An awkward first date leads to a sparkling romance between one of the most powerful witches in town and a magical newbie in this rom-com by Lana Harper, New York Times bestselling author of Payback’s a Witch.
Intrigued? Well read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from Lana Harper’s Back In A Spell, which is the third installment in The Witches of Thistle Grove series and releases on January 3rd 2023.
Even though she won’t deny her love for pretty (and pricey) things, Nineve Blackmoore is almost painfully down-to-earth and sensible by Blackmoore standards. But after a year of nursing a broken heart inflicted by the fiancée who all but ditched her at the altar, the powerful witch is sick of feeling low and is ready to try something drastically different: a dating app.
At her best friend’s urging, Nina goes on a date with Morty Gutierrez, the nonbinary, offbeat soul of spontaneity and co-owner of the Shamrock Cauldron. Their date goes about as well as can be expected of most online dates—awkward and terrible. To make matters worse, once Morty discovers Nina’s last name, he’s far from a fan; it turns out that the Blackmoores have been bullishly trying to buy the Shamrock out from under Morty and his family.
But when Morty begins developing magical powers—something that usually only happens to committed romantic partners once they officially join a founding family—at the same time that Nina’s own magic surges beyond her control, Nina must manage Morty’s rude awakening to the hidden magical world, uncover its cause, and face the intensity of their own burgeoning connection. But what happens when that connection is tied to Nina’s power surge, a power she’s finding nearly as addictive as Morty’s presence in her life?
In the meantime, I took myself to the Avalon, my favorite of our on-site restaurants. I’d always loved its “luxurious monastery” aesthetic; graceful stonemasonry, a soaring double-vaulted cathedral ceiling, Moorish peak windows, azure stained glass reflecting the flames of the candles held by the silver candelabra chandeliers. The reflection of the water from the moat flung rippling light through the windows, dappling their colors across the stone and lending the interior an ethereal air, as if you were in an underwater chapel.
There, I proceeded to order just about everything on the menu.
I was starving, in a way that felt completely unfamiliar. I was no stranger to carb-loading, or the ravenous frenzy that often set in post-marathon, but this was an entirely different level of “stranded in the desert for a week” hunger. I ordered three appetizers, followed by two entrees and a dessert, asking the (slightly scandalized and clearly confounded) server to please bring out everything as soon as it was ready, and not worry too much about any kind of “order.”
As I devoured hamachi ceviche served over ice, truffled poutine fries, and the slow-simmered French onion soup that made me weak in the knees even when I was just normal hungry, it occurred to me that even though I was more voracious than I’d ever been, I didn’t actually feel depleted or weak. Instead, I felt wonderful, aglow with a pervasive sense of well-being and serenity, as if casting that spell had burned away the last remnants of my hangover, scoured through me like some purging flame. Stranger still, I felt like after a solid lunch, I would be completely game for doing it again.
I was diving into the surf-and-turf with scalloped cheesy potatoes when Morty found me.
I paused mid-chew, so surprised to see him here that for a moment I thought I must be imagining him; maybe some kind of hallucinatory aftereffect of having channeled the strongest spell I’d ever cast in my life. He was wearing heavy, Soviet-looking boots and a vintage sheepskin duster that nearly brushed the floor, a dusting of snow sparkling in his windblown ruff of hair. Those ridiculous gemstone eyes skimmed over the tables that were almost entirely empty save for me in my banquette; the Avalon did serve all day, but this was off peak, too late for lunch and not quite dinner time. There was only one other couple, huddled over their drinks, too engaged in what was clearly an intense conversation to pay mind to anyone else.
As soon as he spotted me, Morty made a beeline in my direction, radiating a very disconcerting vibe as he slid into the seat opposite me without even bothering to dust off the snow from his collar.
“Uh, hello,” I ventured, forcing down my bite as I eyed him warily. “I don’t mean to come off rude, but what the hell are you doing here?”
He shrugged off the duster in one smooth motion, tossing it off his shoulders and bundling it behind him. Then he flicked his head to the side to clear snow-spangled hair from his eyes, in a gesture that was, despite everything, infuriatingly attractive. Fixing me with a brilliant blue glare, he held both hands above the table, palms up.
“I’m here because I woke up this morning,” he said through his teeth, his voice an unnerving mixture of furious and terrified, “being able to do this.”
Brow knitting, he gazed down at his blurry tattooed palms—where a dancing shimmer of gold suddenly sprang to life above each. Twin swirling globes of witchlight.
A baby illusionist spell, one of the first that Blackmoore witches learned to do.
My jaw dropped open, and I found myself struck speechless for what was possibly the first time in my entire life. I was a lot of things, but “lacking in words” did not tend to be one of them. How in the triple goddess’s name could a normie, and Mortimer Gutierrez of all people, suddenly cast a working—and one that was such traditionally Blackmoore magic?
I glanced back at up at his face, my gaze shifting between his eyes as I waited, without much real hope, for the oblivion glamour to set in. But no such luck; his eyes remained clear and steady, completely unmuddled, blazing with that electric heart-of-flame blue. The unsettling mixture of fear and rage in them tugged at me again in a way I didn’t like, plucking on my heartstrings.
Angry as he clearly was, he also looked… vulnerable.
“So, you’re really gonna just sit there and stare at me, pretend like you don’t have the first clue about this?” he demanded. “Is that the play here?”
I drew my lips through my teeth, thinking furiously. “I’m not sure what it is you want me to say,” I replied carefully. “I don’t understand how you’re doing that, whatever that even is. What am I seeing here?”
“Kindly cut the shit, Nina,” he hissed through his teeth as he leaned forward across the table, the witchlights casting flickering glimmers over his face. “I know you know something about this. And you know why? Because I’ve seen your people do this—this sparkly crap before. That fuckweasel Gareth—”
“Do you feel like calling my brother a fuckweasel is conducive to this conversation?” I asked him, as calmly as I could, my fingers curling around the table’s lip so hard that splinters threatened.
Morty cut himself off, closing his eyes and taking two ragged breaths.
“Okay,” he muttered, more to himself than me. When he opened his eyes, they were the slightest bit steadier, more distraught than angry, and that damned inconvenient sympathy reared back up in me again. “Alright. Maybe I’m coming in a little hot, yeah. I don’t—this isn’t me, you know? I don’t do toxic man-rage, that’s not my style. I’m just, like, extremely thrown over here? I got a little too deep into the drinks last night after you left, because, full disclosure, I felt kind of shitty about how things went down between us—”
“Thanks for that,” I murmured, thinking how sad-funny it was that we’d both been doing the same thing, in our separate ways.
“Yeah. I mean, definitely a topic for another time, but anyway.” He took another shuddering breath, gave himself a little shake. “So I slept in this morning, and when I got up I was late to… to a thing I really needed to be on time for, so. Then the fucking light in my bathroom died, because of course, why not. So I was just thinking to myself, ‘really wish I had some goddamn light to shave’… and then, bam!”
He gave a harried, half-hysterical little laugh, staring down at the witchlights still flickering sinuously above his palms.
“And then this happened,” he finished, curling his fingers around them to extinguish them. It was such a natural way to huff out that particular spell that it threw me a little; it didn’t look like something a beginner would have done. The instinct to blow the lights out like candle flames tended to be a strong one. “And I suddenly—I just remembered out of the blue, all these times that fu—your brother Gareth used to come into my bar. Do flashy shit like this like a magic trick, to pull some tourist for the night.”
I exhaled, clenching my jaw, because this tracked, unfortunately. Even with the town-wide oblivion glamour in place, we weren’t supposed to cast in public, but that didn’t mean all of us always complied with the prohibition.
And my brother really could be the most spectacular fuckweasel that way.
“But I always forgot,” he said, confusion brewing in his face. “All those other times, I just forgot about it, somehow, almost as soon as it happened. Until this morning. This morning, I remembered everything—and now, I can apparently even do it! So. That’s why I’m here.”
“How did you know where to find me?” I asked, a coal lump of dread landing in my belly with a sickening thud. Because I was starting to get a profoundly unfortunate inkling of what the answer to that might be, something I very much did not want to be the case.
“I don’t even know!” he exclaimed, with another shrill half laugh. “I could just… tell where you were? Feel you, somehow? That’s when I got really spooked, like, am I losing my entire mind right now? Do I have a brain tumor or something, am I fucking hallucinating this whole deal? How is that possible—how is any of this possible or real? I didn’t even believe it until I got here, and here you were. Exactly where I thought you’d be. Where I knew I’d find you.”
I took an unsteady breath myself, splaying my hands flat on the table to find some badly needed purchase as panic rolled through me like an avalanche. Because there was a way that some normies were able to come into magic even if they weren’t born into it. There was a way they could come to feel the presence of a certain special witch even from a distance.
It just couldn’t possibly be happening right now, and definitely not to the two of us.
It couldn’t be.
“Nina,” Morty said, half-pleading, leaning over the table with distress etched into every fine line of his face. “Just tell me, okay? I won’t even be mad, I swear, I just need to understand. What is this paranormal activity shit? What did you do to me?”
