I'm Not Cinderella (The Princess Chronicles) Read online

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  I’m Not

  Cinderella

  TARRAH MONTGOMERY

  To my own Prince Charming, Ryan.

  I’m so lucky to be living in the best fairy tale

  I could ever wish for.

  Currawong Press

  110 South 800 West

  Brigham City, Utah 84302

  http://walnutspringspress.blogspot.com

  Text copyright © 2013 by Tarrah Montgomery

  Cover design copyright © 2013 by Currawong Press

  Interior design copyright © 2013 by Currawong Press

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form without written permission.

  ISBN: 978-1-59992-892-0

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, names, incidents, and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real, and any resemblance to real people and events is not intentional.

  Acknowledgments

  It’s so fun to be able to thank all of the great people in my life who have supported me and helped me write this novel. I first want to thank my Heavenly Father for all of the blessings he has given me. I also want to thank my biggest cheering squad—my family, who has always been there for me since I was a child and wrote endless stories on all of our extra paper. My mom and my sister, Torie, share my love of everything happily ever after, and I blame them completely for my own fairy-tale addiction. I can’t wait until our next girls’ trip. I love you guys! I’m thankful for my family now, with my young kids and wonderful, supportive husband. I get my best ideas from them, and my kids help me with their great imaginations. Thank you for giving me my perfect real-life fairy tale, complete with Prince Charming and everything.

  I am fortunate to get advice from fellow authors. My uncle, Mike Ramsdell, author of Train to Potevka, gave me great counsel and support as I wrote this novel. It’s also nice to call him family. I have the best friends in the world who have read my book and laughed at all of the right parts. You guys are the best!

  Thanks to Amy Orton for loving my story enough to give me a chance, and thanks to Linda Prince for helping me polish the book and make it the best it could be. What a fun experience it was to work on this novel.

  Again, thank you to everyone who has encouraged me along the way. I have the best family, friends, and neighbors in the world, and I am so excited to share this project with you.

  Prologue

  Once upon a time in a land not so far away, a nobleman lived happily in Idaho with his charming wife and their two young daughters. But no sooner had the oldest daughter turned three than the nobleman left his family. The small family suffered the sad consequences of extinguished love.

  This is the story of the oldest daughter—me. With no father in my life and a mother who was the love glum, I tried to fill my life with fairy tales to numb the heartbreak around me. I saw the pain and loneliness in my mother’s eyes and wanted so desperately to find what she was lacking. I looked out to the world and wished for the enchantment and fantasy I found in stories. I wished for the one thing I didn’t have. Love.

  Like many young girls, I dreamed of being a princess. After all, how could reality hope to compete with castles, fairy godmothers, magic dresses, and royal balls? It was normal for a girl to occasionally wish to escape. But with me, it was more than occasionally. In fact, if someone wrote my biography, it would be titled True Confessions of a Fairy-Tale Junkie.

  My favorite fairy tale was Cinderella. It wasn’t just the romance that captured my fascination—it was the entire account and the world within the magical story that kept me spellbound. The real world was harsh and uncaring. By living in my fantasy world, I could leave reality and pretend, for a while, that it didn’t exist, and that Prince Charming did exist.

  Every day I wished for Prince Charming.

  Chapter 1

  My Cinderella Obsession—

  How It All Started Seven Years Ago

  For my tenth birthday, Nana gave me a DVD of The Slipper and the Rose: the Story of Cinderella, with Gemma Craven as Cinderella, and Richard Chamberlain as the dark, perfect, and handsome Prince Edward.

  My Cinderella fascination soon turned into a full-fledged addiction. I watched the musical so many times I could recite the lines with the actors. The words often spoke themselves into my head. Sometimes it felt like a window was opening and I could see that world.

  As I watched the reunion between Prince Charming and Cinderella in the movie, my heart pounded. I felt the elation of the characters as they sang of their love. If I pressed the pause button, the moment would stand still, waiting to carry on. I would have the uncanny feeling that someone was watching me. Sometimes I actually felt that if I turned my head, Prince Charming would be standing there. (Note to self: Dreaming of and visualizing Prince Charming behind me was probably a huge indicator of my unstable mental state.)

  Three Weeks Ago, When I Found Cinderella in

  My Room (the REAL Cinderella—no kidding!)

  One night, the summer I was seventeen, I ventured down the stairs of my grandmother’s old farmhouse for a glass of water. In the darkness, I tiptoed down the creaky stairs from my bedroom in the attic. Everyone was asleep except for me, and the wood planks groaned with each careful footstep I took.

  “What are you doing?” a voice spoke from behind me.

  “Cass, you scared me.” I spun around to face my younger sister.

  My brown-eyed sibling giggled. “That’s what happens when you creep through an old house at night.”

  “A little warning would have been nice.”

  At fifteen, Cassidy was already an identical spawn of our mother’s beauty. Cass’s soft auburn hair bounced in waves along her shoulders, as opposed to my frizzy mass of brown. She was often compared to the beautiful singer and actress Selena Gomez, with her stunning eyes and gorgeous hair—minus the fame and stardom, of course. Selena’s new song is so cool. Makes you want to dance.

  I’m losing focus. Moving on.

  “Are you getting a drink?” Cass asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Me too.” She linked arms with me and we continued down the stairs.

  I loved the sounds and smells of my nana’s old farmhouse. Some people would be irritated with a rickety, handle-with-care kind of home, but I loved the worn feeling, as if years of experience qualified the house to shelter and comfort the people who lived there.

  My senses welcomed the home’
s familiar features—the smell of dust from underneath the stairs, the wind whistling through the loose trim on the windows, the shutters rattling against the house.

  Nana had convinced Grandpapa to buy the small farm with their retirement money as a remedy for her childhood nostalgia and to create a haven for their remaining years. After Grandpapa suddenly died a few years back, Nana held firmly to their dream.

  The “almost a farm” contained one horse, three milkless cows, a dozen chickens, two stinky pigs, and one barkless dog named Ol’ Pete. We were in charge of feeding the cows, gathering the eggs, and slopping the pigs. The chores kept my sister and me busy and were actually soothing once we fell into a rhythm. Ol’ Pete, a German shepherd that had wandered onto the farm when I was about seven, followed us around everywhere, attempting to bark and protect us from every little sound or movement. Even a grasshopper was deemed a threat. Ol’ Pete was old and his legs were bad—he always limped—but he never swayed from his self-designated battleground.

  I loved summer holidays at the farm, despite the chores. This was the place where you took time to sit on a porch swing and enjoy what was around you. All the quirks of Nana’s home were a comforting reassurance of what had been the only constant in my life.

  Since my father abandoned us when I was three, my younger sister and I had moved constantly with my mother wherever her latest career took us. Each year seemed to bring a new setting and a new challenge of trying to fit in. The only thing that never changed was summers spent with Nana.

  My mother only stayed at her mother’s house long enough to drop us off. She used the summer months to advance her career. She took required company trips, added referrals to her client list, and caught up on things she had been putting off during the year. She stopped by the house only a handful of times, merely to fret about what she needed to be doing instead. It was a long time before I realized she used her career the same way I used Cinderella—to try to fill the emptiness in our lives left by my father.

  Our summers at Nana’s place in Idaho would have been paradise except for one thing—my mother’s guilty conscience. She thought she had to make up for leaving her daughters all summer, so she insisted we help our grandmother with the farm chores to build our character.

  “Is Shane coming over again tomorrow night?” Cass asked once we entered the kitchen.

  “No,” I said. Ugh, I hope not.

  Shane was my boyfriend. Yes, I actually had a boyfriend—a pretty good catch, too. He had just graduated from high school. And he was really smart, which just had to be a “royal” trait. Right? But no matter how beautiful and brawny he was, he was no substitute for the Prince Charming of my dreams.

  “Why not?” Cassidy asked.

  “He’s having a guys’ night with his friends.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be around later.”

  “No, he won’t,” I said unconvincingly. “I told him not to come.”

  “Oh, I’m sure he’ll come over after his guys’ night.”

  I had to change the subject. “What are you doing tomorrow night?”

  “Nana and I are going to watch Northanger Abbey.”

  Northanger Abbey was one of my favorite Jane Austen stories.Nana didn’t have cable or satellite TV. Her television had three channels: the striped one, the one that showed what you could watch if you had a better TV, and the Spanish channel. Not that we would have chosen to watch it. Instead, we watched anything Jane Austen, Audrey Hepburn, or Doris Day, plus the Rodgers & Hammerstein collection, other classics, and of course, The Slipper and the Rose.

  We also read a lot of novels, primarily fairy tales. When it rained, all three of us—Nana, my sister, and I—would snuggle into a good book and get lost in the magic. Nana’s passion for a good tale could outdo even mine. At night, while I fell asleep in my room after a pleasant escape in one of my books, the light from Nana’s reading lamp would seep through my floor grate.

  “Don’t worry,” Cass said. “I’m sure Shane will want to watch it with us when he comes over.”

  I frowned. “Not funny.”

  “Girls, what are you doing out of bed in the middle of the night?” Nana asked as she joined us in the kitchen.

  My grandmother was the most delightful woman I had ever known. She was wearing a bright yellow nightdress—the brightest lemon yellow I had ever seen anyone wear. Her hair was loosely gathered at the top of her head in a bun. Her appearance shouted her exuberant existence, and she brought the warmth of the sun with her.

  Being at her house was like stepping into an enchanted story. She encouraged my imagination and dreams. One thing my imagination noticed was how Nana’s life resembled The Wizard of Oz. Her name was Dorothy, and she always laughed when I compared her to the classic story, but the similarities were undeniable.

  First of all, when Nana was younger, she lived on a farm in Kansas. Never mind the fact that she presently lived on a farm in southern Idaho. Second, Nana had an aunt named Emily, just like in the movie. Third, Nana met my grandfather, her sweetheart, while wearing ruby slippers. Well, they weren’t really ruby, and they weren’t slippers, but they were red shoes. Papa and Nana met at a dance. He always said he noticed the shoes before he noticed the girl.

  “We were just talking about how Shane is coming over tomorrow night,” my sister told my grandmother.

  Nana raised an eyebrow. “Shane’s coming over?”

  I nodded, admitting the likelihood.

  “Well, we’ll have to make him some cookies,” she said.

  “Even if he does come, he won’t be staying for very long,” I said.

  Nana looked at me disappointedly. “Brinlee, Shane is a nice, handsome fella. You should pay more attention to him. If you continue to avoid him, you’ll lose him.”

  “I know.” Is that a bad thing?

  Nana reached out her hand and smoothed the hair next to my face. “What’s the matter, honey?”

  With her gentle nature, my grandmother was the complete opposite of my mother. My mother didn’t like my fairy-tale passion—in fact, she discouraged it. She didn’t want me daydreaming of living in la-la land (her words). Maybe it was my father’s abrupt and brutal departure that left her bitter about happy endings. So, nine months out of the year, I hid my passion. I read or watched my fairy tales secretly at night in my bedroom. The only time I was free to pursue my hobby was during the summer months at Nana’s house. There, and only there, I could bask in the euphoric vision of fairy tales and all things happily-ever-after.

  Unlike my mother, Nana inspired my hope for love. Sometimes, as we watched an old romantic movie, I caught her wiping tears from her cheeks as she remembered Grandpapa, her true love.

  “Brin, what’s troubling you?” Nana asked again. There was something about the love in her eyes that always made me want to tell her everything.

  Where do I start?

  “She compares every boy to Prince Charming and feels she never measures up to Cinderella,” my sister said.

  I let out a puff of air. She was right, and my grandmother knew it. Even if Shane met my expectations of Prince Charming, I would never meet my expectations of Cinderella.

  “Brinlee, you are just as beautiful as any Cinderella.” Nana’s eyes sparkled. “You have been blessed with an overabundance of humility, so you will never see the beauty you possess.”

  As a grandmother should and would, Nana always found a way to make me feel like the most beautiful person on the planet. She grasped my hand and led me to the small foyer of the house. After placing her hands on my shoulders, she slowly turned me around to face the antique mirror fastened to the wall.

  “Look,” she said.

  Feeling silly, I turned my head away to protest. With her hands still on my shoulders, she forced my attention to the mirror.

  “With open eyes,
look,” she said gently.

  I complied and looked at myself in the mirror. My nose seemed normal, not too pointy or too flat. My cheekbones were adequately high. My slightly slanted green eyes were shaded by long, dark eyelashes. My complexion was my mother’s—fair and smooth, except for the freckles sprinkled on my nose.

  I stood up straight and inspected my figure. At five feet six inches, I looked normal—ordinarily normal. Disappointingly, I looked nothing like the stunning heroines in my beloved stories. But, at Nana’s request, I had looked with open eyes.

  Once in the sanctuary of my bedroom, I fell dramatically onto my bed. I wanted to hide in a dream and sleep my worries away. I closed my eyes, replaying my favorite Cinderella scenes in my head.

  I finally dozed off, but was awakened by a crash at the opposite end of the room. What was that? I sat up. As in most really old homes, the attic stretched across the length of the house. It held boxes, suitcases, old furniture and appliances, and holiday decorations. Nana had stacked everything and pushed it to the far end of the attic to make room for my bed and one small sofa. Anything could have fallen off the heap of forgotten items and made the noise I’d heard.

  Another crashing sound made me jump to my feet. This time it was louder, as if a heavy object had fallen, like a box of books. Maybe one of the leaning towers of storage was losing its foundation. I decided to survey the damage. After all, what was there to be afraid of—besides rats (which I hate), giant spiders (which I despise), or nasty boxes with mold (which make me cringe)? What else could be hidden among Nana’s collections?