Cinder & Ella Read online

  by Kelly Oram

  Also by Kelly Oram

  Serial Hottie

  The Avery Shaw Experiment

  The Jamie Baker Series:

  Being Jamie Baker

  More Than Jamie Baker

  The V is for Virgin Series:

  V is for Virgin

  A is for Abstinence

  The Supernaturals Series:

  Chameleon

  Ungifted

  Published by Bluefields Creative

  Copyright © 2014 by Kelly Oram

  Edited by Jennifer Henkes (www.literallyjen.com)

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  ISBN 9780991457960

  For my daughter, Jackie. Because every girl deserves her own fairy tale.

  The problem with fairy tales is that most of them begin with tragedy. I understand the reasoning behind it. No one likes a pampered heroine. A great character needs trials to overcome—experiences to give them depth, to make them vulnerable, relatable, and likable. Good characters need hardships to make them strong. The idea makes sense, but it still sucks if you’re the heroine.

  My life had never been much like a fairy tale. I’d had no magical wishes come true, but no real tragedy, either. My dad had an affair and left Mama and me when I was eight, but other than that, I’d had it pretty good.

  I’m sort of pretty—long, wavy black hair and smooth golden-brown skin, thanks to the Chilean heritage on my mother’s side. But I have my dad’s big, bright-blue eyes. I’m sort of smart—mostly A’s without ever having to study much. And I’m sort of popular—not exactly the prom queen, but never without my friends or a date on Saturday night, either.

  I may have grown up without a father, but my mom was my best friend and that was good enough for me. Life, in general, was good enough. Then, last November my mom decided to surprise me with a weekend ski trip to Vermont for my birthday, and I got my first real dose of character-building tragedy.

  “I booked us the full spa package so we can thaw in the Jacuzzi and get massages when we’re sore from skiing all day,” Mama confessed as we left the city of Boston behind us for the next four days.

  “Wow, Mama! Not that I’m not grateful, but can we afford that?”

  Mama laughed at me. I loved the sound of her laugh. It was a light, fluttery sound that made me feel as if I could float away on it. She always laughed. She was the most exuberant person I’d ever known. For her, life just couldn’t be any better.

  “Listen to you, Ella. You’re turning eighteen, not forty.”

  I grinned. “Like you are next month?”

  “Cállate! That is our secret. If anyone asks, I will be thirty-nine for the rest of my life.”

  “Sure, you will. Wait…are those…crow’s-feet?”

  “Ellamara Valentina Rodriguez!” my mother gasped. “These are smile lines, and I am extremely proud of them.” She looked at me, and her bright eyes crinkled into smile lines around the edges. “With you as a daughter, I have had to work very hard to get these instead of gray hair.”

  Snorting, I picked up my phone, which was dinging instant messages at me.

  “You be nice to your mama, or I will embarrass you horribly in front of all the cute boys this weekend.”

  I’d had a witty retort ready, but forgot it when I saw the message on my phone.

  Cinder458: Your blogaversary is coming up, right?

  Cinder458, or just Cinder to me, is my best friend in the whole world besides my mom, even though I’ve never met him. I’ve never even spoken to him on the phone. We’ve been e-mailing nonstop since he stumbled across my blog, Ellamara’s Words Of Wisdom, about two years ago.

  My blog is a book and movie review blog. I started it when I was fifteen, and my third blogaversary was indeed coming up soon.

  The name Ellamara is in honor of my favorite character in my favorite book series, The Cinder Chronicles. It’s a fantasy series written in the seventies and has become one of the most cherished stories in modern literature. Hollywood is finally making the first book, The Druid Prince, into a movie.

  Ellamara is also my name. My mother read the books when she was a girl and loved them so much that she named me after the mysterious druid priestess. I was proud of the name, and of my mom for loving Ellamara best instead of liking the warrior princess Ratana like everyone else. Ellamara was a much better character.

  Cinder is obviously a fan of the series, too. It was the name Ellamara, and my post on why she was the most underappreciated character in the book, that drew Cinder to my blog in the first place. He loves the books as much as I do, so I liked him instantly—even if he was writing to argue that Princess Ratana was better suited for Prince Cinder. He’s disagreed with most of my reviews ever since.

  EllaTheRealHero: Do all those Hollywood friends of yours know you use words like blogaversary?

  Cinder458: Of course not. I need your address. Got you a blogaversary present.

  Cinder got me a gift?

  My heart flipped.

  Not that I was in love with my Internet best friend or anything. That would be utterly ridiculous. The boy was cocky and stubborn and argued with everything I said just to be infuriating. He also had lots of money, dated models—which meant he had to be hot—and was a closet book nerd.

  Funny, rich, hot, confident, book lover. Definitely not my type. Nope. Not at all.

  Yeah, okay, fine, so he wasn’t my type by default because he lived in California and I live in Massachusetts. Whatever.

  Cinder458: Hello? Ella?? Address??

  EllaTheRealHero: I don’t give out my address to creepy Internet stalkers.

  Cinder458: I guess you don’t want this autographed first-edition hardback of The Druid Prince, then. Shame. I had it signed it to Ellamara when I met L.P. Morgan at FantasyCon last week, so I can’t try to impress any other girls with it.

  I didn’t realize I was squealing until the car swerved.

  “Por el amor de todo lo sagrado, Ellamara! Do not scare your poor mama like that. We’re in the middle of a snowstorm. The roads are dangerous enough without you screaming like a banshee.”

  “Sorry, Mama. But Cinder said—”

  “Híjole muñeca, not that boy again.” I recognized the tired voice. I was about to get one of my mom’s favorite lectures. “You do realize he is a complete stranger, right?”

  I shook my head. “He’s not. I know him better than I know anyone.”

  “You’ve never met him in person. For all you know, everything that he says could be lies.”

  I’ll be the first to admit I’d wondered that before because Cinder’s life sounded a bit like a rockstar’s, but I’d known him long enough now that I believed he wasn’t a liar. “I really don’t think so, Mama. It’s possible he embellishes a little, but who doesn’t? And what does it matter? He’s just an Internet friend. He lives in California.”

  “Exactly. So why do you waste so much time with him?”

  “Because I like him. I can talk to him. He’s my best friend.”

  Mama sighed again, but she smiled at me and her voice softened. “I just worry that you’ll fall for him, muñeca, and then what?”

  That was a good question. Which was exactly why Cinder was not my type.

  Not my type.

  Not. My. Type.
/>   Cinder458: Address. Noun. The location at which a particular organization or person may be found or reached. (Or mailed amazing presents.)

  EllaTheRealHero: Did your car tell you that?

  Cinder drives a Ferrari 458. He told me that once when I asked what the numbers in his screen name meant. I looked the car up. It costs more than my mom makes in five years. I like to give him a hard time about his overindulgent ways. And yes, the car actually does talk to him.

  Cinder458: Not driving, so my phone did. Address, woman. Now! Or I won’t tell you who signed on to play Cinder in the movie.

  I almost shrieked again. The movie was green lighted, but the cast hadn’t been announced. Cinder’s dad is some big shot in the movie industry, so Cinder always knows stuff beforehand.

  EllaTheRealHero: No way! Tell me! I’m dying!!!

  I never got to find out which actor was going to immortalize one of the most beloved characters of all time because a logging truck hit a patch of black ice and slid across the two-lane highway straight into Mama and me. I’d been looking down at my phone when it happened and never saw it coming. I just remember hearing my mother’s scream and being thrown against my seat belt as an air bag exploded in my face. There was a quick moment of pain so intense it literally took my breath away, and then there was nothing else.

  I woke up three weeks later in a burn center in Boston when the doctors brought me out of a medically-induced coma. I had second and third-degree burns covering seventy percent of my body.

  My mother was dead.

  I can’t remember many specific details of the accident, but the fear I felt that day is still crystal clear in my memory. I have nightmares all the time. They’re always the same—a few blurry images and a mesh of chaotic sounds, but I’m paralyzed with terror so strong I can’t breathe until I wake up screaming. The dread itself is the main focus of the dream.

  If the sun weren’t blaring so rudely into my face, and my body didn’t ache from the five-and-a-half hour flight from Boston, I’d have thought I was back in my dream. I was that terrified as I sat in the driveway looking at what was to be my new home.

  So far, I’d only seen the view from the car between the airport and my father’s house up in the winding hills above Los Angeles. It was enough to know that LA was nothing like Boston—despite what the traffic on the freeway would have me believe.

  I wished it were only the change of scenery that I was scared of. I spent eight weeks in intensive care and was then in a rehab center for another six months. Eight months of hospitalization total, and now I was being released into the care of the man who’d walked out of my life ten years ago—him and the woman he’d left me for, along with the two daughters he’d replaced me with.

  “I should warn you that Jennifer has probably cooked up some sort of welcome home surprise.”

  “Not a party?” I gasped, my terror exploding into something that might finally kill me. I never thought I’d live through a hell most people couldn’t even imagine, only to be offed on my first day out of the hospital by a group of random strangers wanting to welcome me home.

  “No, of course not,” my father assured me. “It’s nothing like that. Your new rehabilitation team stopped by last week and prepped the whole family. Jennifer knows meeting a lot of new people will be too overwhelming at first. I’m sure it will be just her and the girls, but there’s probably a nice dinner waiting for you along with welcoming gifts, and possibly decorations. She’s very excited to meet you.”

  I couldn’t say the same.

  When I didn’t respond, my dad glanced at me with that look of helplessness he’d been watching me with since I came out of my coma and found him sitting beside my hospital bed. It’s a look that is seventy percent pity, twenty percent fear, and ten percent awkwardness. It’s as if he has no clue what to say or how to act with me—probably because he hasn’t seen or talked to me since I was eight.

  He cleared his throat and said, “You ready, kiddo?”

  I would never be ready.

  “Please don’t call me that,” I whispered, working hard to speak around the lump suddenly clogging up my throat.

  He blew out a long puff of air and tried to smile. “Too old for that now?”

  “Something like that.”

  In truth, I hated the nickname because it reminded me of Mama. She always called me her little muñeca, or baby doll. When I was about six, Dad started calling me kiddo. He said it was because I needed an American nickname too, but I think it was because he’d been jealous of the relationship I had with Mama even back then.

  “Sorry,” Dad said.

  “It’s fine.”

  I opened the car door before the awkwardness choked us to death. Dad came around the car to help me get out, but I brushed him off. “I’m supposed to do it.”

  “Right, sorry. Here.”

  As I moved my legs out one at a time, he handed me my cane and waited as I slowly pulled myself to a stand.

  It took effort, and it wasn’t pretty, but I could finally walk on my own again. I was proud of that. The doctors hadn’t always thought it would be possible, but I pushed through the pain and regained a lot of my range of movement. The scars were bad enough. I didn’t want to be confined to a wheelchair for the rest of my life, too.

  I was glad for the slow walk up the driveway. It gave me the time I needed to brace myself for what waited inside.

  Dad waved a hand at the house in front of us. “I know it doesn’t look like much from the front but it’s bigger than it appears, and the view from the back is spectacular.”

  Didn’t look like much? What did he expect me to think of the two-story postmodern multi-million dollar house in front of me? He’d seen the small two-bedroom apartment Mama and I lived in back in Boston. He’d been the one to clear it out after Mama’s funeral.

  Not knowing what to say, I just shrugged.

  “We had your room set up on the ground floor so that you won’t have to use the stairs except to get to the main family room, which is only down a short flight of steps. You also have your own bathroom and we’ve had it converted so that it’s now handicap accessible. Everything should be all ready for you, but if it proves that the house doesn’t work, Jennifer and I have already talked about finding something new, maybe down the hill in Bel-Air where we can get a nice ranch-style.”

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath in an attempt to not glare or say something rude. He spoke as if I would be here forever, but I was so gone as soon as I was allowed.

  I had a moment of weakness during a low point in my rehabilitation, and I tried to take my own life. I’d been in the hospital for three months at the time, with no end in sight. I could still hardly move, I’d just had my seventeenth surgery, I was told I’d never walk again, I missed my mother, and I was in so much physical pain that I just wanted it all to end.

  Nobody blamed me for my actions, but now nobody believed that I wasn’t a threat to myself anymore. I planned to stay in Boston, finish the school I’d missed online, and then go to Boston University when I was ready. I was eighteen and had the money saved, but when my father realized what I was planning, he had me legally declared mentally incompetent and forced me to come to California with him.

  It wasn’t easy for me to be civil with the man. “I’m sure the house is fine,” I grumbled. “Can we please just get this over with so I can go to bed? I’m exhausted and I really hurt after traveling all day.”

  I felt bad for being short with him when I saw disappointment flash in his eyes. I think he’d been hoping to impress me, but he didn’t understand that I’d never had a lot of money, and I’d never needed it. I was content with the humble lifestyle I had with Mama. I never even used the checks he sent every month. Mama had been putting them in a bank account for years. I had enough in there to pay for college—another reason I would have been fine on my own.

  “Sure, honey—” He paused and winced. “Sorry. I suppose that name is off the approved nicknames list, to
o, huh?”

  I grimaced. “How about we just stick with Ella?”

  Inside, the house was as immaculate as the burn center. It probably had alarms that went off if a speck of dust landed anywhere. My rehab team would be thrilled. The place was posh and the furniture all looked highly uncomfortable. There was no way this house would ever feel like home.

  The new Mrs. Coleman stood in an enormous kitchen, setting a silver platter of fruit and dip on a granite countertop when we came around the corner. I think the tray might have been actual silver. When she noticed us, her entire face lit up into the hugest, brightest smile I’d ever seen on anyone. “Ellamara! Welcome to our home, sweetie!”

  Jennifer Coleman had to be the most beautiful woman in all of Los Angeles. Hair as golden as the sun, eyes as blue as the sky, and lashes that reached all the way to the moon. Her legs were long, her waist was tiny, and her giant boobs were perfectly round and perky. Bombshell was the only word that came to mind.

  I don’t know why I found her beauty surprising. I knew she was a professional model—print and commercials, not fashion. She did things like shampoo and skin cream commercials, so she actually looked healthy and not skinnier than a crack addict.

  Judging from the size of her house, she must have done pretty well for herself because my dad may have been a big shot lawyer, but U.S. attorneys didn’t have outrageous salaries. Back when he lived with us, we had a moderate house in the suburbs, but we certainly weren’t driving a Mercedes and living up on a hill in a house with its own gate.

  Jennifer stepped forward and gave me a careful hug, kissing the air next to my cheek. “We’re so excited that we finally get to have you here with us. Rich has been telling us so much about you for so long I feel like you’re already part of the family. It must be a relief to be in a real home again.”

  Actually, leaving the rehab center was one of the scariest things I’d ever had to do, and being here was the opposite of relief. But, of course I didn’t say that. I tried to think of something that was true and not too insulting. “It’s a relief to be off the plane.”