Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 45319 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 227(@200wpm)___ 181(@250wpm)___ 151(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 45319 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 227(@200wpm)___ 181(@250wpm)___ 151(@300wpm)
Hi, I’m Celia. I’m a kitchen witch and I run The Lost Lamb bakery in Hidden Hollow, a small New England town where it’s almost always Autumn. I just turned forty—it’s not a very happy birthday since I’m all alone but to my surprise, I got a very unusual birthday gift—a huge portrait of a handsome demon whose eyes seem to follow me wherever I go.
Living with magic for years makes me discount the strange gift, but maybe I shouldn’t. Is the demon watching me from the portrait? Is my boring life about to get incredibly weird and extremely spicy? You’ll have to read Dreaming of the Demon to find out.
Because in Hidden Hollow…anything is possible.
Author’s Warning-- This book contains a h0rny, lonely baker, an irresistible Incubus with a naughty tail, magic pastries that makes you sing and have hot, dirty sex, and a Pilgrim 0rgy. Read at your own risk!
Author’s Note #1-- This short novel is not Hidden Hollow book 2, it’s more like a fun little interlude between the main books in the series and it can be read as a STAND ALONE. It's not as long as my usual books, so I have priced it less than usual. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.
What you’ll get in this Spicy, Small Town Monster Romance
Spicy times with an actual Plot
A handsome Incubus who’s eager to please and has a tail that stings in all the right places
A Pilgrim orgy
All kinds of Creatures including Centaurs, Krakens, Witches, Demons, Ogres and more
A HEA Ending that will give you the warm fuzzies
*************FULL BOOK START HERE*************
CHAPTER ONE
“Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday, dear Celia, Happy Birthday to me,” I sang sadly under my breath before blowing out the candle on the Strawberry Supreme cupcake, which was my personal favorite and a best seller at the bakery I owned. Then I just sat there looking at it—I didn’t even have the heart to take a bite.
I was turning forty and I was all alone—no husband, no kids, and no family at all besides one estranged brother I hadn’t seen in years. I was officially in what my Great Aunt would have called a “blue funk.”
“It wouldn’t be so bad if I was at least dating someone,” I muttered, as I pinched off a piece of my birthday cupcake. It was delicious as always, but that didn’t lift my spirits. “I mean, I’d even settle for a hook-up at this point. Just a quick, one-night stand would work. At least it would be something.”
But it seemed like no one was interested in hooking up with a curvy, plus-sized bakery owner who was edging into middle age. Middle age—God!
I slapped the kitchen table and stood up, unable to stand sitting still anymore. I started pacing the black and white checked tiles of the roomy kitchen. It was my favorite space in the old, rambling Victorian house my Great Aunt Gertrude had left me in her will. She had left me her bakery, The Lost Lamb, too and I had been running it successfully for the past five years.
But running a successful small business means you have almost no time for yourself. And that goes double for owning a bakery—especially in a magical town like Hidden Hollow where Creatures with big appetites live side-by-side with the few human inhabitants.
I have to make quadruple batches of every recipe because your average Orc or Minotaur or Centaur will inhale a dozen donuts in two bites and then ask for more. And don’t get me started on my hubcap-sized cinnamon rolls, my Frisbee-sized chocolate chip cookies, or my mountainous blueberry muffins—not to mention the enormous fifteen-layer Devil’s Food cakes I make on Saturdays only because they take so much time and oven space.
But baking for supernatural beings—Creatures as they call themselves—is only part of living in Hidden Hollow. It’s a special place—a small New England town located in the Berkshires Mountains.
A magical bubble around the town keeps non-magical folk out. It also keeps the outside world’s weather at bay. Years ago the town council took a vote and everyone agreed that their favorite time of year was Fall—peak leaf season to be exact. So now it’s almost always Autumn.
I say “almost” because there are a few exceptions. In May we have a whole month of Spring. In August it’s Summer, and in December it’s Winter with big, feathery snowflakes that collect in gorgeous drifts, but never on the road, because that would be inconvenient. Every other month of the year it’s Autumn and except for the constant leaf raking—which most folks around here manage by magic—it’s amazing.
Hidden Hollow is a beautiful place to live and I hadn’t regretted moving here a bit…until now.
Now I had to wonder if I had done the right thing when I accepted my Great Aunt’s invitation—which came in the form of a cryptic greeting card with a picture of a fresh baked loaf of bread on the outside and the words, You are the Only One who can Help Me! Please Come—Love, Aunt Gertrude, in her untidy scrawl inside.
At that point I’d had only a very vague notion of who my Great Aunt was. My Mom had mentioned something about her once—she had apparently disappeared mysteriously when she was in her thirties. She left an unhappy husband and a troubled marriage behind but no kids. In fact, according to my mother that was one reason Great Aunt Gertrude’s marriage was so unhappy—she didn’t want children and made no secret about it.
“She just never had any use for them,” my mother said, shrugging. “After she disappeared, they tried to say that Great Uncle Lou killed her but they never found her body, so they couldn’t make it stick. He moved out to California and married again and had three sons and two daughters, so I guess that made him happy.”
“But what happened to Great Aunt Gertrude?” I asked, focused on the mystery that surrounded my long-lost relation.
My Mom shrugged.
“Nobody knows. It was strange too—she disappeared in the middle of the day and didn’t take a thing with her. One minute she was in the kitchen making supper for Uncle Lou and the next minute she was gone. He said he smelled burning and ran in to see what was happening because Great Aunt Gertrude never burned anything. In fact, her cooking and baking were wonderful—he always said it was the only reason he stayed with her.”