A Taste for the Widow

A Sapphic Gothic Vampire Romance
by Maeve Hollow

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Vampire Romance, Gothic, Haunted House, Forced Proximity, Immortal × Mortal Age Gap, Ice Queen, Power Exchange, Written Terms, Touch Starved, Found Family

Thirteen nights. One immortal widow. A house that wants a bride.

Estate attorney Mara Ellison has closed uglier files before lunch. Drive up the coast, inventory a dead woman’s house, sell it before the cliff takes it. One afternoon.

Then she reads the codicil. In 1849 a solicitor named Eleanor Vane left Vane House to the woman at law who shall come to end this estate, on one condition: thirteen nights beneath its roof.

The tide takes the causeway. The house takes an interest. And the woman in the portraits upstairs, the same woman in 1720, 1790 and 1845, turns out to be very much at home.

Lady Sabine Vane has not touched anyone in a hundred and seventy-seven years. She has starved herself and her house for longer than Mara has been alive, because every woman who ever loved her is hanging on a wall in a white gown. She wants Mara gone by dark. She wants Mara more than blood.

Mara doesn’t run. Mara drafts terms. Three swallows, counted aloud. One word that stops everything. Nothing taken that is not asked for by name.

But the house has already put a red thread around her ring finger, and it deepens every night. It cannot make a want. It feeds on the ones you hide. And Sabine is hiding one that could cost Mara everything.

A Taste for the Widow is a high-heat sapphic gothic vampire romance with an ice-queen immortal, a lawyer who litigates a haunted house, explicit feeding, negotiated power exchange, a ghost wife who writes in the margins, a lot of on-page spice, and a guaranteed HEA.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A sapphic vampire romance with an immortal widow nobody has touched since 1849
✅ A haunted house that is alive, jealous, and listening at every mirror
✅ Thirteen nights of forced proximity and one tidal causeway
✅ A heroine who answers “I am a vampire” with “Show me the paperwork”
✅ Written terms, a safeword, and a bite that has to be asked for by name
✅ Power exchange that switches: she gives orders from a chair, then learns to ask
✅ A dead wife in the margins with opinions on everyone’s drafting
✅ Real consequences, 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

Buy Now

Get the Paperback

Get the Bonus Chapter →

⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes, including a strap-on), blood, biting and vampire feeding, restraint and consensual power exchange, supernatural manipulation of consent (including a shared dream encounter and non-consensual blood consumption that the story treats as a violation), past non-consensual turning, drowning and death, an on-page attempt at self-sacrifice, and confinement in a haunted house. Intended for readers 18+.

📖 Read Chapter One Free

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

Chapter One

“Eleven inches,” Priya said.

She was flat on her stomach at the edge of the west lawn with a laser level in one fist and her whole head hanging over a ninety-foot drop, so the words reached me secondhand, by way of the Atlantic.

“Eleven inches of what?”

“Movement.” She wriggled backward, sat up, and scowled at her tablet. There was grass seed in her braid. “Since the last survey anyone bothered to file, which was fourteen months ago. This cliff has walked eleven inches toward the water in a year and change. Cliffs are not supposed to walk, Mara.”

“Give me a number I can put in a listing.”

“A season. Less, if you get a real nor’easter, and it’s late October in Massachusetts, so start praying to whoever handles your billing.” She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder at the house. She did not turn her head to do it. She had been doing that since we got out of our cars, pointing at the place without looking at it, the way you’d indicate a man at a bar you didn’t want to encourage. “That whole wing is sitting on a shelf of rock that would much rather be a beach. Whoever buys this is paying for a front-row seat to their own dining room going into the sea.”

One of us had to look, so I did.

Vane House was black. Not painted. Weathered to it, three stories of salt-cured timber and slate standing taller than it was wide, with every shutter closed from the inside and a widow’s walk on top like a crown nobody had asked it to take off. Nothing sagged. Three centuries of ocean had been thrown at that house and it had not given up one shingle. It did not look abandoned. I had sold abandoned. Abandoned has a slump to it, an apology. This looked like a woman who has decided she will not be the first to leave the party.

Behind us ran the only way on or off the headland: half a mile of cobbled causeway laid straight across the mudflats, shining wet, with the tide pulled back on either side like a held breath.

“When does the road go under?”

“Wet by five. Gone by half past.” Priya started collapsing her tripod with more force than aluminum deserves. “I’m on the mainland side by four, and so are you.”

“I have an inventory to open.”

“You have a go-bag in your trunk is what you have. I saw it. Laptop, that sad little printer, two blouses on hangers.”

“I have a go-bag in every trunk. In eleven years I have never once left an estate at the hour I planned to.”

The file had come to me the way the bad ones always do, on a Friday afternoon, from a partner who wouldn’t hold my eye. The last trustee of something called the Vane Trust had died in Marblehead at ninety-one, fourth in a line of men who had cashed the fee and never driven up to see what they were minding. The beneficiary of record had been dead since 1891. Wind it up, sell the dirt, bill the hours. I had dissolved uglier before lunch.

Priya zipped her case and stood there holding it.

“You’re not coming in,” I said.

“I can assess a structure from outside.”

“You crawled through a grain silo in Worcester on your elbows. You sent me a selfie from inside a culvert.”

“The culvert didn’t—” She shut her mouth so fast her teeth clicked.

“Didn’t what?”

“I don’t like it.” She said it to the grass. “Professionally. The loads are wrong. A building that old on a footing that bad should be racked six ways from Sunday, and it’s plumb. I shot it four times. It’s plumb, Mara, it’s truer than my condo.” She hitched the case onto her shoulder. “And otherwise.”

“Otherwise.”

“Don’t ask me what otherwise means. I don’t bill for otherwise.”

Priya Nanduri once made opposing counsel cry on the stand over a foundation drawing, and that is the day I decided to keep her. She is the least fanciful person I know. So I let it go, and I let her hug me, which she did hard and briefly, like checking a weld.

“Four o’clock,” she said into my shoulder. “Text me from the other side or I’m calling the Coast Guard and telling them you’re a boat.”

I watched her truck all the way down the causeway, getting smaller between two flat sheets of silver, until it climbed the far bank and was gone.

Then there was only me and the wind and the house.

I picked up my briefcase and went to introduce myself.

The front door opened while my knuckles were still an inch off the wood.

“Miss Ellison. You’ve made good time.”

“I didn’t give anyone a time.”

“No,” the man in the doorway agreed, quite pleasantly, and stepped aside.

He was fifty or so, lean, with hair the exact gray-white of dried sea salt and a black suit so correct it might have been pressed while he was wearing it. He took my coat before I had decided to surrender it. His fingers grazed the inside of my wrist as he did, and I very nearly snatched my hand back. He was cold. Not cool, not a man who had been outdoors. Cold the way an iron railing is cold in January, all the way through.

“Gideon Wren. I keep the house.”

“For whom? The trust hasn’t paid a caretaker since the Coolidge administration. I checked.”

“I’ve never troubled them for a wage.”

That is the kind of answer that makes me take out a pen.

It was colder inside than out, which should not have been possible. No lights. No switches on the walls to produce any, either; the estate schedule had said unimproved, and I had read that as shabby rather than literal. Wren carried an oil lamp at two in the afternoon because every shutter in the place was barred, and the flame went ahead of us down a hall of black paneling and wallpaper gone soft with salt. A pier glass taller than I was hung at the foot of the stairs. It was cracked clean across. As I passed, the two halves of my reflection slid a quarter inch out of true, so that for a step my own face did not quite line up.

I don’t spook. I grew up in apartments where the lights went off for reasons that had nothing to do with ghosts and everything to do with the fifteenth of the month. A dark house is only a house with a billing problem.

He had laid the papers out already. That was the first thing I couldn’t account for. A long table in a cold dining room, three deed boxes with their ribbons untied, and every instrument squared to the table edge in the order I would have asked for them.

“The indenture of trust,” Wren said, touching each stack with one white finger, “the schedule of the estate, the certificates. And the codicil.”

“There’s no codicil.”

“Is there not.”

“I’ve read the Vane file front to back. There’s a deed of 1841, a will, and a trust settled in 1891. Nobody mentioned a codicil.”

“Nobody in Boston has had it before them, miss. It was to be kept here against the day.” He turned up the lamp. “That would seem to be today.”

It was a single sheet of laid paper, the ink gone the brown of old blood, in a hand so even it might have been engraved. Not a clerk’s hand. A clerk decorates. This was someone who wrote the way I cross-examine, with nothing in it that wasn’t meant to do damage. It was dated the ninth of March, 1849, and signed Eleanor Vane, and under the usual recitals of sound mind it said this:

I give and devise the house and lands at Gravesend Point, upon the failure of the last trustee, to the woman at law who shall come to end this estate. And I charge her to keep thirteen nights beneath its roof, and on or before the thirteenth to accept or to disclaim, and I pray she will not be hurried in it by anyone, living or otherwise.

I read it three times. I am paid a great deal of money to find what is wrong with documents, and it took me about nine seconds to find three things.

One. In 1849 there was no such creature as a woman at law in this Commonwealth, and there would not be for another thirty-three years. Eleanor Vane had left her house to a kind of person who had not been invented yet.

Two. It broke the rule against perpetuities so flagrantly that a first-year associate would have laughed out loud.

Three. It was me. The trust had failed with the old man in Marblehead. I was a woman at law. I had driven across that causeway two hours ago for the sole and stated purpose of ending this estate. An attorney who inherits the file she’s been sent to close is the sort of thing the Board of Bar Overseers frames and hangs in the lobby.

And yet. Witnessed. Sealed. A registry stamp from 1849 in one corner and a second from 1891 in the other, where some bored county clerk had recorded it all over again without reading a word. It should not have survived a week. It had survived a hundred and seventy-seven years, sitting in a box on a rock, waiting for the trustees to run out.

“This is a drafting error,” I said, “or it’s a fraud.”

I uncapped my pen and wrote exactly that on my legal pad, with a line under fraud, and looked up to ask Wren who else had handled the box.

He was studying the ceiling with an expression of mild attention, like a man listening to someone walk around upstairs.

I looked back down.

In the left margin of the codicil, beside the words to end this estate, there was a note. Three words, small and slanted, in that same unforgiving hand and that same brown ink.

It is neither.

It had not been there. I had been over that sheet three times, I have never in my career missed marginalia, and it had not been there.

I laid my pen on the table very precisely, parallel to the pad.

“Mr. Wren. Was this document annotated when you set it out?”

“Mrs. Vane was a great one for margins.”

“That isn’t what I asked.”

“No.” Something that might have been approval moved in his face and was put away again. “You’re very exact. She thought you would be.”

“Who thought?”

“The lady who wrote it, miss. In her way. She does describe you rather well, for a woman a century and three quarters in her grave.” He lifted the lamp. “I’ll see about tea. Shall I have a room made up?”

“I’ll be across the causeway by four.”

“As you like.”

“Is there anyone else in this house?”

He gave the question more care than it deserved. I watched him do it. I have watched a great many witnesses decide how much of the truth they can afford.

“The house has not received a guest,” he said, “in a very long time.”

“That’s also not what I asked.”

“Begin your inventory wherever you please, Miss Ellison. The upper gallery is sealed. I’d leave it so.”

He took the lamp with him. He left me a candle.

There are two reasons to tell a litigator that a room is sealed. Either you’re a fool, or you would like her to go and look. Gideon Wren did not strike me as anybody’s fool.

I picked up the candle, then put it down again and took my phone instead.

The seal on the gallery doors was a strip of linen tape and a disc of black wax, and it had already split down the middle.

I want that understood. I didn’t break it. I had my fingers on the handle and had not yet turned it when the door let go of its frame and swung inward, slow and silent, on hinges that ought to have screamed. I noted it. I note everything. Noting a thing is not the same as understanding it, and that afternoon I was still confusing the two.

The room ran the whole length of the house on the sea side. Shutters closed. Daylight came through the slats in thin blades and lay across the floorboards in rows, and between them the dark was the thick brown dark of a place that has not had a window open since Grover Cleveland. It smelled of linseed, and salt, and faintly of something sweeter underneath. Roses that had been dead a long time.

Portraits. One wall of them, floor to cornice.

I put my phone’s light on the nearest brass plate. 1720. A woman in gray satin, seated, one hand resting on a closed book.

The next. 1790. A woman in a gown with the waist up under her breasts, standing at an open casement with the night behind her.

The next. 1845. A woman in black silk with a small, hard waist, looking straight out of the canvas.

It was the same woman.

I don’t mean a resemblance. I have settled estates for families who bred true for six generations, the same chin stamped onto every wedding photograph, and I know what that looks like. This was not that. This was one face. The same black hair drawn back, with the same streak of silver at each temple, no wider in 1845 than in 1720. The same pale olive skin. The same long, unsmiling mouth. On the first finger of the same left hand, the same ring, a square black stone in a claw setting, painted by three different men a lifetime apart who had each plainly been made to get it right.

Forty-two, I’d have said. Forty-two, three times, across a hundred and twenty-five years.

My mind did what it is trained to do and offered me options. A family tradition of sitting in grandmother’s jewels. A vain descendant who had the ancestors repainted to match her. A straightforward forgery to pad an appraisal. I once caught a family in Brookline faking a Copley for exactly that.

None of it explained the 1845.

Whoever painted that one had been in love with her or frightened of her, and I had some sympathy for him either way. She looked at you the way I look at a witness I already know is lying. Patient. A little sorry for you. She had been painted with her collar open, which no respectable woman in 1845 would have allowed, and at the side of her throat the artist had tried, with great tact and no success, to disguise a mark. Two small pale scars, a finger’s width apart.

It was, I regret to report, an extremely effective face. I stood there with a dead woman’s impossible will downstairs and eleven inches of cliff going out from under me, an estate attorney of some standing, and I felt that painted stare low in my stomach. Then lower. A slow, specific heat, right between my legs, of the kind I had not felt for anything but a deadline in two years.

I actually said it out loud. “Oh, for God’s sake.”

“The 1790 is the better likeness.”

I did not scream. I’d like that on the record.

“Romney’s pupil,” the voice went on, from the far end of the room where none of the light reached. It was low, a woman’s, and unhurried, with an accent I couldn’t place. English worn down by a great many years of somewhere else. “He flattered no one. It ruined him. The gentleman in 1845 flattered everyone and died rich, and I have never forgiven him that collar.”

I swung the light around.

She didn’t flinch. She only narrowed her eyes a little, as you would at someone who had brought a dog to dinner.

Black silk, high at the neck, cuffed to the knuckle, falling straight to the floor. Black hair drawn back. Silver at the temples. On her left hand, a square black stone.

My light was shaking. I made it stop.

“And you are?”

“Inconvenienced.”

“Then we have something in common. This property is held by the Vane Trust. The trust is under my administration as of nine o’clock Friday. Nobody told me it came with a tenant. So I’ll need a name, and then I’ll need to hear what you’re doing in my gallery.”

“Your gallery.” Her mouth did something that was not a smile but lived on the same street. “How long have you owned it? An hour?”

“Forty minutes. Do you have a lease?”

“I have never required one.”

“Then you’re a trespasser with excellent posture. Name.”

She came forward. One step, then another, straight through a blade of daylight, and I swear she turned her face aside from it the way you would from a slap. Up close she was worse. The portraits had been kind to no one, least of all me, because not one of them had managed to get down what she did to the air around her. She was my height and held it like a blade held flat. There were fine lines at the corners of her eyes. Her eyes were brown, very dark, and they went over me once from my shoes to my hair, and I felt every inch of the trip.

“Sabine Vane.”

“Lady Sabine Vane died on the second of November, 1891. I have a certified copy of the certificate in my briefcase.”

“I am aware of it. I chose the date.”

I laughed. It wasn’t a nice laugh. It was the one I keep for opposing counsel.

“That’s the play? You’re the lost heir. You turn up looking like the family pictures in a dress from a costume house and I’m supposed to do what, exactly, weep and hand over the deed? I’ve had three of you. One was a very convincing Romanov. The resemblance is superb, I’ll give you that, somebody spent money. The dress is a bit much.”

“It is not a play.” For the first time something moved under all that composure, and it was not anger. It looked, absurdly, like dread. “Wren tells me you are the attorney. Then take this as advice from the other side of the matter, Counselor. There is a road. For two hours more it will be dry. Use it. Send a man with a hammer and a sign, sell the place to the sea for all I care, but do not be on this rock when the light goes, and do not, under any circumstances, sleep here.”

“Is that a threat?”

“It is the nearest thing to a kindness I have in the house.”

“I’ve been ordered off better properties by worse people, and every one of them had paperwork.” I walked toward her, because backing up is a habit and I have never let myself start. There was a display case between us, waist high, a glass-topped thing full of miniatures on rotted velvet. “So here is my counteroffer. You come downstairs with me. You show me one piece of identification issued in this century. And then I decide whether I’m calling the county sheriff or my paralegal.”

I put my hand down flat on the case to finish the sentence.

I didn’t lean on it. I’ll swear to that in any court you like. I set down the weight of one hand, the way you’d rest it on a table.

The glass went with a crack like a pistol.

It was nothing. I knew it was nothing even as I snatched my arm back. A slice across the heel of my palm, clean and shallow and already welling, a thread of bright red running down toward my mother’s watch. I said something my mother would not have liked, and fished left-handed for a tissue, and looked up to tell the woman in the costume that she could add a premises claim to her troubles.

She had gone still.

Not the way a person holds still. People breathe. People sway. Their eyes move. This was the stillness of something that had never needed to do any of that and had just stopped pretending for my benefit. Her eyes were not brown anymore. They were black from lid to lid, wet and lightless, fixed on my hand. Her lips had come apart.

I have deposed dentists. Those were not veneers.

And she was closer. She had been six feet off, on the far side of the case. She was now near enough that I could have counted her lashes, and I had not seen her cross the space. There was only the cold coming off her, and that dead-rose sweetness, and her face a foot from my bleeding hand, with a look on it I had never in my life had turned on me by anyone.

I’d been wanted before. Politely. Conveniently. On somebody else’s schedule.

Nobody had ever looked at me as though I were the last water on earth and she fully intended to die of thirst.

One second. I think it was only one. Then she made a sound low in her chest, a small torn noise, and she was going backward. Not gliding. Step by step, as if every one cost her, the back of one white hand crushed across her mouth and nose, until her shoulders struck the wall between 1720 and 1790 hard enough to set both frames knocking. Her free hand flattened against the plaster. Her fingers dug in. A little dry stream of dust ran out from under her nails.

A drop of my blood let go of my wrist and hit the floorboards. In that silence I heard it land.

I should have run. I know what I should have done. My heart was going so hard I could feel it in the cut. But she looked ill, was the thing. She looked like a woman in the worst pain of her life who was refusing to make it anyone else’s problem, and I knew that look, I had seen it in my own kitchen growing up, and my stupid feet had taken a step toward her before my brain could file an objection.

“Are you—”

“Do not.” It came through her fingers, shaking, the way a cable shakes under a load it was never built to carry. Above her hand those black eyes found mine and held on. “Do not come one step closer, Counselor. I am asking you. I do not ask twice in a century.”

Want to keep reading? The full novel is available now.

Buy A Taste for the Widow

Get the Paperback

🔥 Want an EXCLUSIVE Bonus Chapter?

The Fourteenth Night — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

The night after the last night. No bell, no tide, no clause. Mara makes a list, burns a chair, and finally lets Sabine cross the library. Then she opens the briefcase.

Get the Bonus Chapter →