50_shades_ultimate

  50 Shades of Fairy Tales

  Courtesan Press Ultimate Collection

  Madeline Apple & Alex Crossman

  Red Copyright © 2013 Madeline Apple

  The Beauty of the Beast Copyright © 2013 Alex Crossman

  Snow Copyright © 2013 Madeline Apple

  Rumpelstiltskin Copyright © 2013 Alex Crossman

  Puss ‘N Boots Copyright © 2013 Madeline Apple

  Cinderfella Copyright © 2013 Alex Crossman

  The Little Mermaid Copyright © 2013 Madeline Apple

  Beauty’s Sleep Copyright © 2013 Alex Crossman

  Published by Courtesan Press

  http://courtesanpress.wordpress.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be distributed, shared, resold, posted online, or reproduced in any electronic or hard copy form.

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities between actual persons or events is entirely coincidental. This book contains adult content and is intended for a mature readership. All sexual scenarios depicted in this book occur between consenting adults over 18 years of age.

  Cover art designed by Courtesan Press.

  * * *

  CONTENTS

  Red by Madeline Apple (m/f)

  The Beauty of the Beast by Alex Crossman (m/m)

  Snow by Madeline Apple (m/f)

  Rumpelstiltskin by Alex Crossman (m/f)

  Puss ‘N Boots by Madeline Apple (m/m)

  Cinderfella by Alex Crossman (m/m/f)

  Beauty’s Sleep by Alex Crossman (m/f)

  The Little Mermaid by Madeline Apple (m/f)

  * * *

  RED

  By Madeline Apple

  Frank Lupo was the type of guy you fell in love with at first sight—and then quickly learned the error of your ways. I know because I was one of the stupid ones who did, the first day on the job, no less.

  Frank was my boss and half owner of Lupo & Mayer, Accountants. He was tall and powerfully built, with the lean, broad physique of a guy who had probably done track in high school and football in college. He wore his perfectly black hair slicked back Mafioso-style and his goatee trimmed and tight. His eyes were icy blue and his teeth the porcelain white of a man with good genetics as opposed to a good dentist. He looked like the devil, if the devil was an accountant. He wore no wedding ring, though he did have a football ring from Rutgers University. Real movie-star material, I thought dreamily that first day I found myself working in one of the biggest accounting firms in New York City.

  The competition for the job had been fierce, and I had only gotten in due to good timing. The last girl had been caught embezzling money and I had just put my resume in, thinking nothing would come of it. At twenty-four, I didn’t think I would actually get it. But suddenly there I was at Lupo & Mayer, crunching numbers. Naturally, that first week I was careful, checking and double checking my work. The last thing I needed was an error on the books. The following Monday, Frank called me into his executive suite office and told me to sit down.

  I honestly thought he meant to compliment me, stupid me, but as he sat down and I concentrated on not gaping at him like some lovestruck teenager, he said, “You work too slow, Sadie.”

  “I’m…sorry?” Maybe I hadn’t heard him right.

  He scooped some papers out of the file folder that I had delivered to him before the weekend. “I appreciate you graduated top of your class, and you obviously have a knack for numbers, but, Redner, you finished two accounts last week. If I had shown these to my partner, he would have canned you before the weekend.” His voice was steady and boomed around his plush, white luxury office. He put off a kind of fission as he slapped the folder down in front of me like some kind of a displeased professor put off by a project of mine.

  I felt my face burn with shame and anger—shame that I had let him down, anger at being called Redner, like he was my coach back in high school. His lips pursed together, hiding his big, strong teeth, and his eyes narrowed to laser points. I thought of some big predator stalking a deer deep in the wood and the thought made me hyperaware of my body, the way my hose rubbed between my legs. My fingers pressed nervously into my sweating palms.

  He lifted his chin in a gesture I could only call arrogant. “If you want to run with the big dogs someday, Redner, you’re going to need to step it up.”

  I wanted to tell him I’d done my best, and I’d made no mistakes. It took me three tries to get the words out. “All right.”

  As always, I never got mad fast enough, and I always let everything bother me afterward. I knew what I would do next. I would thank him and then step out of his office, dutifully reprimanded but smiling at all my coworkers as if nothing had happened. Then I would go home and overeat and cry into my pillow as all the loose parts of my self-confidence fell apart. I was the same way in high school and college. I was the same way in all my relationships. That was me, Sadie Redner, human doormat.

  At least I had the good grace to not cry when I got back to my desk. But later that day, as I was leaving, Frank called me back into his office. I was shaking and I nearly collapsed to the floor as he let me back in. Had he found an error in my hastily performed work? Or maybe I still wasn’t fast enough, even though I had knocked out a whole account in a day.

  “Thanks for staying after, Sadie,” he said as he walked around his desk and picked up the file folder I had just delivered. He flipped it open and I felt my heart as it started banging around my chest. He glanced down at my figures, then up at my face. “Good work. And see, you can work fast and not make any errors.”

  I nearly sobbed with relief. He noted my expression and said, “Look...Red…I have to be hard on you. My partner’s a nervous man, and we’ve never taken on someone as young as you are. I don’t want to see you out on the street. It’s nothing personal.”

  I swallowed and nodded. He stared at me with an intensity that left me feeling pinned down and a little vulnerable, but at the same time, hopeful. I hated him for being so confident, but at the same time, I envied him. So when he asked to walk me down to the lobby, I scrambled for my coat and satchel like a desperate idiot.

  I’d only had two boyfriends, one in high school and one in college that I’d actually slept with. Neither of my relationships had ended well, and after my boyfriend in college left me for my best friend, I had vowed not to fall for a pretty face again.

  On the way down in the elevator, Frank asked me how I was liking New York.

  “How do you know I don’t come from New York?” I asked.

  “You have a Pennsylvania Dutch accent,” Frank noted, and I felt my face flush for the second time that day. “Are you Amish?” he asked. He sounded genuinely interested. “Or were you?”

  Oh god. I hated talking about this. It made me feel like Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. “No,” I immediately told him. “My grandmother and I just grew up in Lancaster, is all. There’s a large Pennsylvania Dutch settlement there.” I didn’t mention that Gramma was an ex-Amish and that she had largely raised me alone.

  I tried not to talk too much the rest of the way down.

  When we stepped out into the lobby, I immediately saw a beautiful, sleek woman in a smart suit and swing coat from Saks Fifth Avenue heading our way. She was carrying a Prada clutch purse. I was still about five years away from owning anything Prada. She immediately linked her arm through Frank’s and leaned down to whisper something in his ear, something that made Frank grin in his wolfish way. The two hurried toward a limo waiting for them in the curb outside the building, both their coats flying.

  It was the emotional equivalent of having a cold pail of water dumped over my head. Then I wondered what I had been expecting. Frank was so much older than I was, sophisticated. I was a country girl at heart. We had no
thing in common.

  I hurried out into the street, trying not to gape and look like a tourist. I had only been living in New York a few months and its vastness and speed still took my breath away.

  * * *

  When I was four years old, my mom, dad and I were in a violent car accident. We were driving home from the Lancaster State Fair when a camper ran a red light and sideswiped us. My dad was killed on impact and my mom lingered in the hospital for a week before finally succumbing to the bleeding in her brain. I was unharmed, and the child therapists told my grandmother, who took me in right after, that I would have little if any memory of the incident. But they were wrong.

  I remembered the impact, the squeal and burn of tires, and all that came after enough to be terrified to ride in cars for years. My grandmother had had to walk me the two miles to my first day of kindergarten. When I was sixteen, I tried for my license, I really did, but I kept freezing up in Driver’s Ed. The move to New York after college was actually a relief. No one drove in New York unless they were masochists. There were buses, taxis and subways everywhere, and almost anything I needed was a brisk mile or two from my studio apartment in SoHo.

  I missed my Gramma, of course, every day. She had encouraged me to move to New York and “Crunch them numbers like a rock star,” as she used to say, but she had no intention of leaving her old, meticulously kept up Victorian in Lancaster. Still, my Gramma, who was a remarkably modern woman, had a laptop, so we could video chat all the time, and I called her every night on my cell before I went to bed.

  A few weeks after the incident with Frank Lupo, I woke to the sound of my cell bleating on the bedside table. I sat up, pushed aside my sweaty hair, aware that I’d been having a very intimate dream, if the slick wetness between my legs was any indication, and picked it up, terrified that I had overslept and it was the office calling to discover why I wasn’t in work.

  It wasn’t. It was my Gramma’s neighbor Elsie, an old woman with ten cats. She was very halting on the phone as she told me my Gramma had been taken away by ambulance to the hospital in Lancaster.

  I immediately sat up, painfully awake and now sick to my stomach, and said, “What happened? Is she all right? Elsie, tell me she’s all right…”

  The idea that my Gramma might have fallen and broken her hip, or had had a stroke or heart attack haunted me. I thought how I should never have left her alone in that old house with all those stairs…

  “Dear, the paramedics don’t know what’s wrong, but Miriam seemed quite lucid, I promise. I don’t think it’s all that bad, but I wanted you to know.”

  They had said the same thing about my mom. That her injuries didn’t seem that bad. She had still died. “Tell Gramma I’ll be up there just as soon as I can arrange for it.”

  “Yes, of course, dear.”

  The bad taste of terror rose in my throat. “And tell Gramma…tell her I love her,” I said and jumped out of bed to prepare for the trip up.

  * * *

  Since the office was on the way to the bus station, I stopped in to tell Frank in person that I needed this Friday off but that I’d be back to work on Monday, no problem. I even intended to take some work along for the ride up. He pursed his lips together in that way that always made me nervous. Surely he wouldn’t fire me for wanting to see my grandmother in a time of emergency?

  “That’s a long trip, isn’t it? New York to Lancaster?”

  “It’s about four hours by bus, not so bad,” I explained with one foot outside his office.

  “Don’t you have a car?”

  “No,” I told him. I didn’t elaborate. My lack of driving skills embarrassed the hell out of me.

  For the first time he looked concerned. He sat back in his seat. “Do you need a ride? I’m headed that way myself for the weekend, and I know some back roads so it usually takes me less than four hours.” I looked at him funny, so he added, “I have a cabin up in the Poconos. You could ride with me if you want.”

  “What about work?” I said, looking around. It was ten o’clock in the morning.

  He shrugged, making his pinstriped business suit slide up and down over his solid, muscular frame. “I usually take it with me on the weekends anyway,” he explained as she shuffled some papers together into his satchel. “And anyway, I’m the boss. I can cut out anytime I want.”

  So that’s how I wound up riding with Frank Lupo on my way up to Gramma’s house.

  * * *

  Frank had a Lincoln Continental and his own driver in the city, but I soon learned that he also owned an eight-year-old, mud-splattered Jeep Patriot that he said he used for road trips. When we got to his penthouse apartment, I slid my overnight bag into the back of the jeep and went to wait in the passenger seat for Frank, who had gone up to change for the trip.

  The Jeep wasn’t what I had expected, admittedly. I had thought a guy like Frank would own a luxury SUV, or maybe a weekend Hummer or some other “weekend warrior” vehicle. The Patriot seemed far too low key, but when he got back to the underground parking garage, sporting a black and white checked flannel shirt molded to his upper chest and biceps, faded blue jeans that looked nicely painted on, and a bomber jacket over one shoulder, I felt my breath catch. He looked like a totally different person.

  He slid into the driver’s seat, and I was immediately aware of his spicy cologne, which he was still wearing from his workday. It contrasted nicely with his rugged appearance. He looked over at me with his sparkling blue eyes and said, “All ready?”

  “I think so.” I sounded nervous. And then I asked the obvious question. “Why are you being so nice to me?”

  He smiled a smile that was not the typical Frank Lupo smile that he used at work, the professional smile that revealed nothing. This one was far more vulpine. “I’m hoping to seduce you at some point.”

  I felt my heart lurch inside.

  “I’m joking. Actually, it would be good to have company for the drive up. CD’s get boring after a while. And I like helping a damsel in distress.” He shrugged his big linebacker shoulders. “I guess I’m old fashioned like that.”

  We headed down the Henry Hudson Parkway on our way to the Lincoln Tunnel. Somewhere outside Newark I finally got up the courage to say what had been bothering me for the past fifty miles. I hooked a strand of honey blonde hair behind my ear. “I’m not a damsel in distress, just so you know. And I’d rather you didn’t refer to me that way.”

  I immediately regretted saying it.

  Frank raised his brows above his sunglasses as he drove. “I’m impressed. I think that’s the first time you’ve ever spoken your mind to me, Red.” He glanced over. “And I apologize if I’ve offended you. I didn’t mean to.”

  “You didn’t offend me,” I said, even though he had. I so quickly fell back on my old apologetic ways. “It’s just…that makes me sound helpless or something. And I’m not helpless. I could have taken the bus.”

  “But you chose to go with me.”

  I watched Newark, full of chain link rail yards and dilapidated ghettos, pass by. “Yes,” I answered after a few moments. “Thank you. My grandmother taught me to have better manners than this.”

  “Tell me about your grandmother,” Frank said. “Is she anything like you?”

  “Oh God, no!” I said before I even thought of it. “I mean…she’s a very strong and decisive woman.” I felt stupid for saying that, for putting myself down that way, so I continued by telling Frank about her, how she had been born into a very strict Amish Ordnung but had left it to marry an Englisher, as she sometimes still called the non-Amish. I couldn’t believe I was telling him these things, but it comforted me to talk about her like that, like she was going to be all right. I went on to explain how her English husband had left her after a few years and she’d been forced to raise my dad all by herself. “She said she thought a few times about going back, but you don’t really do that, you know? You can never really go home after you’ve lived English.”

  “That’s interesti
ng,” Frank commented. “I didn’t know that. Was she shunned? I know about the shunning.”

  “Everyone knows about the shunning,” I said with a nervous laugh. “But there are good things too about the Amish. She loved her family. That’s why she wanted to go back after her husband ran off. But she never could.”

  I sat in silence as we crossed onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike. After we were settled in for the longest part of the drive, Frank said, “So you’re an almost-Amish girl.”

  I laughed at that. “I guess.”

  “How are you not like your grandmother? She seems like a remarkable woman. Very strong.”

  I shrugged as my confidence wilted. I felt I had already said far too much to Frank about my past and spent some time checking my phone for messages, hopefully from the hospital or from Elsie. There were none.

  “Try not to worry too much, Red,” Frank said. “I’m sure she’s fine.”

  I sat back in my seat, listened to my breathing and Frank’s, and watched the seemingly endless road unravel before us. Despite Frank’s advice, I worried.

  * * *

  Around noon, Frank asked if it would be all right with me if we grabbed something from the Sonic up ahead.

  “Why wouldn’t it be all right with me?” I asked. I had been making a point of not looking over at him too often. His sharp profile, goatee, and dark glasses gave him a mysterious look that kept my heart hammering far too fast in my chest.

  “I know you’re in a hurry, is all.”

  “But you must be hungry. You’re a big guy.”

  “Glad you noticed.”

  I blushed at that, despite myself.

  We stopped briefly so he could order two double bacon cheeseburgers, a pile of fries, tater tots, and two frosty iced coffees. I told him I didn’t want anything, that I was too nervous to eat, but I wound up sipping my coffee and nibbling a tater tot as I watched him wolf down the burgers in less than five minutes. It was impressive stuff.

  “Sorry,” he said, wiping away that special sauce stuff to keep his neatly manicured goatee clean. It was cute, like something a kid would do. “I don’t mean to eat like a Neanderthal. I just didn’t have any dinner last night.”