Page 50 of Monster Among the Roses (Fairy Tale Quartet 1)

I had no idea how long Kit had been there, but our mundane book carrying had clearly fascinated him.

“Hi, Kit,” I said good-naturedly. “Why don’t you come help us?”

Isobel paused what she was doing and turned to see the boy. When he realized her attention was on him, he gasped and disappeared.

“That does it,” I muttered, setting down the stack I was holding and charging after him.

“Oh, leave him be,” Isobel called. “Seriously. Shaw! What the heck are you doing?”

I held up a finger. “I’ll be right back.”

Then I raced from the room and reached the boy before he could make it to the kitchen. “Hey!” I caught him by the back of the shirt, pulling him to a stop.

I winced when he stumbled off balance from the abruptness and almost fell. Shit, I hoped no one had seen that. But when he looked up at me with big, scared eyes, my reason for chasing him down resurfaced.

“Why’d you run off?” I asked, shaking my head cluelessly.

He peered down the hall as if looking for signs of Isobel before turning back to me and whispering, “She looked at me.”

“Yeah.” I nodded before giving him a wink. “And you didn’t turn to stone. That’s a good sign, isn’t it?”

Considering that a moment, he finally gave a slow nod. “Yeah. I guess.”

“Here.” I grasped his hand and urged him to follow me back toward the library. “Just meet her. She’s actually very nice.”

“But—”

“Trust me, kid,” I told him, looking him straight in the eye. “I wouldn’t let anything bad happen to you.”

He gulped audibly before whispering, “You swear?”

“On my life.”

After giving me a nod, he followed me willingly but hesitantly back to the library, but as soon as we hit the doorway, he pressed himself to my hip and hugged my leg.

“I found us some more help,” I announced to Isobel, grinning as if a trembling, scared child wasn’t clinging to me for dear life.

Isobel sent me a reprimanding glance, silently commanding me to stop torturing the poor child.

I ignored it. “Isobel, this is Kit. Kit, Miss Isobel Nash.”

Kit peeled his face from my thigh and slowly turned his attention to her.

She smiled at him, even though her lips trembled. She had her hair pulled back and face on full display. I knew it took everything she had to keep from hiding her scars from him, but I think we both realized he had to see them openly before he could combat his fear of them.

“Hey, Kit,” she said. “Are you really here to help? Because I have some important rare books I need put on this shelf over there, and I need someone special to do it.?

??

The muscles in Kit’s body relaxed fractionally; I felt every one of them because he seemed to have them all plastered against me. “I…I guess,” he mumbled.

Isobel’s face brightened. She looked more beautiful than I’d ever seen her before. “Great,” she said, “these books are super important to me. They’re first edition fairy tales with hand-drawn pictures. They’re really good pictures, too.” She began to gather an armful of crumbling old books. “Did you know, in some of the original versions of Cinderella, the wicked stepsisters cut off parts of their feet to fit them into the glass slipper?”

Kit perked to attention and stopped holding my leg entirely. “Really?”

“Yep. And they have pictures of it. It’s really gory and bloody.”

“Sweet.” The kid bounded away from me, hurrying toward Isobel as she opened the book on the top of her pile and started to flip through pages.

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