Hair Apparent: A Gender Swapped Rapunzel Retelling E-Book

AJ Tipton

• Herausgeber: AJ Tipton
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Love is the perfect escape. 

In a magical kingdom far away, there lived cursed princes, warrior women, and mighty magic. Hair Apparent is a sexy gender swapped retelling of Rapunzel where the heroes have become heroines, the heroines have become heroes, and nothing is as it seems. 

The handsome oracle Rapunzel is trapped in an evil sorcerer's tower with no way out. Resigned to his fate, he’s decided to do only what his long, magical beard predicts. When a beautiful dwarf named Parker bursts into his world with a daring escape plan, Rapunzel must decide if he’s ready to leave the safety of his confinement for a world of uncertainty. 

Parker craves adventure. Sent by her queen to rescue Rapunzel, Parker soon realizes escape from the magically-protected fortress may be impossible. When she discovers the oracle is not the tower's only prisoner, Parker must do whatever it takes to get everyone to safety. Will Rapunzel and Parker be able to come together to defeat their dangerous foe? 

This sexy novella for adults includes high-risk hijinks, creatures who pun, and a love that even magic can’t predict. 

This STANDALONE novella is part of the "Sexy Gender Swapped Fairy Tales" series which can be read in any order. There are no cliffhangers, and each story ends as it should: happily ever after.

Leseprobe

Hair Apparent

A Gender Swapped Rapunzel Retelling

AJ Tipton

Illustrated byLydiaChai

Copyright © AJ Tipton 2015 The right of AJ Tipton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (or other similar law, depending on your country). All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author, except in cases of brief quotations embodied in reviews or articles. It may not be edited, amended, lent, resold, hired out, distributed or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s written permission. Permission can be obtained from [email protected]

This book is for sale to adult audiences only. It contains substantial sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which may be considered offensive by some readers.

This is a work of fiction. All characters, names, places and incidents appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, organizations, events or locales is purely coincidental.

All sexually active characters in this work are 18 years of age or older.

Cover art photos provided by BigStock.com, Morgue Files, Flickr.com, and Upsplash.com.

Created with Vellum

The yelps and clangs from the tower’s entrance were driving Rapunzel to madness. The clamor had been going on all morning and didn’t sound like it would be stopping any time soon. Just when he started to concentrate, another bang exploded from far below and he lost focus. With this incessant racket, how was he supposed to get a proper read on the future?

“Can’t they understand?” After a year of living alone in the top cell of an evil sorcerer’s tower, Rapunzel had given up worrying about talking to himself. “The future doesn’t just come to me, I need to think!” He leaned his head out of his tower window, shouting at the tiny, pink-haired figure below, “Shut up and go away!”

“Hey! You with the beard!” The voice was feminine, but lower than Rapunzel expected, with a husky edge even as she yelled.

Rapunzel tried to ignore the woman, sitting back in his reading chair and laying out his long, brown beard on the special table Mal the Sorcerer had provided him. The beard’s strands glistened in the sun. They were so long they reached well past Rapunzel’s feet when he stood. Spread across the glass table, the individual threads trembled slightly as Rapunzel took a deep breath.

“Hair bend and gleam,” Rapunzel muttered, sinking down into his chair as he deepened his breathing, feeling his heartbeat slow in his chest. “Be my dream...Future come…all be done.” As he spoke the incantation, the strands of hair began to move, their lines forming an image that slowly came into focus. He smiled as he looked down at the final depiction: an image of himself eating pancakes.

“Good. A nice, predictable day,” he said to the table.

“Beard guy! Come down here and open the gods-damn door!” The woman shouted, her voice clear despite their distance, followed by another loud bang from below.

The image forming in the hair dissolved, the strands shifting back into the uncertain, constantly-shifting sketch of a future in flux.

“Dammit,” Rapunzel said, slapping the top of the table. “Disruptive woman, messing with the future. I didn’t ask for this.” He stomped over to the window, holding the train of his beard to relieve some of the weight pulling on his chin.

The woman with the bright, pink hair was shorter than he first guessed. It was hard to tell exactly how tall she was, but considering how her head barely reached halfway up the front door, Rapunzel doubted she would come up to his shoulders.

Broken objects lay scattered across the tower’s entryway. She must have been trying to break down Mal’s front door, but that was impossible. The tower was impregnable. Mal was an all-powerful sorcerer feared throughout the land. Rapunzel was too far away to see clearly what the objects were, although Rapunzel thought one of them looked like a sword made of cheese.

“That can’t be right,” he muttered to himself. He was about to turn back into his room and ignore the wannabe intruder, when she pulled an enormous hat stand twice as tall as her body out of a shoulder bag no bigger than a fist. His eyes grew wider as the tiny woman hurled the hat stand at Mal’s door with all her might. A flash of light sparked where the hat stand struck the tower’s magical barrier, a gust of magical energy sending the tiny woman flying back. Rapunzel let out a sigh of relief when she jumped to her feet and started screaming obscenities at the door.

She rummaged in her bag again, her arm disappearing far deeper into the bag’s recesses than appeared possible, and pulled out a pair of small golden wings she bent to affix to her shoes.

“What are you doing?” Rapunzel called down, feeling uneasy.

The woman looked up at him and scowled. “What does it look like I’m doing?” she replied. She jumped to her feet and clicked her heels together. “I’m getting inside that tower, and you have the only window.” The wings on her shoes started to flap, and she swung out her arms for balance as she rose off the ground. Rapunzel’s stomach lurched.

“No! Stop!” Rapunzel yelled, leaning out so far he nearly toppled forward from the weight of his beard. He waved his arms back and forth desperately. “Don’t fly any closer!” His chin jerked forward as the full length of his heavy beard fell down the side of the tower, trailing down nearly three stories.

The stubborn woman kept approaching, her winged shoes inching her upward closer and closer to Mal’s last defense line.

“Listen to me!” Rapunzel tried again. He grabbed the nearest book off a shelf and threw it at her, trying to knock her from the sky before she got too high. The book bounced off of her shoulder and she cursed again.

“What’s wrong with you?” The woman picked up speed, flying close to the tower wall. She was nearly level with the bottom of his dangling beard. “I’m trying to rescue you, you hairy asshole!”

“And I’m trying to save your life!” Rapunzel yelled. She was too high now. If she fell, she’d be a goner for sure. “The tower is booby-trapped. If you get any higher, you’re going to die!”

The woman was close enough he could see more details of her face. Her eyes were a little too narrow, and her nose too big for classic beauty, but her chin was strong and her cheekbones were high and sharp enough to give her face a sort of riveting drama.

She scoffed and laughed. “I’m a dwarf. I’m immune to magic.”

Rapunzel shook his head. “No! This tower belongs to Mal. The Mal. You can’t be immune to his magic. You have to turn back! Right now!”

Too late. The invisible wall shimmered with power just as she reached it.

“Fuck!” she screamed as the barrier’s force punched her out of the air, smashing her into the tower’s wall. The wings on her shoes stopped working as the magic failed, and she grabbed at the slick stones, trying for purchase. Her fingers and toes dug in, but she was slipping.

“Grab the beard!” Rapunzel yelled, gripping just below his chin and guiding the hanging train closer to her.

She reached out and grasped the strands, swinging out into the air as she tried to wrap as much of her body around the hair as she could. She kicked at the air, trying to climb.

“Hold on, I’m going to pull you up!” he cried.

“‘Hold on?’ What a great idea! I was planning on letting go!” the woman yelled back.

Ignoring the screaming pain overwhelming his face, Rapunzel grabbed his beard with both hands and walked backward across the tower floor. His foot caught on the rug, and he yelled a warning as his fingers fumbled. He lost his grip long enough a few strands pulled from his face. They dropped, their magical glisten already dimming as they left his chin, and Rapunzel tightened his hands around the rest.

“I’m going to fall!” she yelled, her voice so close Rapunzel thought she must be just a few feet from the window. “If I die, I swear to all the gods I’m going to haunt your stupid tower forever.” As she continued to swear, a mass of pink hair cleared the top of the windowsill, followed immediately by a pair of bright blue eyes and full lips. Rapunzel wasn’t sure how he’d missed how red her lips were the first time he saw her face. As soon as she had a strong grip on the windowsill, she let go of the hair, to Rapunzel’s immediate relief. She swung herself up over the edge of the window and dropped down onto the balls of her feet with the grace of a cat.

She studied him, and for a breathless second their eyes locked, the air between them vibrating with a crackling energy Rapunzel usually associated with the moments before his magical beard started to move. She licked her lips. Rapunzel felt long-ago urges—urges he hadn’t allowed himself to think about in the year he’d been imprisoned in Mal’s tower—begin to roar to the surface. He pushed them down.

No time for that now.

“Wow,” she said, finally. “When my queen sent me to rescue you, I had no idea you were going to be so hot.”

Rapunzel looked down at himself. Ther [...]