The Seventh Daughter’s Bodyguard

A Steamy Sapphic Paranormal Romance
by Maeve Hollow

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Bodyguard × Witch, Forced Proximity, Only One Bed, Touch Her and Die, “You’re Fired”, Professional Boundaries, Gothic Family Secrets, Haunted House, Possession, Praise Kink, Light Bondage, Safe Word, Hurt/Comfort, Small Town, Found Family, Rescue Dog, Standalone

She was hired to keep the witch alive. Nobody said she’d have to share her with six dead women.

Greer Halvorsen takes the contracts nobody else will — clients haunted by things that don’t fit in a police report. Sevenfold House should be simple: one heiress, one frozen lake in upstate New York, twelve nights until a family ceremony at the first hard freeze.

Then the heiress sleepwalks into Lake Ondessa at three in the morning, humming a funeral hymn from 1849.

Dr. Linnea Vantreese is the Seventh Daughter — next in a line of witches who carry every woman who held the office before them. Her family calls it inheritance. Linnea calls it what it is: six dead women waiting to move into her head, and an aunt who’s already unlocking the door. One of the dead women has opinions about Greer’s mouth.

The voices go quiet only when something is really happening to Linnea’s body. Cold. Pain. Being held.

Being touched.

Greer has one rule: never sleep with the client. Linnea has a solution: fire her.

The Seventh Daughter’s Bodyguard is a high-heat sapphic paranormal romance with a protector heroine who has never once been allowed to stop watching the door, a brilliant, curvy witch who has never once been allowed to say no, a gothic house that locks from the inside, a frozen lake full of voices, a lot of on-page spice, and a guaranteed HEA. Standalone.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A flat-voiced Minnesota bodyguard who once carried eleven kids and a goat out of a burning barn
✅ A 38-year-old witch with pencils in her hair who builds ice-bells and grows tomatoes in December out of spite
✅ Only one bed, a hand around a bare ankle, and the night the client whispers “Touch me. I want to know if I’m still in here.”
✅ “You’re fired, Ms. Halvorsen.” … “Now get in my bed.”
✅ A dead debutante from 1849 who calls the heroine “the Methodist” and wants very badly to borrow a body
✅ Praise that works both ways, a holster strap, a safe word that’s a state, and a greenhouse full of frost
✅ Consent you can sign, railings not locks, and an apology with no “because” in it
✅ A village of hedge witches, a lake that remembers every voice it ever swallowed, and a big stupid dog who eats socks
✅ 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes, including masturbation, fingering, oral sex, tribbing, light bondage with a leather strap, a safe word, and a strap-on), possession of a character’s body by a spirit, including unwanted sexual touching and speech while possessed (interrupted), covert drugging by a family physician, coercive control and confinement by a family member, sleepwalking, near-drowning and CPR, the murder of a parent revealed in backstory, physical violence (a fight, a dislocated shoulder, a firearm discharged), nosebleeds and blood, a workplace injury, grief, and strong language. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

Not sure yet? Read all of Chapter One right here.

Chapter One: Linnea

The water under the Crossing had started humming at four o’clock, which was early, and by dusk it had found a key.

Linnea Vantreese felt it in her molars first. A low, patient note, like someone holding a cello string down with one finger and drawing a bow across it for an hour. Then it was in the iron of the footbridge under her knees, then in the bolt she was threading, then in the tender place behind her sternum where her body kept its opinions about the boundary.

“That’s not wind,” said Tom Burkett, from six feet down the span.

“No,” Linnea agreed, and kept threading.

The Crossing was forty yards of black iron lace slung over the channel where Lake Ondessa narrowed between two shoulders of shale. Somebody’s great-great-grandfather had built it in 1851 to replace a rope ferry that kept losing passengers. Somebody’s great-great-grandmother, who had been a Vantreese and therefore impossible, had insisted that every rivet be driven by hand and every bolt be inscribed. Linnea had spent five winters learning those inscriptions the way other women learned the faces of their lovers. She could find the cracked ones with her eyes shut. Tonight there were nine.

Below them, the lake had grown its first skin. Not ice, not yet. A slick grey membrane that wrinkled when the current moved under it, the color of an eye going cloudy. In two weeks it would be hard enough to drive a truck across. In two weeks the boundary under it would be thin as a held breath.

That was the thing nobody in Ondessa said out loud, but everybody knew in the way they knew which roads flooded. There was a lake you could see, and a lake under the lake. The old families called it the Undertide. It wasn’t heaven and it wasn’t hell; it wasn’t anywhere a person went on purpose. It was more like a drain at the bottom of the world, full of what had slipped through. Footsteps. Arguments. The last minute of a drowned man, played over and over like a record with a scratch in it. It copied things. It was very good at voices.

And when the freeze came, it got hungry.

“Bolt seven,” Linnea said. “Torque it to sixty and then stop. Don’t get heroic.”

“I’m never heroic,” said the kid holding the wrench, whose name was Jory Fenn and who was nineteen and therefore always heroic. He leaned his weight into the bar. The bolt sank. The inscription along its shank caught the last orange light and, for a half-second, the script moved, the way a line of ants moves when you breathe on them.

Good. That one would hold.

Linnea pressed her palm flat on the rail beside it and felt the ward take the load. It was a physical sensation, as specific as a hand on the back of her neck: the tension running out along the span in both directions, finding its anchors on the north and south banks, settling. A suspension bridge made of intention. She’d tried to explain it to a man she’d dated in Ithaca once, and he’d said so it’s like a vibe, and she’d broken up with him before dessert.

“Eight,” she said.

The hum dropped half a tone.

All three men on the bridge went still. Linnea had worked with Tom’s crew long enough to know what their stillness meant. These were men who’d grown up on this water. They didn’t spook. But they knew that sound the way a farmer knows the yellow-green color of a sky before hail.

“Doctor,” Tom said quietly.

“I know.”

“It’s November thirtieth.”

“I know what day it is, Tom.”

“It’s not supposed to do that till after Christmas.”

“I know.” She softened it, because it wasn’t his fault, and because his hands were shaking a little on the bolt-case and he was the steadiest man she knew. “Let’s get eight and nine in and get off the iron. We can do the south anchors tomorrow in daylight.”

Jory moved to bolt eight. He knelt, set the wrench.

From under the grey skin of the lake, a woman said, “Jory, honey. Come down here a minute.”

It was not loud. It didn’t have to be. It came up through the iron, through the soles of their boots. It was warm and tired and a little hoarse, and it had the particular flat music of a woman who’d smoked Pall Malls for thirty years, and Linnea watched the boy’s whole face come apart.

“Mom?”

“Don’t,” Linnea said. “Jory. Look at me. That isn’t her.”

“That’s — she sounds —”

“I know how she sounds. That’s why it picked it. Hand me the wrench.”

He didn’t hand her the wrench. He stood up. He took one step toward the rail.

“Jory, honey,” said the lake, fond and exasperated, the way a mother calls a boy in from the yard. “You’re letting the cold in.“

Tom got there first. He was fifty pounds heavier than the kid and he simply wrapped one arm around Jory’s chest from behind and sat down with him on the iron, hard, like a man sitting on a suitcase to close it. Jory made a sound that wasn’t a word.

Linnea reached for the rail to feed more load into the span, to drown that voice out with sheer structure —

— and the ward snapped.

She’d never felt one go before. She’d felt them sag, fray, unknot. This was different. This was a cable parting under tension. It went crack inside her teeth and the whole span bucked, and the hum became a roar, and every inscription along the Crossing flared at once, white and frantic, like a string of Christmas lights shorting out.

Tom was on his feet, dragging Jory back. The bridge pitched. Tom’s boot found the place where the deck plate had buckled and found nothing under it, and he went sideways into the rail, and the rail was not there.

She saw it in pieces. His orange vest. His hand open. The rocks under the north footing, wet and black, eight feet down. The sound his leg made when it met them, which she would hear for a very long time.

Then the bridge started to fold.

Linnea didn’t decide anything. She was simply on her knees with both bare hands wrapped around the iron rail, and the cold of it went through her palms like nails, and she took the load.

All of it.

It came into her the way water comes into a breached hull. Forty yards of failing intention. The north anchor and the south anchor screaming at each other across the gap. The lake underneath, the lake under the lake, leaning up against the thin place with the whole weight of its appetite. Her concordance caught the separate pieces and lashed them together inside her chest, and her chest was not built for it, and something warm ran out of her nose and down over her lip.

And something opened behind her eyes.

It was like a door at the end of a long hall swinging out. She felt it go. She felt air move.

Her mouth said, in a voice that wasn’t hers, “Don’t let her finish it.“

Low. Clear. Pitched a little sweeter than her own and rounded at the edges with an accent Linnea hadn’t heard in twenty-five years except in dreams. A voice that used to sing badly in the kitchen. A voice that used to call her baby in the dark.

“Don’t let her finish it. Linnie. Don’t let her —“

It said other things. She didn’t hear them. She was very busy being a bridge.

Somebody was counting. Later, she found out it had been Jory, because Jory had a stopwatch habit from cross-country, and he’d thumbed it on without thinking when her mouth opened. Eleven seconds. That was how long her dead mother had used her throat. Eleven seconds, and then the north anchor caught, and the south anchor caught, and the load bled out of her into the iron where it belonged, and the hum fell back to a mutter, and the lake went flat and grey and innocent.

Linnea let go of the rail. Her palms stayed behind on it, a little — a thin film of skin, frozen to the iron. She looked at it with distant interest.

Then she looked up.

Three men were staring at her. Tom, below on the rocks, propped on his elbows with his face the color of putty and his left leg pointed in a direction legs didn’t go. Jory, on his ass on the deck plate, crying without seeming to know it. And Danny Mahler, who’d been at the south end the whole time with the bolt-case and hadn’t said one word, holding his phone.

Danny lowered the phone slowly.

“Doctor Vantreese,” he said. “That was your mom.”

The library at Sevenfold House had been designed by a woman who did not want anyone to feel comfortable in it, and she’d done excellent work.

Black walnut shelves, three stories of them, with an iron gallery and a ladder nobody had climbed since 1962. A fireplace big enough to roast a deer in. Seven tall windows facing the lake, each one leaded in a pattern of interlocking rings, so that from inside the whole black water looked caught in a net. The furniture was the kind that had been expensive two hundred years ago and had been punishing spines ever since.

Hester Vantreese sat in the only good chair with a cup of tea and a blanket over her knees and looked, as she always did, as if the room had been built around her.

“Sit, darling. You’re bleeding on the Aubusson.”

Linnea looked down. Her hands were wrapped in clinic gauze — the paramedics had insisted — and blood had come through the left one in a neat red coin. She did not sit.

“Tom Burkett has a compound fracture,” she said. “Tib and fib. They took him to Auburn because our clinic can’t set it. He has three kids. He’s been re-setting bolts on that bridge for sixteen years.”

“And the boy?”

“Fenn. Jory Fenn. He’s fine. He heard his mother calling him from under the ice, and his mother died in August, so I’d say fine is generous.”

“Poor child.” Hester set her cup on its saucer with a sound like a closing latch. She was sixty-eight and had the bones to make it look like a decision. White hair in a low chignon. Long, ringed hands. A face that had been called handsome for fifty years by people who were afraid of the word beautiful near her. “Wynne has already sent flowers to the Burketts. I’ll see about the Fenns.”

“Flowers.”

“And a check, Linnea. I’m not a monster. Sit down.”

Linnea sat, mostly because her knees chose to. The chair received her like a disapproving relative. Across the room, in the doorway to the east hall, Wynne Pruitt was folding and refolding a dish towel with the concentration of a woman who’d been told to stay in case she was needed and had decided that meant pretend to be furniture. She caught Linnea’s eye and looked away.

“The ward didn’t fail,” Linnea said. “It was cut.”

“I know.”

That stopped her. “You know.”

“I felt it go from here.” Hester touched two fingers to her own breastbone, absently, the way other women touched a cross. She was not a Daughter and never had been, but she’d been custodian of the Vantreese ward for twenty-five years, holding it the way a regent holds a crown for a child. She felt every crack in it the way Linnea did. More, maybe. Hester’s whole body had become a ledger of the lake’s damage. “Something took a blade to the north anchor-line this afternoon. Quite deliberately. And then it waited for you to be standing on it.”

“You think it was aimed at me.”

“I think someone is trying to stop the succession, and I think they’ve stopped being polite about it.” Hester’s eyes were the same grey as the lake skin and had about as much give. “You were very nearly the second Seventh Daughter to die on the boundary before she could take the office. I find I don’t care for that.”

The office. As if it were a job with a corner desk and a parking space. As if it weren’t six dead women in a box under the house, waiting to unpack themselves into her skull.

Linnea pressed her tongue against the back of her front tooth, hard, until it ached.

“And there’s the other thing,” Hester said gently.

There it was.

“Danny Mahler sent the video to his sister-in-law,” Hester went on, “who sent it to the diner, who sent it to — well. By now, I’d imagine, everyone in Ondessa with a telephone. Rosalind’s voice coming out of your mouth on the Crossing in front of half a ward crew.” She lifted the cup again, did not drink. “I watched it four times. It was her. The vowels. It was very much her.”

“She said don’t let her finish it.”

“She said a great many things in life that didn’t mean what they sounded like. Death hasn’t made her more coherent.” A thin smile. “What it means, darling, is that the archive is reaching for you. Early. It’s ready. The Daughters are pressing at the door, and the door is you, and there are people in this village who’d rather see the lake take us all than see you open it.”

“Or,” Linnea said, “the dead woman who died in that chamber trying to get out of this is trying to warn me about something.”

The room got very quiet. The fire popped. Wynne stopped folding the towel.

Hester set the cup down a second time.

“Your mother,” she said, each word placed like a chess piece, “refused the office on the night of the freeze. She went down to that chamber and she tried to tear the ward off her own body like a dress, and the boundary broke, Linnea. You were thirteen. You don’t remember the water in the streets. You don’t remember the Hollis twins. I do. I stood in that room and held the whole lake back with my bare hands while my sister drowned on the floor, because there was no one else. And I’ve been holding it for twenty-five years since, because there’s still no one else.” Her voice never rose. It didn’t need to. “So when Rosalind’s ghost tells you not to let me finish it, forgive me if I don’t take it as sound advice.”

Linnea had heard the story a hundred times. It had been her bedtime story, practically. It still landed like a slap.

“The rite is in March,” she said, when she could.

“The rite,” Hester said, “is in twelve nights.”

The word didn’t go in. Linnea heard it, the way you hear a car alarm three streets over. Then it went in.

“No.”

“The first hard freeze. Gus Lindqvist reads the ice for the Coast Guard station, and he says the twelfth or thirteenth of December, and I trust him more than the almanac. After tonight, I’m not waiting for March. Not with someone cutting anchor-lines with you on the iron.” Hester smoothed the blanket over her knees. “I’ve already notified Dr. Pell. He’ll start your preparation tonight.”

“You can’t just move it —”

“I’m the custodian. I can, and I have.”

“I haven’t agreed to —”

“You agreed when you came home.” Not cruel. Almost tender. “Five years ago, you came back and put your hands on those wards, and you knew what it meant, and you stayed. Every bolt you’ve driven since has been a yes. Don’t insult us both now.”

Linnea opened her mouth. Shut it. The thing about Hester was that she was never entirely wrong. She just stood in the one place where being right did the most damage.

“I’ve also hired protection,” Hester said, as if mentioning the weather. “A woman out of Minneapolis. Very well regarded in a narrow field. She works with families like ours.”

“There are no families like ours.”

“There are a few.” Hester’s mouth curved. “She drove through the afternoon. She’ll be here tonight. She’ll sleep in the Blue Room, beside yours.”

“I don’t need a bodyguard.”

“You needed one at four-forty this afternoon.” Hester reached out and, very lightly, touched the bloody coin on Linnea’s gauze. Her fingertips were cold. “You’re the last one, darling. There isn’t an eighth. Let me take care of you.”

And there it was. The trap Hester had been setting since Linnea was thirteen and sobbing in this same room: let me take care of you, in that voice, with those hands. There was no way to say no to it that didn’t make you a selfish little girl.

“Fine,” Linnea said.

“Thank you.” Hester picked up her tea, and this time she drank. “Go and have a bath. You smell of the lake.”

The bath in the west wing had claw feet and a crack in the enamel shaped like the state of Ohio, and it was the only thing in Sevenfold that Linnea had ever been allowed to choose.

She ran it hot enough to sting. She peeled off the gauze and let her torn palms throb in the steam. She put on the record player in the bedroom — Nina Simone, because she was not an idiot — and left the door open so it came in soft and warm and a little crackly over the sound of the taps. She took the four pencils out of her hair one by one and lined them up on the sink like a tiny firing squad.

Then she got in, and sank to her chin, and let herself shake.

It came in waves. The bridge. Tom’s leg. Jory’s face. The way her own mouth had moved around a voice that wasn’t hers, the shape of it, the taste of it, sweeter than her own and a little burnt, like caramel left too long on the stove. Twelve nights.

She put her face underwater and screamed, briefly, and came up and felt better, which was humiliating.

Twelve nights.

Here was the thing nobody told you about being the Seventh Daughter: it was terribly lonely. Not dramatically lonely — nobody locked her in a tower. She had friends in the village. She had her work, her bells, her apprentices, her stupid half-written proposal for a ward school that Hester called sweet. She’d had lovers, in her twenties, in Ithaca and Boston and one very unwise summer in Montreal. Men and women and a gorgeous person who’d played the oboe. She’d been touched by a great many people, and some of them had been very good at it.

And then she’d come home, and the wards had started failing, and somewhere in the past four years she’d turned into a utility. A structural element. People touched her the way they touched a railing. To steady themselves. To be held up.

Nobody had put a hand on her in four years without needing something from her body.

She thought about that, sliding lower in the water. She thought about the paramedic’s gloved fingers on her wrists, taking her pulse. She thought about Hester’s fingertip on the gauze, cold, proprietary. Let me take care of you.

Her own hand found her stomach under the water. Rested there. Soft, heavy, warm — she had always been soft, and had spent most of her life deciding that was a feature. She let her palm drift up, over her ribs, to the full weight of her breast, and her nipple was already tight from the heat and the shock and it ached sweetly when she brushed her thumb across it.

Oh.

That was hers. That was only hers. Nobody needed anything from it.

She did it again. Slower. Pinched, a little, and felt it in her cunt like a plucked string. Her breath came out unsteady and fogged the surface of the water.

Nina Simone was singing about wild is the wind. The heat was making her drowsy, heavy-limbed, and the drowsiness was a mercy — it rounded off the edges of the day until they couldn’t cut. Linnea let her knees fall open against the sides of the tub. Let her other hand slide down between them.

She was slick there in a way that had nothing to do with bathwater, and the first touch made her hips jerk and slosh a wave over the rim onto the tile. She laughed a little, breathless, and didn’t care. She circled her clit with two fingers, slow and wet and lazy, the way you trace the rim of a glass to make it sing. Felt herself swell under her own touch. Felt the heat gather low and thick and sweet.

God. How long had it been since she’d even done this? Months. She’d been too tired. Too full of other people’s emergencies. She’d lie down at night with the whole lake humming in her bones and she couldn’t find a single corner of herself to want anything in.

She found one now. She pressed two fingers inside, curling, and her head fell back against the cold enamel lip of the tub, and she made a sound she’d forgotten she could make — low and rough and absolutely undignified. Her thumb settled on her clit and rocked. Her other hand squeezed her breast, hard, harder than she’d have let anyone else do it. The water lapped against her ribs in rhythm. Her thighs started to tremble.

Yes. Just this. Just her own body, her own hands, the heat and the slow drag of —

“Slower,” said a voice inside her head. “Oh, sweetheart. Slower. I remember how.“

It wasn’t a thought. Thoughts didn’t have accents. This was a woman’s voice — amused, low, ripe as a peach split on a hot step, with the round vowels and careful consonants of a parlor two centuries gone. It came from behind her eyes, from that same door that had swung open on the Crossing.

It sounded delighted.

“There, darling, that little spot — no, don’t stop, you were doing so beautifully. Let me show you what Miss Abigail Thorne taught me in the summer of ‘forty-three. She had the most extraordinary —“

Linnea was out of the water before she knew she’d moved.

She stood on the bathmat with her heart going like a fist on a door, water sheeting off her, dripping from her hair, from her breasts, from between her legs. Her hand was still wet with herself. She held it out in front of her like it belonged to a stranger.

The bathroom was empty. Of course it was empty. The steam curled. Nina Simone kept singing. On the edge of the sink, her four pencils lay in their neat row.

Inside her head, the voice sighed, deeply put-upon. “Oh, don’t be missish about it.“

Then it was gone. The door behind her eyes swung shut — not quite shut, she could feel the draft of it, the cold thin line of air — and the silence that came after was worse than the voice, because now she knew.

Constance. That had been Constance Vantreese, the Second Daughter, 1849, the woman in the green dress at the far end of the portrait corridor with the knowing mouth and the fan held like a knife. Linnea had walked past that painting every day of her life.

And Constance had been watching.

They had never followed her in here before. Never. The whispers in the archive, the dreams, the half-words on the edge of sleep — those were one thing. She’d lived with those for years. But this room, this bath, her own two hands on her own body — this had been the last place in Sevenfold House that belonged to no one but her.

She grabbed a towel and pulled it around herself and sat down hard on the closed lid of the toilet. Her teeth were chattering. The heat was all gone out of her; she was cold to the marrow, cold the way the iron had been, and her cunt still ached, unfinished and humiliated, and she wanted to cry and she wanted to break something and mostly she wanted to know, with a terrible clarity, whether the wanting had ever been hers to begin with.

Twelve nights. And then the door wouldn’t close at all.

Through the bathroom window, the drive curved down through the frost gardens toward the iron gates, black and silver under a fingernail moon. Something moved at the bottom of it. Light.

Headlights swept across the frozen hedges, across the glass, across her bare wet knees — and kept coming, steady and unhurried, up the long hill toward the house.

Her bodyguard was here.

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Clause Six — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

The sweet peas are in bloom, and Greer comes home from a long day in a July heat wave to find an addendum pinned to the holster hook. For one night, she’s the principal and her instructions govern. She has exactly one instruction: Linnea decides everything. One cedar crossbeam, one holster strap, one summer storm on the greenhouse glass.

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