The Ex-Hex of Hollow House

A Steamy Sapphic Second Chance Witch Romance
by Maeve Hollow

Available at all major retailers

Pairing: FF (Sapphic)
Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ Inferno
Series: The Hollow House Romances, Book 1
Tropes: Second Chance, Supernatural Exes, Witch × Contractor, Haunted House, Gothic, Forced Proximity, Only One Bed, Immortal × Mortal, Stolen Memory, She Always Asks First, Touch Starved, Power Exchange, Found Family Among the Dead

She left me twenty years ago. She hasn’t aged a day. And her house wants to keep me.

Kit Mercer can fix almost anything. Rotten beams. Failing foundations. Old houses abandoned by families with more money than sense.

She does not fix hearts, and she does not think about the woman who walked out on her twenty years ago without a word.

Then a contract too rich to refuse sends her to Hollow House, a dying mansion in the Massachusetts hills. She expects black mold and bad wiring.

She does not expect Elowen Vale.

Elowen hasn’t aged a day. She still knows how Kit takes her tea. She still looks at Kit like a wound and a miracle. And her house keeps opening doors onto rooms that shouldn’t exist, rooms where a younger Kit is still in her bed.

The truth is worse than being left. Elowen is a witch. Her family’s house keeps every mortal woman a Vale witch loves, and keeps them for good. Twenty years ago she didn’t just leave. She reached into Kit’s head and took the part where Kit chose to stay.

Now the house is awake, it knows Kit’s name, and every time she touches Elowen it pulls the walls a little closer.

Kit came to save a house. She’s going to have to tear out its heart first.

The Ex-Hex of Hollow House is a high-heat sapphic gothic romance with supernatural exes, forced proximity, only one bed, a haunted house with opinions, a ghost with no patience for melodrama, a contractor who brings her own hammer, a lot of on-page spice, and a guaranteed HEA. Book 1 of The Hollow House Romances.

You’ll love this book if you enjoy:

✅ A sapphic second-chance romance where the ex is a 138-year-old witch who hasn’t aged a day
✅ A blue-collar heroine at 42, silver at the temples, who measures the impossible and then fixes it
✅ A haunted house that keeps the women its witches love, and has already learned her name
✅ “May I?” at every touch, and a heroine who makes her earn every yes back
✅ Angry wanting, edging, letters read aloud in bed, and one very well-used tool belt
✅ Real accountability: no easy forgiveness, just “I’m here”
✅ A curse broken with jacks, cribbing, a framing hammer and two women on a hearthstone
✅ Open doors, “ask me again tomorrow,” 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️ heat, HEA guaranteed

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⚠️ Content Warning: This novel contains explicit sexual content (graphic FF scenes, including a strap-on), consensual power exchange, edging and orgasm control, a past non-consensual memory erasure by a love interest (the story treats it as a violation), magical confinement of women by a haunted house, a character drugged by an antagonist, coercive illusions, ghosts and references to past deaths, the past death of a parent and hospital imagery, and strong language. Intended for readers 18+.

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

Chapter One

The man behind the counter at the Dunmere Gas & Grocery had my forty dollars in his fist and no intention of ringing it up.

He was looking past me, through a window papered with lottery ads, at my truck. MERCER RESTORATION, the door said. HISTORIC PRESERVATION. NEW HAVEN, CT. Behind it the crew van sat idling at pump two with Joss’s boots propped on the dash.

“You’re the ones going up to Hollow House,” he said.

“That’s us.”

“You’d be the fourth outfit.”

“So I’m told.”

I’d been told plenty. Dr. Celia Harrow of the Thorn Trust had been very open about it on the phone: three contractors in eighteen months, none of whom lasted two weeks, one of whom had abandoned a perfectly good skid steer on the lawn and refused to come back for it. She’d shared all this in a voice like warm bread. I find people either can’t bear the place or can’t leave it, she’d said. I do hope you’re the second kind. Then she’d named a figure for structural stabilization that made me sit down on an overturned bucket in the middle of somebody else’s kitchen.

It was the kind of number that buys a second crew. A real shop in place of a rented bay. The end of smiling at men who call me sweetheart while they explain my own bid back to me. I said yes before she’d finished her sentence and read the contract afterward, and the contract was clean. Only the access rider was odd. Owner in residence. Owner not to be disturbed. Owner’s name appearing nowhere at all, just the Trust’s, over and over, like a hand held up in front of a face.

My father would have handed the check back over that rider alone. Never take money from somebody who won’t shake your hand, Kit. He ran a six-man crew out of a garage in East Haven for thirty-one years and died owing the lumberyard. I loved him. I did not intend to be him.

The old man finally hit the register. He wore a blaze-orange cap and had the unhurried eyes of somebody who’d watched a lot of out-of-state plates go up that hill.

“Piece of advice,” he said.

“Is it extra?”

“Work in the daylight. Sleep in town.” He counted change into my palm one coin at a time. “And if the place takes a shine to you, leave your tools where they lie and go. It keeps what it wants.”

“It’s a house. It wants a roof and about two hundred grand in sill work. They all want the same thing.”

He didn’t laugh. I took my coffee and went.

Joss cranked her window down as I crossed the lot. Josephine Rowan had been my forewoman for eleven years and my best friend for sixteen, and she had a face built for skepticism, one eyebrow permanently on its way up.

“What did the local color have to say?”

“House keeps what it wants.”

“Ooh. Did he say what it wants?”

“Didn’t itemize.”

“They never do.” She popped her gum. “For the record, any client too rich to put a name on a contract is hiding from the IRS or hiding a body. I’m fine with the first one. And if I see one single pale child in a nightgown, I want hazard pay.”

“You’ll get a respirator and a sandwich.”

“That’s what you said in Guilford, and I got a rash.”

In the back seat Benny laughed. Tuan, who had not laughed in the four years I’d employed him, turned a page of the drawings.

Joss looked up the hill road, and the eyebrow came down.

“My nana’s people were from up this way,” she said. “She wouldn’t drive through Dunmere. Forty minutes around by Route 9 every Thanksgiving so she didn’t have to.”

“She say why?”

“She said the pie was better in Pittsfield.” Joss shrugged and put the gum back to work. “It wasn’t.”

The road out of Dunmere climbed for six miles through hills that had already burned through their color. Late October. The maples were down to bone and the oaks were hanging on to a few rust-brown rags. We passed an orchard nobody had pruned since before I was born, the apples rotting where they’d dropped, the air through my vents gone sweet and vinegary. Then a pair of iron gates, standing open, each one sagging off its top hinge.

Then the house.

I pulled up on the weedy gravel, got out, and did the first thing I do on any job, which is stand still and let the building tell me how it’s dying.

Hollow House was three stories of soot-dark stone under a slate roof, with too many chimneys and a porch deep enough to park in. Somebody in the 1870s had spent a railroad fortune on it. The ridge line had a sway like an old mare’s back. The gutters had gone to planters. A long glass conservatory hung off the south side with half its panes cracked, and the whole east corner had settled hard enough that I could read it in the window heads from fifty yards.

It was also the most beautiful thing anybody had handed me in twenty years of work, and my chest did something stupid about it.

I know what I am. I’m a woman who walks into rooms other people gave up on and finds the one beam still doing its job. I’ve made a living out of it and a personality out of it, and my last three girlfriends would tell you I’m a great deal better with a house that’s falling down than with a person who isn’t. They’d be right. A house never asks where you’re going. A house lets you fix it and leave.

“Oh, she’s a mess,” Joss said, coming up beside me, fond as a nurse.

“She’s got good bones.”

“You say that about all of them. Then we open a wall.”

Benny had wandered off toward the edge of the lawn, where the skid steer sat exactly as Celia Harrow had described it, bucket still raised, cab door hanging open. A lunch cooler stood on the seat with the lid off.

“Somebody walked away from sixty grand of Bobcat in the middle of a sandwich,” he called.

“Don’t touch it.”

“I wasn’t going to touch it.”

“You were going to touch it a little,” Joss said.

He came back and started hauling the job box off the van instead, whistling. Tuan stood with the drawings pressed flat against his chest, frowning at the roofline, then at the paper, then at the roofline.

I went up the porch steps. Seven of them, granite, heaved by a hundred and fifty winters. The front door was a slab of black oak eight feet tall with a knocker in the shape of a woman’s hand, and I had my fist raised, an inch off the wood, when the latch clicked and the door swung inward on its own.

All the way. Smooth as a breath. Not one squeal out of hinges that should have been rusted solid.

I’ve had doors drift on me before. A house settles, a strike plate wears, a latch that hasn’t caught properly since Eisenhower gives up the second you lean on the porch boards. That’s a door falling open. This one had been opened.

Nobody stood behind it. Just a long dim hall and a staircase, and cold air rolling out over my boots.

“Drafts,” Joss said.

“Sure.”

Neither of us moved for a second. Neither of us believed it, either.

There was a ring of keys on a hook inside the door and a note beneath it in round, pleasant handwriting. Start wherever it’s worst. So glad you’re here. C.H.

So I started in the cellar, because that’s always where it’s worst.

Fieldstone foundation, dirt floor, and a forest of oak joists overhead, each one ten inches deep and hand-hewn. They looked magnificent. No sag, no checking, no white bloom of rot. I ran my flashlight down the nearest one and would have signed off on it from the ground.

I don’t sign off from the ground. I dragged a crate over, climbed up, and put my awl to it.

The first inch was like punching iron. Then the awl sank to the handle.

I pulled it out and tried a foot to the left. Same. A foot to the right. Same. I rapped the joist with my knuckles and it rang back at me like a drum.

“Talk to me,” Joss said from the stairs.

“It’s hollow.”

“Termites?”

“No frass. No tunnels, no mud.” I pulled the moisture meter off my belt and pinned it. “Nine percent. That’s furniture. This wood is bone dry and sound on the outside, and there’s nothing in the middle.”

“Wood doesn’t rot like that.”

“Wood doesn’t do anything like that.” I checked four more. Every one of them was a perfect oak shell around a hole, as if something had put its mouth to the end grain and sucked. “Nobody walks the great hall till I’ve got posts under it. Tell Benny.”

I went up and looked at the great hall anyway, from the doorway, the way you look over the edge of a roof. Forty feet of oak floor under a coffered ceiling, and at the far end a fireplace I could have backed the truck into. The hearthstone in front of it was a single black slab the size of a barn door. The floor ran downhill to it from every direction, gently, like a mattress with a sleeper in the middle. I’ve seen floors dish over a failed girder. I had never seen one dish toward a fireplace.

From there it got less reasonable.

Tuan found me in the morning room with the drawings and a look I’d never seen on him. He held out the end of the tape without a word. I walked it to the far wall and read it.

“Seventeen feet.”

He turned the sheet around. A 1911 survey, inked, stamped by a Boston architect. Morning Room, 14’-0”.

“So the drawing’s off,” I said.

“Check the others.”

I checked. The hall matched to the quarter inch. The library matched. The dining room matched. I shot the morning room again with the laser and got seventeen feet, two inches. Then I went outside, waded in through the dead rosebushes, and taped the exterior of the same wall.

Fourteen feet. On the nose.

I stood there with the tape in my hand and a rose cane hooked in my sleeve and did the arithmetic three times, because arithmetic is the one thing in my life that has never lied to me.

“Could be a false wall,” Joss offered when I came back in. “Double partition. Hidden closet.”

“A hidden closet makes a room smaller. This one’s got three feet it didn’t pay for.”

“I’m trying to help.”

“I know you are.”

We walked the rest of the ground floor together and I filled two pages. Knob-and-tube wiring. A pier glass in the hall with its silvering gone to freckles. Black mold in the butler’s pantry, which cheered me up, because mold is a thing I know how to kill. And the doors. Every door in the place swung inward. Fine for a bedroom. But the cellar bulkhead did it too, and the kitchen door, and the French doors off the library, which meant every exit from that house had to be pulled toward you before it would let you through.

“Fire marshal’s going to hate that,” Joss said.

“I hate that.”

The stair hall was where I quit pretending it was a paperwork problem.

I carry my father’s plumb bob on every job. Eight ounces of brass on a braided line, worn smooth where his thumb used to rest and then mine. Lasers are faster. I don’t trust anything that needs batteries to tell me which way is down. I tied it off to the second-floor railing, let it drop into the stairwell, steadied it, and stepped back to read the newel post against it.

The post was fine. The bob was wrong.

It hung at an angle. Not swinging, not settling. It had come to rest a good four degrees off vertical with the line stretched taut as a guitar string and the brass point aimed past the foot of the stairs, toward the west side of the house. Like something over there had hold of the other end.

Joss looked at it for a long moment.

“Tell me that’s a magnet.”

“It’s brass.”

“Tell me anyway.”

I put my palm under the bob and lifted. It weighed what it has always weighed. When I let go it swung back out to its slant and stopped without a quiver, pointing.

West. I went to the landing window and counted. From the drive I’d clocked nine bays across the front of the house. The drawings showed six. On paper the west wall of this landing was an exterior wall with a window in it. In front of me it was paneling, and a door, and behind that door three more bays of house that no architect had ever drawn.

The door had no knob and no keyhole, so nothing on Celia Harrow’s ring was going to help me. I laid my hand flat on it and took it right back off. The wood was humming. One low, steady note that I felt in my back teeth.

“Kit.” Joss had gone a shade paler than the plaster, and she was pressing a knuckle under her nose. “I don’t love it up here.”

“Go help Benny set up the carriage house. Get the generator running and the posts off the truck. I’ll finish the walk-through.”

“Alone.”

“It’s a house, Joss.”

“You keep saying that like it’s going to start helping.” But she went, one hand on the rail, and I listened to her boots all the way down and out.

I should have followed her. I was halfway down the stairs to do exactly that when the smell reached me, and I stopped with one foot in the air.

Every old house smells the same on the first day: wet plaster, mouse, cold ash. Hollow House had all of that. It also had something riding underneath, faint as a thread, and my body knew it before my head did.

Bergamot. Bergamot and woodsmoke.

I hadn’t smelled it in twenty years. I’d gone looking, too, in weaker moments. A tin of Earl Grey won’t do it and neither will a campfire. It needs the two together and it needs skin, warm skin, the dip at the base of one particular throat where I’d put my face every night for eleven weeks the summer I was twenty-two. I used to wake up with it in my hair. I used to go to work on my father’s crew with it on my fingers and spend the whole day finding reasons to hold my hand near my mouth.

I let myself think about her roughly twice a year, and never on a job. She’d rented the cottage next door to the sea captain’s house my father’s crew was putting back together, and on my fourth night in Port Averill she came out onto her porch at three in the morning with two mugs, because she could hear me not sleeping through an open window. I was twenty-two, an apprentice with a truck I’d paid for myself and opinions about everything. She was thirty-eight and read books in languages I couldn’t identify. She handed me a tea made exactly the way I took it, which I had not told her, and asked whether I’d like company. Asked. She asked for everything, that woman. I’d have given her most of it unprompted.

It went through me like a nail gun. Low in the belly, then lower, a place two decades of perfectly nice women in perfectly nice beds had never once managed to find.

My grip had gone white on the banister. I made it let go.

Tea in a pantry, I told myself. Somebody’s cold fireplace. You are forty-two years old and you’re standing in a stranger’s stairwell getting wet over a smell.

It was coming from the south side of the house.

I went south.

The passage ended in a pair of glass doors gone green at the edges, and past them was the conservatory.

It must have been something once. Sixty feet of iron ribs and glass, a tiled floor, a potbellied stove furred orange with rust. Now a third of the panes were cracked and the light came through a skin of algae, dim and underwater. Two rows of orange trees stood in lead tubs down the middle, all of them dead. They’d kept their leaves, brown and curled as old receipts, and the whole room rustled when I opened the door. I priced the glazing in my head out of pure reflex. Six figures before you bought a pane.

Cold in there. Colder than outside. The smell was strong enough to taste.

A woman stood at the far end with her back to me and one hand resting on the trunk of a dead tree.

Tall. Straight as a level. A long charcoal coat over something dark green, and black hair loose to the middle of her back. The owner in residence, not to be disturbed, and here I was tracking cellar dirt across her tile.

I cleared my throat and put my site voice on.

“Ma’am. Sorry to barge in. Kit Mercer, Mercer Restoration, the Trust sent us. I know I’m supposed to leave you be, but somebody needs to hear that the floor of your great hall is being held up by good intentions, and I’d rather it was—”

She turned around, and the rest of the sentence bound up in my throat like a saw in a wet cut.

I’ve been on a roof when the staging let go. There’s a half second where your feet are still telling you there’s a plank under them and the rest of you already knows better. That was the half second I got.

Then there was nothing under me at all.

She had a white streak in her hair at the left temple, bright as a chalk line. I had kissed that streak. Under it was a face I’d spent two years hunting through every phone book and county registry in New England, and eighteen more training myself not to look for in crowds. The long, severe mouth. The dark eyes. The brows that could say really, Katherine without any help from the rest of her.

Elowen Vale.

I’d said that name out loud exactly once since 2008, to a bartender in Mystic, and had needed to be driven home.

Not an older Elowen. That was what my mind kept reaching for and closing on air. I knew what twenty years did to a woman. I had the evidence on me. I was forty-two, with silver coming in at my temples and reading glasses in my shirt pocket and a left knee that could call rain from two counties off. I’d earned every bit of it, and mostly I liked it.

She’d been thirty-eight that summer. She should have been fifty-eight. I looked for fifty-eight the way I’d looked for rot in those joists, methodically, expecting to find it. A softening at the jaw. Lines beside the eyes. Gray anywhere but that single streak.

Nothing. Not a crease. Not a day. She looked precisely the way she had on the last morning I could remember having her, asleep on her stomach in the gray light of a rented cottage in Maine with the sheet down around her hips and my teeth marks fading on her shoulder. As if somebody had lifted her out of that bed, dressed her, and stood her up here in the cold to wait.

That was the last I had of her. The next thing I owned was the same bed stripped to the ticking, a swept floor, and a key left on the kitchen table. No note. No forwarding address. Not one long black hair in the drain. I sat on that porch until my father came over and got me, and he looked at my face and had the sense not to ask. I went back to work the next morning. I’ve been at work ever since.

Heat went up my neck, and it wasn’t embarrassment. Twenty years of being fine, of being over it, of being the one who left first, and my whole body turned toward her like that brass bob on its string.

My hand found the tape measure on my belt and gripped it. I don’t know what I thought I was going to measure.

She hadn’t moved. The hand had come off the tree and hung at her side, half curled, with a heavy silver ring on it that I didn’t recognize. Her face had gone the color of old plaster. Whatever she had expected to walk through that door today, it wasn’t me. In eleven weeks I had never once seen her afraid. I was watching it happen now.

Her lips shaped a word and no sound came out with it. One syllable. I knew which. Then she took half a step toward me and stopped herself so hard I saw it travel up her spine, and for the first time in my life I watched Elowen Vale not know what to do with her hands.

I knew what I wanted to do with mine. I wanted to cross sixty feet of cracked tile and take her by the jaw and find out whether my fingers would go through. I wanted to shake her until an explanation fell out. I wanted, God help me, to put my mouth on the pulse in her throat and check that the smell was really coming from there. None of those were things a licensed contractor does to a client. I stayed exactly where I was.

Behind me the glass doors drifted shut. The latch dropped with a small, final click. Down both rows, every dead leaf on every dead tree shivered at once. There was no wind in there. There wasn’t a pane open.

Her eyes went to it. Then they came back to me and moved over the gray in my hair, the goggles shoved up into it, the ink on my forearms, the boots, all of it, slowly, like a woman reading a letter she had waited a long time for and dreaded getting.

I opened my mouth. I had twenty years of things lined up behind my teeth. Where did you go was the cleanest of them. I couldn’t get a single one out.

She managed it first. Low and exact, the faintest rasp underneath, the same voice that used to say may I against the inside of my thigh.

“Hello, Katherine.”

No one had called me that in twenty years. I’d made sure of it.

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The Porch Swing — A scene TOO HOT for the bookstore

Maine, 2006. Three in the morning in a heat wave, a porch swing on two squeaking chains, and Elowen on her knees saying hands on the chains, and be very quiet. Twenty-one years later Kit hangs a swing of her own on the new west porch, leaves two links dry on purpose, and says it back. Nobody has to be quiet this time.

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