in Westwood, but who in reality had married Cinderella a long, long time ago and was known to many as
the
Prince Charming.
“What are you?” Bluebeard asked.
Which wasn’t really, when you got down to it, a charming question. It was, in fact, somewhat rude. But she understood what he meant.