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eBook Category: Fantasy
eBook Description: A penniless divorcee finds help in an enchanted castle.

eBook Publisher: Fictionwise.com, Published: he Magic Toy Box, 2006
Fictionwise Release Date: July 2008

10 Reader Ratings:

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Available eBook Formats [MultiFormat - What's this?]: eReader (PDB) [33 KB] , ePub (EPUB) [37 KB] , Rocket/REB1100 (RB) [19 KB] , Portable Document Format (PDF) [178 KB] , Palm Doc (PDB) [20 KB] , Microsoft Reader (LIT) [79 KB] , Franklin eBookMan (FUB) [91 KB] , hiebook (KML) [78 KB] , Sony Reader (LRF) [46 KB] , iSilo (PDB) [17 KB] , Mobipocket (PRC) [22 KB] , Kindle Compatible (MOBI) [49 KB] , OEBFF Format (IMP) [33 KB]
Words: 5954
Reading time: 17-23 min.
Microsoft Reader (LIT) Format: Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud ENABLED
Portable Document Format (PDF) Format:  Printing DISABLED, Read-Aloud DISABLED
All Other formats: Printing DISABLED, Read-aloud DISABLED

If her problem had been a mere nuclear holocaust, she might have adjusted with grace.

If a plane crash had stranded her in a frozen tundra with nothing on the menu but the flesh of her fellow passengers ... If a tragic hairdressing accident had left her permanently bald ... If she and Donald Trump were the only two survivors of a sudden, devastating plague, so that she faced a choice between procreating with The Donald or else condemning civilization to certain oblivion ... She'd cope somehow. She'd manage. She was a hardy, resilient person. A survivor. She liked to think she had moxie. She'd always believed she possessed true grit.

So, yes, if something merely catastrophic happened, she'd deal with it and try not to complain too much.

But this?

No, this was too much. This was beyond the pale. It was beyond anything she had ever imagined having to survive. Beyond what she believed any woman could survive with her sanity intact.

It was the ultimate disaster: Due to circumstances beyond her control, she had recently moved back in with her parents.

Roxanne Bell awoke that morning in the bedroom where she had slept every night as a child, and she stared morosely at the lavender ceiling.

She hated lavender. She had always hated lavender. But her mother hadn't believed her when she expressed this sentiment at the age of five. In Mom's worldview, girls loved lavender and boys loved green; so she had painted the rooms of her two children in those colors thirty years ago years ago. Roxanne's brother Michael had, in fact, loved green, and he was perfectly content in his room for the rest of his youth, thus proving Mrs. Bell's point (as she said often, smugly, and to this very day). Roxanne continued to loathe lavender and confidently expected to loathe it for the rest of her life; but her mother remained convinced this was just a rebellious phase and she would one day confess that a lavender bedroom had been her heart's secret desire from birth. This was perhaps why, when redecorating the house a decade ago, Mrs. Bell had repainted these two bedrooms in the exact same childhood colors they'd been painted for years.

Of course, this time around, the paint job was for her grandchildren. Michael's old bedroom was now reserved for Jeff, Roxanne's ten year old son. And Roxanne's lavender bedroom was intended for the granddaughter that Mrs. Bell remained convinced would soon be born.

Since Michael was gay, single, and fiercely childless, and since Roxanne's husband had just left her, there was little realistic chance of another grandchild. This, however, did not seem to alter Mrs. Bell's certainty that, any moment now, one of her two offspring would provide the lavender bedroom with a girlchild.

Roxanne stared at the ceiling and sighed.

Instead of contributing a granddaughter to the nauseating pale-purple room, she had moved back in here as an impoverished, abandoned mother in her mid-thirties.

If she ever saw Thack again, she would kill him.

Why did I even marry a man called "Thack" in the first place? What was I thinking?