Teresa Medeiros - [FairyTale 02] by The Bride, the Beast

desert of barren neglect. A superior smile touched her lips. M’lord Dragon might be a beast at heart, but he certainly appreciated his creature comforts.
    Faded wainscoting and peeling whitewash covered the paneled walls of the chamber. She poked her nose behind a moth-eaten curtain and found an ancient privy. Any ideas she might have had about escaping down its yawning shaft were banished after she dropped a loose bit of plaster into it and failed to hear so much as an echo of a splash. At least she was to be spared the indignity of asking M’lord Dragon to empty her chamber pot. Although, she thought with an evil grin, it might be worth sacrificing her dignity to insult his.
    A wooden birdcage festooned with cobwebs hung in the corner, its occupant long flown—or so Gwendolyn believed until she stood on tiptoe to peep through the cage’s bars and saw the tiny nest of bones huddled on its floor.
    She backed away from the cage. There was something so pathetic, so betrayed about that fragile corpse. At onetime, it had belonged to some merry, chirping creature who had trusted that someone would return to listen to him sing, to clean his cage… to feed him.
    Gwendolyn whirled around, suddenly discovering what was missing from the chamber.
    A door.
    She circled the walls, tempted to beat against them as the hapless bird must have beat his wings against the bars of his cage when he realized no one was ever coming back. She could almost believe the Dragon had cast some dark enchantment upon her. Some diabolical spell that would allow him to come and go as he desired, but that would keep her his prisoner forever.
    She sagged against the wall, shamed by her panic. What was it about this place? It was no longer the enchanted castle she had once believed it to be, yet it still possessed the power to awaken her every girlish fancy. Fancies she’d squelched during the years she’d spent caring for her father. She was even more ashamed to realize it was the first time she’d thought of Papa since last night.
    Her only hope for him lay in his frequent lapses of memory. If his broken mind decided to go wandering in the past as it so often did, perhaps he wouldn’t even miss her. The thought gave her less comfort than she had hoped.
    She straightened. The solution to her dilemma was really quite simple. One of the panels had to be a door. She began to circle the room again, this time usingher fingernails to pry at each panel in turn. She soon found herself back where she had started without having heard even a creak of encouragement. The Dragon might as well have chained her to a wall in the castle dungeon.
    “God’s toenails,” she swore, slumping against the panel as her stomach growled in frustration.
    The distant sound of singing drifted to her ears. Gwendolyn cocked her head, recognizing the words and melody of the familiar ditty, but not the voice of the singer.
I love the fair hair o’ me Jenny Claire.
The bonniest lady is she.
But to woo the lass,
I must kick the… um, rump
O’ her braw brothers three.
    Gwendolyn winced. The song was not only atrociously off-key, but sung in a Scottish burr thicker than Auld Tavis’s. As it deteriorated into cheery whistling, Gwendolyn pressed her ear first to one panel, then to another, until she was rewarded by the sound of approaching footsteps.
    Still gripping the sheet in one hand, she looked frantically around for a weapon. All she could find was the birdcage. With a muttered apology to its lifeless occupant, she wrenched it from its chain, then pressed herself to the wall next to the panel, holding the cage over herhead with her free hand. Let M’lord Dragon see how he liked being caught in his own trap!
    The panel clicked, then swung inward. A man ducked through the opening. Without allowing herself time to lose her nerve, Gwendolyn slammed the birdcage down on the back of his head.
    He slumped into a boneless heap.
    “Oh, no!” Gwendolyn cried out, not in regret but in