The Witch Hitch

Book 2: Cupcake Coven Romance

by Elizabeth Bass

Genres: Romantic Comedy; Literary Fiction; Witches

Synopsis

In A Letter to Three Witches, Elizabeth Bass introduced the sleepy college town of Zenobia, New York, where magic is very real. Now, a bride-to-be on a quest for the right wedding dress realizes it's time to embrace her inner witch, in this witty, lighthearted romantic comedy with an enchanted twist.



Lots of people get pre-wedding jitters, but Bailey Tomlin's are a bit extreme. Paranoia . . . the sudden ability to communicate with her pet parrot . . . something odd is definitely happening. She discovers the unexpected reason why: her birth mother, Esme, is an actual witch, part of a magical clan in the neighboring town of Zenobia, New York. Esme insists that Bailey, too, has witch blood in her veins. That's not going to play well with Bailey's uptight future in-laws . . .



Then there's Seton Atterbury, the man Esme somehow conjured into the present day from 1930, and who keeps crashing into Bailey's plans. In addition to figuring out seating charts and boutonnieres, Bailey now has to navigate her new witch family, keep an unseen enemy from hexing the ceremony, placate her fiancé, and get Seton back to his own time. But Seton doesn't know if he wants to go back. And though Bailey's about to marry someone else—someone who isn't technically 120 years old—it's just possible she doesn't want Seton to go back either . . .

Release date: July 25, 2023

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 320

Sample

“Boutonnieres.”

The word, spoken like a warning, froze me on my bridal pedestal.

Olivia, one of my bridesmaids and sister of Wes Haverman, my fiancé, sprawled in a powder-blue poof chair, eyes glued to her phone screen.

Boutonnieres? I locked gazes with Sarah, my best friend and maid of honor, to see if she had a clue what this was about. She shook her head.

“It’s a text from Katrina,” Olivia explained without looking up. She spent so much time staring down at her screen, it wouldn’t have been surprising to see some kind of primordial eyeball evolving on her scalp. “You’re supposed to pick the boutonnieres for the groomsmen, Bailey. Or okay them or something.”

Katrina, the wedding planner my future in-laws had generously hired, spray hosed me daily with texts. I now twitched at my phone’s every vibration or ping, knowing another request for consultation on wedding minutiae was incoming.

“Katrina’s texting you now?” I asked Olivia.

“Yes, and it’s annoying.” Her voice didn’t convey any more annoyance than usual, however. Exhausted irritation was her steady state. “Oh, and I’m supposed to tell you that Dads wants to walk you down the aisle.”

I gaped at her. “Katrina told you that?”

“No, Mother did.”

It sounded like something Joan Haverman, my future mother-in-law, would suggest. She’d also “suggested” the venue, including Olivia as a bridesmaid, and having Wes’s adolescent nephew and niece, Parker and Aida, provide the music for the ceremony. Which is why in three weeks I would be marching toward a bower set up by the country club putting green, behind the world’s least enthusiastic bridesmaid, serenaded by a middle school cello-oboe combo.

Sarah was about to bite into a complimentary macaron, but now mouthed Dads? at me incredulously.

I turned away quickly to keep from laughing—and immediately regretted it. Blanche Bridal Boutique was a nightmare of mirrors. Everywhere I looked, there I was, standing in the strangest dress yet while Blanche, the owner, flitted about, alternately tugging at me and topping off champagne glasses.

Less than three weeks out from the wedding, I was scrambling to locate the ultimate dress. With Katrina and Joan tackling everything else, this was my one big designated wedding task. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a dress special enough. I had holds on three gowns in boutiques all over western New York, including one strong option I considered my backup dress. But the more I tried on, the more I dithered.

Three weeks. My waffling was rapidly becoming a crisis.

The boutique was empty except for me, Olivia, Sarah, Blanche, and one woman with brassy red hair who’d wandered in after we arrived and hovered around various racks and displays, peering at us. The exclusive shop was reserved for a half-hour private fitting, but I resisted the urge to ask Blanche to expel the red-haired woman or to pull the curtain to cut off the viewing area with its comfy armchairs, table of complimentary champagne and macarons, and all the mirrors from the showroom. I was trying not to be a bridezilla, although it was difficult not to feel self-conscious while swathed head-to-toe in strange white silk material, wearing foundation garments not in vogue since 1902.

Now I had to refuse my future father-in-law—“Dads” to his two children but still Mr. Haverman to me—offering to walk me down the aisle. How did I say no without causing a family-wide kerfuffle?

Thank God Mom wasn’t here yet to hear this latest proposal. This wedding was already straining our relationship. I could tell that Mom thought Joan Haverman and her wedding planning had usurped her own role as mother of the bride. The thought of Mr. Haverman standing in my late father’s place might just break her.

Where was Mom? She liked to come to these dress appointments, which was quite a concession since I knew she was upset that I’d chosen not to wear her old wedding dress.

I checked my phone. Nothing from Mom. I fired off a text. Did you forget Blanche Bridal Boutique?

When I snapped my phone closed, Sarah was regarding me with a pensive frown. “It’s weird.”

“It’s worse than weird,” Olivia declared, her smoky eyes finally darting up from her screen. “Whatever they’ve done to that fabric makes you look like Bride of the Michelin Man.”

I agreed. Blanche had called to tell me that she had a newly arrived dress that was “totalement unique.” It was that, but not in a good way. The designer had put strange, tufted gathers everywhere, giving the material a quilted effect. “It’s like bridal bubble wrap.”

“I’m not talking about the dress,” Sarah said. “I’m talking about Bailey walking down the aisle with her future father-in-law. That’s weird.” Her gaze met mine, anxious in a way I’d been seeing more and more lately. “You’re going to say no, right?”

This was where things could get awkward. I mean, Olivia was sitting right there. In addition to being a bridesmaid, I suspected she was Joan Haverman’s spy. My phone pinged. I grabbed it.

MOM: I forgot! So sorry!!! I’m at the hairdresser’s. In the chair. If I weren’t halfway done . . .

I tapped out a reply. No biggie.

MOM: I’ll be at the next shopping expedition. I promise. WTF.

Frowning, I tapped, What?

MOM: Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday after noon. I’m free all those days.

LOL.

MOM: LOL to you too!

No matter how many times I told her, I couldn’t convince Mom that LOL didn’t stand for “lots of love.”

In the time it had taken me to text with Mom, the lines on Sarah’s forehead had deepened. She was my best friend since our Zenobia College days, my confidante of fifteen years, and now she saw herself as the last guardrail from my becoming a Havermonster. A word I really needed to expunge from my vocabulary sometime before June 1.

“Mr. Haverman’s not your father,” Sarah said.

Olivia snorted. “Genius observation.”

I tried to joke it off. “Actually, I’m thinking of having Django walk me down the aisle.” Django was my parrot, a colorful, and until recently, stubbornly silent green-cheeked conure. I’d adopted him a couple of years ago, when I was grieving for my dad. It was around the same time I’d taken up guitar, so I’d named him for my favorite guitarist, Django Reinhardt. “Did I tell you that he finally started talking to me?”

Sarah brightened. Getting Django to say anything had been our discouraging, longtime project. “What did he say?”

“He said, ‘Are you sure?’ Freakin’ amazing. He’s got an English accent, too. Like a BBC announcer.”

Olivia finally glanced up at me, her face wearing the same perplexed expression as Sarah’s. “Why would you teach a bird to say that?”

“I didn’t. He thought of it all on his own. And it’s funny, because at the time I was so distracted I was about to pour orange juice instead of milk into my coffee. And then he came out with, ‘Are you sure?’ and I caught my mistake just in time.”

Sarah shook her head. “Remember that parrot documentary we watched, Bailey? That’s not how the talking thing works. They don’t just ‘come up’ with stuff. Or speak with foreign accents.”

“He probably picked it up from television.” I was addicted to BritBox.

“I need to witness this for myself,” Sarah’s blue eyes brightened in her round face. “Maybe I can come over and help you finish packing.”

“Finish?” I laughed. Right now I lived in a one-bedroom duplex, but after the honeymoon I was going to live with Wes, of course, in his townhouse, which was a little bigger and nicer. I’d been putting off packing, though. “So far all I’ve done is scavenge a bunch of boxes.”

Sarah smiled. “I have an idea—let’s have a packing-up party.”

Olivia choked on her champagne. “I have a better idea—let’s not.” She shook her head at me. “Honestly, Bailey, just hire a mover who’ll do it for you. Why waste your time working?”

Why waste your time working could have been Olivia’s motto. She had a job in the PR department of the Haverman family’s grocery store chain, but she never seemed to let it get in the way of her free time.

She unfolded herself from her chair. “Are we done here?”

I nodded. “Sure—I need to get back to work.”

Sarah sighed. “Me too.”

“Another day, another dress fail.” Olivia made a ticking sound.

An odd feeling I’d experienced lately jolted me—an electric current traveling across my nerve endings. All my life I’d occasionally had tingling in my extremities, which worried my parents, since my dad had diabetes. But lately the hot-and-cold prickling in my fingertips was getting extreme. Wedding jitters, I told myself. Or full-fledged wedding panic. Three weeks . . . still no dress . . . and I obviously wasn’t going to find the one today. What if I never did?

I took a breath. There was always the backup dress—a white silk shift that everyone agreed looked fine. Wes’s family was pulling out all the stops for this wedding, though. Did I really want to get married in a backup dress?

Sarah rounded on Olivia. “There’s no reason to put pressure on her, Olivia. Everything else is almost done. And we have our bridesmaid dresses—even Martine’s.”

“And we’re just assuming it will fit her?” Olivia asked, brow arched.

I wasn’t just assuming, I was certain. Martine—Sarah’s and my French-Canadian roommate from our Zenobia College days—was a flight attendant and hadn’t seemed to gain or lose an ounce since freshman orientation fifteen years ago. Anyway, she would be flying into town two days before the wedding—plenty of time to make a last-minute adjustment.

“You don’t have to be negative all the time just because you don’t like the dress,” Sarah told Olivia. “You had a vote.”

Olivia was less than thrilled with the bridesmaid outfits. She hadn’t minded the design—a classic strapless sheath in raw silk. It was the colors she objected to.

“Oh, right—me against the pastel caucus.”

Sarah planted her hands on her hips. She was a half foot shorter than Olivia. Watching them scrap was like seeing a terrier face off with a greyhound. “Bridesmaids’ dresses shouldn’t be black.”

“You’ve never heard of Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball?” Olivia asked. “It’s classic—much more original than being part of this Necco Wafer bridal chorus line.”

Sarah sputtered, “How original can it be when you’re referencing a party some writer threw over fifty years ago?”

While Olivia and Sarah sniped at each other, I drained the last of my champagne—I only allowed myself a half glass per fitting, just to make the trying-on experience less cringe-inducing. Then I stepped off the pedestal and walked over to inform Blanche that this dress didn’t suit me, but that if she got anything new this week with simpler lines, maybe she could call me? ASAP, s’il vous plaît?

Before I could escape to the dressing room, the woman with the frizzy red hair darted in front of me. I’d forgotten all about her. Now my fingertips sparked, causing me to jump like I’d just touched a static surface. Did I know this woman? There was something familiar about her....

“Didn’t like the dress?” she asked.

We were the same height, so I was looking straight into her eyes, which, strangely, were brimming with tears. As if she were emotionally invested in the outcome of my dress hunt. Was she the dress designer?

“It’s just not my style,” I said.

“No,” she agreed, sighing, “it’s not. Of course you’d be beautiful in anything, but that getup looks like what you’d wear to be crowned Miss Miniature Marshmallow.”

Okay, not the dress designer. Maybe she just had seasonal allergies.

“Your silhouette cries out for something less fussy, with straight lines,” she continued.

Was she some kind of bridal boutique junkie? Was that even a thing?

I imitated Olivia’s deadpan verbal fry as I backed away. “Thanks, that’s so nice of you to say. I’m in a hurry, so . . .”

I retreated to the dressing room and collapsed on a button-tufted chair. Then I remembered I was wrinkling the dress—and that I had squillions of little buttons to undo on my back.

My phone rang. Katrina. Again? The woman’s birth had predated the deadly hurricane of 2005 by several years, so her parents had shown an eerie foresight in naming a baby who would grow up to deluge me in messages every day.

“Boutonnieres?” her impatient voice asked as soon as I picked up. “I sent you three options. All you have to do is pick one.”

“I’m so sorry. I will—I’m at a bridal boutique and I need to get back to work, so . . .”

“Please tell me you’re not straying from our color palette,” she said in a rush of despair.

“The dresses I’m looking at are mostly white.” As bridal gowns tend to be.

“White?” She sputtered at my ignorance. “You mean pearl white, or cotton, or alabaster? Or maybe parchment white? Linen? Cream, or—God help us—ecru?”

“Ecru isn’t white, is it?”

A sigh gusted over the line. “All I’m saying, Bailey, is that white covers a lot of territory, and we decided months ago on a Spring Blush color scheme. If you veer too far toward blinding white, you’re going to push yourself into Summer Fancy and send your entire visual scheme completely off the rails.”

“I won’t veer,” I promised.

“Just get back to me today about those boutonnieres. Even if you decide to walk down the aisle in a bathrobe, we need to finalize the florist order.”

“I understand.”

A soft knock at the dressing room door gave me an excuse to hang up and stand.

Sarah poked her head into the dressing room. “Olivia took off, and now I need to run. I have a one-o’clock appointment. A patient’s getting four wisdom teeth extracted at once.”

I winced in sympathy for her patient. “Okay, can you help me with all these buttons before you go?”

She cast a baffled gaze at my back, which I’d twisted toward her. “You’re already undone.”

I looked in the mirror. She was right. The back of the dress was gaping open. When had I done that, and how? It had taken Blanche five minutes to do up all the little pearl buttons when I put it on.

On top of everything else, I seemed to be losing my mind.

“The owner lady must have helped you,” Sarah said.

“And I just forgot having her undo fifty buttons?”

“It’s called wedding jitters. Frankly, who can blame you? Just being in the same room with Olivia gives me the jitters. One more crack about Necco Wafers and I’ll be ready to shove that cell phone up her patrician nose.”

“Don’t take anything she says personally. She’s equally awful to everyone.”

Sarah smiled. “It’s good that Wes isn’t like her, or your maid of honor would be objecting at the wedding.”

I gave her a grateful hug. “Thanks for going through all of this with me. You’re all that’s keeping me from being sucked into the Havermonster vortex.”

She laughed, then checked herself. “We should really stop using that word.”

“We really should.” I lowered my voice. “Is that woman still out there?”

“The store owner?”

“No, the lady with the red hair.”

Sarah blinked. “What lady with red hair?”

“You didn’t see her? She’s been lurking the whole time we’ve been here.”

Sarah’s expression remained a puzzled frown.

Maybe I really was losing my mind. The store wasn’t that big. “I was talking to her. You heard me talking to her, right?”

“I heard you say something to Blanche.”

“I didn’t just dream up a strange red-headed woman.” Did I? How could Sarah have missed her? “I think she might be some bridal boutique kook,” I said, noting that Sarah was looking even more anxious now. “I’ve seen her around somewhere before. She was just my height, with blue-green eyes, and red hair—curly, like mine used to be.”

“So she looked like . . . you?”

“Well, no.” Well, yes. “She’s a lot older than me.”

Sarah crooked her head. “You think maybe she’s a long-lost relative of yours, like an aunt or something?”

“If there’s one thing I don’t have to worry about, it’s relations crawling out of the woodwork.” Both my parents, who’d adopted me when they were in their late thirties had been only children. Not counting my aunt Janet in Florida, we were a family of three—until my dad’s final heart attack two years ago had winnowed us down to two.

Sarah hitched her purse higher on her shoulder. “You really are okay, aren’t you?”

“Of course.”

“Good.” She smiled. “I’m so excited about the wedding. Dave said he’s buying an actual suit for it. It’ll be the first time we’re in public together with him wearing something other than jeans or a dentist smock.”

Dave, an orthodontist, was her longtime—very longtime—boyfriend.

After she left, I wriggled out of the weird corset thing that Joan Haverman had convinced me was essential when trying on wedding dresses. Freed, my diaphragm sucked in a healthy lungful of air. No wonder my hands were feeling funny. My circulation was being squeezed off by my underwear. How had women survived centuries of that kind of torture? How was I going to survive one day?

I took care returning the dress to its hanger, then hurriedly got back into my work clothes. In just a few minutes, I was my usual business casual self again. I unclipped my hair. I missed the curls sometimes, but that kooky lady made me glad I’d taken Olivia’s advice and gone to her stylist to straighten it. Anton had deepened the color, too. “Makes it look less clown orange,” Olivia had declared in her usual flattering way.

The woman in the store had been clown orange.

Could I have really been hallucinating? Maybe some trick of my mind, oxygen-deprived from my wedding bra, had made me imagine an older version of myself looking at current me trying on wedding dresses. Was Future Me attempting to tell Current Me something?

A sound popped into my head. A literal popping sound. Popcorn. Someone crunching popcorn. The memory was so distinct, I could smell the butter flavoring. The last time Wes and I had gone to the movies, there had been a loud popcorn cruncher behind us. I’d reflexively twisted to glare and noticed a woman with the jumbo-sized bag cradled in her lap, scooping little handfuls methodically to her mouth. A woman with curly red hair.

She’d smiled at me, which had been annoying at the time. Now...

I picked up my purse and hurried out. The mysterious woman was loitering in front of the store. I might have sagged in relief—she wasn’t a hallucination—except that I was more than a little wigged out that she seemed to be lying in wait for me.

A warning klaxon in my head told me to walk past the red-haired woman, but my feet stopped right in front of her. “Were you at the movies last week?” I asked.

“I was, but that’s not where you know me from.” She tilted her head. “You don’t remember me? I’m Esme Zimmer.”

The name jolted something in my memory. Esme Zimmer. Esme Zimmer . . .

Finally, it clicked. She was one of my customers—one of my best customers, if you went by how many policies she’d taken out with Genesee Insurance. We insured her business, car, house (homeowner with extra contents coverage and earthquake coverage), and life. If I wasn’t mistaken, there was a premium traveler’s insurance policy in the mix, too. I’d seen her at the office a few times.

So. Not future me. A client.

I was about to laugh, but it died in my throat as doubts bubbled back to the surface. The Esme Zimmer who was my customer had not looked like this woman. Esme Zimmer had been . . . well, unattractive. To say the least. In a Grimm’s fairy tale, she’d have been the old lady in a forest handing out poisoned apples. This woman, while odd, was not hag material.

“You look different than the last time I saw you.”

“New hairdo.” Her smile revealed newly whitened teeth, too. “You know, if you’re still in need of a wedding dress, I can make you the gown of your dreams.”

“Are you a designer?”

“In a manner of speaking. You might call me a sorceress with a Singer.”

“I thought you had some other business . . .”

“I’m a woman of many talents. As are you.”

She leveled that strange gaze on me again. The intensity of it made me step back as I would from a snake I couldn’t identify. She spoke as if she knew me well, which was downright creepy.

“Well, thanks. I’ll give it some thought. The dress, I mean.”

“Any time of the day or the night,” she said. “Just look me up. I’ll make whatever you want in a jiffy.”

She made it sound as if she had fairy godmother–like abilities. “You’re just going to snap your fingers or wave a wand or something?”

She blasted out another laugh. “Right. Bippity-boppity-flippin’-boo.”

Oh, boy. I smiled and kept edging away.

The sharp tattoo of high heels on sidewalk came toward us, then stopped abruptly. “Bailey!”

At the sound of the hyperenthusiastic greeting, my guts clenched in dread. A tall, lanky brunette whipped off her sunglasses to reveal perfect, long-lashed doe eyes.

“Madeleine!” I said, with no enthusiasm. “What are you doing here?”

Madeleine was Olivia’s best friend. More significantly, she was Wes’s ex-girlfriend. And not just any ex-girlfriend. They dated all through school, to hear them tell it, practically from Montessori right up to the day after she’d confessed to a debauched spring break one-night stand with a teammate on Wes’s college lacrosse team. Wes had never forgiven her—and Madeleine never forgave any woman who’d dated Wes since then. Olivia had even hinted that Madeleine had caused the breakup of Wes’s first marriage . . . although the Havermans had never confirmed whose idea it had been to hire the private investigator who discovered Wes’s wife, Lydia, and her personal trainer having a workout session in a motel.

“I thought you were in France,” I said.

After we’d announced our engagement, Madeleine had taken off on an open-ended grief tour of Europe. I should have known our Madeleine hiatus was too good to last.

“I’m back!” Her smile broadened. “O told me to meet her here.”

My lips froze in a tight smile. Why hadn’t Olivia—or Wes—warned me that Madeleine was back in Rochester?

“Olivia left a little while ago,” I said. “You missed her.”

“Too bad. But it’s such a kick to see you.” Her insincere smile transferred from me to Esme Zimmer. “Is this a relative of yours?”

“No,” I said quickly. “A client, actually. We just bumped into each other.”

“How odd. You’re practically Twinkies.” She hiked her voluminous fringed leather shoulder bag higher on her shoulder, and put her sunglasses back on. “Well, I guess I’ll catch up with O somewhere. Great to see you, though.”

She flashed a parting smile, turned, and tottered off in the direction she’d come from.

“Friend of yours?” Esme asked.

“She’s my fiancé’s ex.”

“Really.”

As we watched Madeleine sashay toward her MINI Cooper like a model on a Milan catwalk, an amazing thing happened. The heels of her shoes disintegrated, crumbling under her weight like dried cork. First Madeleine’s long colt legs wobbled, then she wheeled her arms, and finally she stumble-fell to the sidewalk.

I ran over to help her. “My God, are you okay? What happened?” I’d never seen Madeleine move awkwardly before, much less face-plant on the pavement.

She was having even more trouble processing how she’d ended up sprawled on the sidewalk than I was. “These are Christian Louboutins! From their Paris store.”

I helped Madeleine hobble to her car and watched her drive away.

“Quel dommage,” Esme Zimmer said.

I’d been so distracted and puzzled by Madeleine’s weird shoe malfunction, I’d almost forgotten that the strange woman was still there. Now she was right at my elbow. It was disconcerting.

“Don’t forget about my dress offer, Iz,” Esme told me.

“My name’s Bailey.”

“Oh, right.” She smiled, and there was a little sadness in it. “I keep forgetting.”

What did that mean?

Come to think of it, I didn’t want to know. I’d had my full quota of weirdness for one day. I said a quick goodbye and hurried to my car. After I got in and pulled into the street, the strange woman was still standing where I’d left her, watching me.

Madeleine was back.

At my desk in my gray office at Genesee Insurance, I picked up my phone to call Sarah with this alarming news bulletin, but then I remembered she was extracting four wisdom teeth. I had work to do, too.

And yet . . .

Madele. . .