The Ex-Hex Next Door

Sapphic Paranormal Romance
by Isla Wilde

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Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Tropes: Cursed Exes, Second Chance, Witchy Small Town, Forced Proximity, Grumpy/Sunshine, Praise Kink, Only One Bed

She didn’t mean to curse her ex-girlfriend. The universe had other plans.

Wren Ashford did not mean to curse her ex-girlfriend. Eight years ago, she left Briar Hollow with a broken heart, one suitcase, and a spell meant to make it easier for Sloane Blackwood to forget her. Now Wren is back — broke, freshly screwed over by a business partner, and renting the only affordable place in town: the cottage directly beside Sloane’s restored Victorian.

Sloane is furious. She’s also Briar Hollow’s most powerful hedge witch, the town council president, and a woman who has spent nearly a decade building a life with no loose ends — because Wren was the biggest loose end of all.

There’s just one problem. Every time they fight, the old spell surges — flooding both women with heat, magic, and a desire neither one can fake or control.

To break the curse before the Harvest Moon Festival exposes them to the entire town, they’ll have to work together, revisit the spell, and face every reason they fell apart. But some magic doesn’t want to be broken. Some magic wants a second chance.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ Cursed exes who can’t stop wanting each other
✅ Witchy small-town vibes with autumnal coziness
✅ Grumpy/sunshine sapphic romance with REAL heat
✅ Second-chance love that earns every moment
✅ Slow burn that IGNITES (🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ — graphic, explicit, emotional)
✅ Magic as metaphor for vulnerability and trust
✅ HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes), strong language, magical manipulation of memories, and depictions of anxiety and emotional trauma. Intended for readers 18+.

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Chapter One: Home Is a Four-Letter Word

The cottage looked like something that had given up.

Which made two of us.

I pulled my car — a fifteen-year-old Subaru held together by duct tape, optimism, and a protection charm I’d placed on the engine block four states ago — onto the gravel drive and cut the ignition. The engine ticked into silence. Through the rain-streaked windshield, Aunt Maeve’s cottage sat at the end of a weedy flagstone path like a woman who’d been stood up at a restaurant and was too stubborn to leave.

The roof sagged on the left side. The gutters were choked with wet leaves. A climbing rose — unpruned and feral — had swallowed half the porch railing and was making a credible attempt at the front door. The paint on the shutters had gone from the cheerful sage green I remembered to a color best described as “institutional surrender.”

I sat in the car for a long time.

Briar Hollow in October was exactly the way I’d left it: gray skies, golden trees, the faint hum of old magic rising off the land like heat from asphalt. The town sat in a shallow valley in upstate New York, surrounded by orchards and protected by a ward network that had been maintained by the same handful of witching families for two hundred years. It was the kind of place where the coffee shop knew your order, the library held your books, and every single person you’d ever wronged remembered your face.

I had wronged a lot of people in Briar Hollow.

Well. One person, specifically. But she was the kind of person whose opinion carried the weight of an entire zip code.

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The Garden Gate — A scene TOO HOT for Amazon

Two months after the reconciliation. A Sunday morning. The vine on the garden gate blooms for the first time — and Wren misses it, because Sloane has her pinned against the kitchen counter. Counter sex, reading glasses, and the filthiest, most joyful morning in the series.

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