Sneak Peek: Exclusive look at “Beast Charming”

My publisher said I could give you guys an excerpt of “Beast Charming”! So here it is – not as long as “Dreamless,” but it should give you a taste of our heroine, Beauty Tremain and the … unusual family circumstances she’s had to deal with.

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Chapter 1

Of Frying Pans and Fires

Beauty held up the mangled gauntlet, ready to fight. She’d spent most of the afternoon yanking the thing out from between a dragon’s teeth, and said dragon would probably approve of her using it to beat her father’s head in. “Get. Out. Of. My. Way.”

“Not until you’ve returned to your senses and come back home.” Noble Tremain—whose birth certificate still identified him as Frank—folded his arms across his brocade-covered chest and tried to stare her down. Her father sincerely believed he was an important and powerful man, even though he’d spent most of Beauty’s formative years being kicked out of rich people’s houses. “This ridiculous job is an insult to the family name.”

Beauty shoved her shaggy brown hair out of her eyes with her free hand, glaring at the man who was technically responsible for her existence. She’d told herself only a few months ago that she needed to move again, just in case her father finally tracked her and Grace down, but she was sick of letting the man ruin her life. Besides, she couldn’t leave her sister to face this alone.

“So sedating princesses and sneaking your daughters into secret ballrooms is what, creative parenting?” She gritted her teeth to keep from shouting, furious he’d insisted on doing this where she worked. The only good thing about all this was that he’d caught her before she’d made it inside. “Or how about that time you knocked us unconscious and left us in an ogre’s cave, hoping a questing hero would just happen to rescue us?”

Her father’s brow lowered at the reminder of that last incident. “You could have tried to be a little more in peril with that ogre,” he snapped, his round face tensing up with annoyance.

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Excerpted from BEAST CHARMING by JENNIFFER WARDELL. Copyright © 2013 by JENNIFFER WARDELL. Excerpted by permission of Jolly Fish Press, LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.