Shh, this is a sneak peek!

It’s the first page of my latest completed young adult novel, A Beastly Beauty. I’m excited to share a bit of it with you!

My night of freedom had arrived, and I wasn’t wasting a moment. The gate clicked behind me. At last I was on the right side of our estate walls again—the side where the rest of the world awaited. I nudged my horse’s flanks, and he snorted.

“All right, Domino,” I whispered. “Let’s go.” My heart leaped as he broke into a gallop. We were going to town.

If I could kiss the full moon with gratitude, I would. Once each month, the curse I had lived with since birth was contained. Between moonrise this morning and moonset tonight, I looked like a human instead of a nightmare.

The wind whistled through my hair as I urged Domino on. He was likely as sick as I was of trotting in sedate circles around the courtyard like a tethered pony.

He leapt over a log, bouncing me in the saddle. My stomach flipped at the feeling, but this wasn’t a night for nerves. It was a night for dancing and billiards and… Maybe this night would be the night. The night I had grown up dreaming of.

The night I’d find a way to break the curse.

We rode off the crest of the hill, leaving our estate behind. Inside the stone wall, the castle’s upper windows were dark. In a few minutes my father, the frosty Marquis of Molinas, would settle into his bed for the night. But his secret daughter, the invisible Isabella, was already gone.

A Beastly Beauty is a gender-swapped, Stockholm-syndrome-free retelling of “Beauty and the Beast” (featuring a villainous fairy godmother and her glass-slippered underling).