Free The Charming Way by Kristine Grayson Page B

black-haired woman unloading
a passel of signs from the van looked familiar to him, but he couldn’t remember
where he had seen her before.
    He wasn’t about to go ask her either. His
divorce had left him feeling very insecure, especially around women. Whenever
he saw a pretty woman, the words of his ex-wife rose in his head.
    She had screamed them at him in that very
last fight, the horrible unforgettable fight when she took the glass
slipper—the thing that defined all that was good and pure in their
relationship—and heaved it against the wall above his head.
    Not
so charming now, are you, asshole? Nope, not charming at all.
    He had to concede she had a
point—although he never would have conceded it to her. Still, those
formerly dulcet tones echoed in his brain whenever he looked in the mirror and
saw not the square-jawed hero who saved her from a life of poverty, but a
balding, paunchy middle-aged man who would never achieve his full
potential—not without killing his father, and that was a different story
entirely.
    Charming squared his shoulders and pinned
his precious name badge to his shirt. The name badge did not use his real name.
It used his nom de plum—which sounded a lot more romantic than The Name
He Used Because His Real Name Was Stupid.
    He called himself Dave. Dave Encanto, for
those who required last names. His family didn’t even have a last
name—that’s how long they’d been around—and even though he knew
Prince was now considered a last name, he couldn’t bring himself to use it.
    He couldn’t bring himself to use any
name, really. He still thought of himself as Charming even though he knew his
ex was right—he wasn’t “charming” any more. Not that he didn’t try. It
was just that charming used to come easily to him, when he had a head full of
black black hair, and an unwrinkled face, and the squarest of square jaws.
    Prince Charming was a young man’s name,
in truth, and then only the name of an arrogant young man. To use that name now
would seem like wish fulfillment or a really bad joke. He couldn’t go with P.C.
because the initials had been usurped, and people would catch the double irony
of a prince trying to be p.c. with his own name change.
    And as for Prince—that name was
overused. In addition to the musician, princes abounded. People named their
horses Prince, for heaven’s sake, and their dogs, and their surrogate children.
In other words, only the nutty named a human being Prince these days, and much
as Charming resented his father, he couldn’t put either of his parents in the
nutty category.
    So he told people to call him Dave, which
was emphatically not a family name. Too many family names had been co-opted as
well—Edward, George, Louis, Philippe, even Harry not just by another
prince, but by some potter’s kid as well.
    Dave, not David, a man who could go
anywhere incognito any time he liked. Gone were the days when people would do a
double-take, and some would say, Aren’t
you…? or You know you look just like
that prince—whatsisname?—Charming.
    Now they nodded and looked past him,
hoping to see someone more important. Which was why he preferred the Greater
World to the Third Kingdom. In the Greater World, they knew he wasn’t the Prince Charming. To them, the Prince Charming was a man in a fairy
tale, a creature of unattainable perfection, or—more accurately (he
believed) a cartoon character, an animated hero.
    He was none of those things. True, he had
a longer than usual life, but that caused longer than usual problems—like
waiting for his father, who also had a longer than usual life, to kick the
proverbial bucket (which in the Third Kingdom, wasn’t as proverbial as you
might think).
    But as for magical powers, Charming had
none. Besides that all-encompassing charm, which Ella had told him in no
uncertain terms was gone now. Ella, who got his estates, half of his money, and
custody of their two daughters because—true to form—his