Not Your Ordinary Girl Next Door
Don’t believe everything you see.
Rascal Martin wasn’t the kind of boy girls brought home to meet their mothers. It might have been the burn scar that ran in a jagged line down his right cheek, or perhaps it was the deep black of his eyes that made a good girl think twice. Or maybe it was the misfortune of his name given by a mother who left this world far too early.
Cataline knew all these things before she accepted the assignment to go undercover as a new girl moving into the house next door to Rascal’s grandparents’ home. It was supposed to be the kind of fixer-upper story that would earn her outstanding marks in the realm of fairy-godmother training. If she was lucky, she would earn her wand well before the beginning of spring.
But it was a different story when she met Rascal face-to-face for the first time. Most boys — even those in the fairy realm — usually stopped in their tracks when they first glimpsed Cataline. Then they might shake their heads, almost as if they were trying to clear their cluttered thoughts, before they offered sloppy smiles rife with awkwardness.
That wasn’t the case with Rascal, whose eyes passed over her on the first day of school. Something trembled through her when she saw the vacancy in his eyes, almost as if he were a living, breathing ghost. But then he…
