How Beauty Met the Beast

How Beauty Met the Beast is the first novella in Jax Garren's Tales of the Underlight, an urban paranormal romance that reworks Beauty and the Beast into a fight between a rebel underground and an oppressive order.

Wesley "Hauk" Haukon is scarred, damaged, and living with a terrible secret. As an agent of the Underlight he has nothing left but the fight for liberty against the Order of Ananke, and he is starting to lose hope, until he sees her.

Despite her night job as a burlesque dancer, grad student Jolie Benoit has always played the mostly good girl. That changes after a scorching encounter with a stranger whose face she never sees. When she is kidnapped by thugs and rescued by a man with a very familiar voice, Jolie becomes a pawn in a struggle she never knew existed. Hauk knows he cannot have her and resolves to protect both his heart and his secrets, but as they work together and grow closer he finds new reason to keep fighting, and new reason to hope that Jolie might see past his ravaged face.