Disclaimer: me no ownie.
Chapter 1
Sarah stood in front of the mirror and seriously doubted her plan.
To bide her time, she leaned forward to study the freckles on her nose. She made a face and breathed in deeply, willing the color on her cheeks to disappear.
This was an exceptionally bad idea.
Probably.
But it had been ten years to the day, and try as she might, she had not been able to forget his words. Or his pants. Or the look in his eyes. She wasn't sure which of those three had made the biggest impression on her, but considering her age, it was probably the pants. Or maybe, just maybe, the look.
During those years she had got her first boyfriend, graduated, gone to college, got her first serious boyfriend, and her second, graduated college, found her first job, her second and her third, all the while keeping in touch with her friends from the Labyrinth – and managing to keep those particular relationships (and the tendency of things to become misplaced in her vicinity) a secret from the people around her. But she had never been back to the Labyrinth, and she had never seen him again.
Despite that fact, she couldn't help thinking of him on a regular basis. What she could help was the starring role he played in many of her more interesting dreams and at least half of her fantasies. Fortunately, she felt not the least bit guilty of what her active imagination conjured up, and relished in finding out precisely what sorts of magic he was capable of, if only in her daydreams.
When she realized that she was thinking of leather gloves and mismatched eyes even when sleeping with her latest boyfriend, she decided that enough was enough. She dumped the boyfriend (not a keeper anyway) and started to think up a plan to seduce the Goblin King.
That wasn't easy in the least. Because aside the fact that he was a trickster fairytale king and thus pretty much impossible to outsmart, she simply didn't know whether or not he even found her attractive. The way he had looked at her, the offers he had made her… had he meant it, or had his behavior simply been a ploy to keep her from getting to the castle in time? He was a powerful, handsome fae after all, who might not be the least bit tempted by human girls - what with their tendency to wither and die in the blink of an eye.
She couldn't outright seduce him, that much was obvious. Or well, maybe she could, but the uncertainty was enough to put her off that idea. No, she had decided, what she needed was to spend time with him, to find out if she even stood a chance, to figure out how she should go about the whole seducing a fae thing.
Getting him to spend time with her, that should be doable. Jareth might be a trickster king, but she was the one who bested his Labyrinth, and she was certain she could trick him into playing another game with her. Especially if her goal wasn't winning.
So yes, she had a plan. It just happened to be, in all likelihood, an exceptionally bad plan.
She breathed in deeply again, and stared her reflection down. "I wish the Goblin King was here, right now."
