Buzz Books 2021: Romance

By Publishers Lunch

Our sixth annual edition of Buzz Books: Romance provides substantial prepublication excerpts from forthcoming romance titles. Enjoy access to some of the best romance voices the publishing industry is broadcasting for the upcoming season as you discover new series, catch up with the latest installments from beloved series, and find great standalone titles from top romance authors.
From a power player such as bestselling Kat Martin and Beth Reekles, author of The Kissing Booth, now a Netflix film, to fan favorites Therese Beharrie and Marcella Bell, these authors are bestselling, award-winning, and irresistible.
Discover debut romance writers Ali Hazelwood and Jean Meltzer then round out your reading list with LGBTQ titles by our first male authors: Kosoko Jackson and Timothy Janovsky.
Finally, get spooky with romantic witch stories by Elizabeth Bass and Lana Harper.
Start enjoying books right now that are sure to show up on your personal “must read” lists.
For the best in soon-to-be-published other fiction genres, plus nonfiction, and children’s literature, be sure to read Buzz Books 2021: Fall/Winter available now. Then be on the lookout for the next edition of Buzz Books covering the spring/summer 2022 publishing season for both adults and young adults, available in January 2022.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishers Lunch
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781948586450

Book preview

cover.jpgTitle page: Buzz Books 2021: Spring/Summer

Contents

Introduction

Elizabeth Bass, A Letter To Three Witches (Kensington)

Therese Beharrie, And They Lived Happily Ever After (Zebra)

Marcella Bell, The Wildest Ride (HQN)

Lana Harper, Payback’s A Witch (Berkley)

Ali Hazelwood, The Love Hypothesis (Berkley)

Kosoko Jackson, I’m So (Not) Over You (Berkley)

Timothy Janovsky, Never Been Kissed (Sourcebooks Casablanca)

Kat Martin, The Last Goodnight (Kensington)

Jean Meltzer, The Matzah Ball (MIRA)

Beth Reekles, Lockdown On London Lane (Wattpad Books)

Credits

Copyright

Introduction

Our sixth annual edition of Buzz Books: Romance provides substantial prepublication excerpts from forthcoming romance titles. Enjoy access to some of the best romance voices the publishing industry is broadcasting for the upcoming season as you discover new series, catch up with the latest installments from beloved series, and find great standalone titles from top romance authors.

From a power player such as bestselling Kat Martin and Beth Reekles, author of The Kissing Booth, now a Netflix film, to fan favorites Therese Beharrie and Marcella Bell, these authors are bestselling, award-winning, and irresistible.

Discover debut romance writers Ali Hazelwood and Jean Meltzer then round out your reading list with LGBTQ titles by our first male authors: Kosoko Jackson and Timothy Janovsky.

Finally, get spooky with romantic witch stories by Elizabeth Bass and Lana Harper.

Start enjoying books right now that are sure to show up on your personal must read lists.

For the best in soon-to-be-published other fiction genres, plus nonfiction, and children’s literature, be sure to read Buzz Books 2021: Fall/Winter available now. Then be on the lookout for the next edition of Buzz Books covering the spring/summer 2022 publishing season for both adults and young adults, available in January 2022.

Elizabeth Bass, A Letter To Three Witches (Kensington)

SUMMARY

In the sleepy college town of Zenobia, New York, the only supernatural trace on display is the name of Gwen Engel’s business—Abracadabra Odd Job Service. But Gwen’s family has some unusual abilities they’ve been keeping under wraps—until one little letter spells big trouble . . .

Nearly a century ago, Gwen Engel’s great-great-grandfather cast a spell with catastrophic side-effects. As a result, the Grand Council of Witches forbade his descendants from practicing witchcraft. The Council even planted anonymous snitches called Watchers in the community to report any errant spellcasting . . .

Yet magic may still be alive and not so well in Zenobia. Gwen and her cousins, Trudy and Milo, receive a letter from Gwen’s adopted sister, Tannith, informing them that she’s bewitched one of their partners and will run away with him at the end of the week. While Gwen frets about whether to trust her scientist boyfriend, currently out of town on a beetle-studying trip, she’s worried that local grad student Jeremy is secretly a Watcher doing his own research. Cousin Trudy is so stressed that she accidentally enchants her cupcakes, creating havoc among her bakery customers—and in her marriage. Perhaps it’s time the family took back control and figured out how to harness their powers. How else can Gwen decide whether her growing feelings for Jeremy are real—or the result of too many of Trudy’s cupcakes? . . .

EXCERPT

Chapter 1

Griz

What is she doing in there?

Tannith’s magic lamp draws her so near the glass that her breath fogs its surface. In her state of perplexed impatience, she’s breathtakingly beautiful. Almond shaped green eyes reflect like gemstones against the glass, and hair blacker than mine drapes over her shoulders, tantalizing me. Sometimes that hair swings when she moves and I can’t take my eyes off of it. In bed at night I often to reach a paw out to touch its silkiness, though only lightly, careful not to wake her. Nothing angers Tannith more than disturbing her sleep. Seriously. Objects get thrown. She has good aim.

She peers so closely that her nose is almost touching glass. "Why is she just sitting there?"

I gaze at the lamp and the woman visible inside it. She’s in the front seat of her vehicle, which pulled into her driveway a full minute ago. The image flits and flickers, unstable, but the woman is also in motion.

She’s not just sitting, I point out. Tannith’s powers of inference can be woefully lacking, but that’s one of her failings which I, a mere feline, am not supposed to acknowledge. As her familiar, I’m not supposed to acknowledge any of her failings. Holding my tongue isn’t always easy. She’s moving.

And not even subtly, but in jerky gyrations. From anyone else this might be considered very odd behavior, but I know the woman inside that glass. There’s nothing graceful or normal about her. Just the sight of her makes my fur bristle.

Tannith’s gaze narrows, and then she bleats out a joyful laugh. You’re right! The idiot is sitting in the front seat of her car in her driveway, dancing to... She angles her ear, and her smile widens as she recognizes a tune that means nothing to me. Oh my god, that’s Barry Manilow! ‘Copacabana’! She bends, laughing silently but gleefully. Then she leans forward, almost kissing the glass. Gwen, you pathetic cheeseball.

I don’t care for any of Tannith’s relations, but I had the misfortune to be stuck at Gwen’s apartment once. Every day was torture. Her smothering attention was unendurable, and the food she served me wasn’t worthy of the most pathetic alley cat, which I most definitely am not.

Tannith’s delight in Gwen’s dancing is short lived. She drums her long, red-lacquered nails on the table. Damn, this song goes on forever.

Why are you watching her at all? You said the others reacted just as you expected them to. What is there to see?

I just want to make sure Gwen gets her letter, too. She smirks at my skeptical glance. Okay, I admit it. I’ll relish seeing her devastation more than anybody’s.

I want to see it, too.

Dear Gwen. Tannith barely keeps an eye on the glass now as she engages in jubilant speculation. "First she’ll open the letter, then she’ll read it—twice, just to make sure her eyes aren’t deceiving her. She’ll have to sit down. Her expression pantomimes every emotion her cousin would be going through. And then she’ll have a little debate with herself. Should she call Daniel? No! That would show a lack of trust in their relationship." She shakes her head, hair shimmering. "Gwen is the type who thinks in dorky phrases like that. You know what she’ll do instead?"

I look up at her, blink slowly. No...

"She’ll run to the other cousins. They’ll have an impromptu meeting of their little cupcake coven. Their uncoven. And it will be nothing but confusion, because they’re idiots."

Pleasure purrs through me. Tannith’s clever, powerful, and devious, and—God help me—I love her. Sometimes I feel I don’t deserve her, and other times it seems she doesn’t appreciate me. But moments like this compensate for the bad things.

A flash inside the lamp draws our gazes.

Oh look! She’s finally getting out of her car. Dressed in lumberjack lite, as usual. And there she goes...up to the door...checking her box...

The woman in the glass plucks a letter attached to her mailbox and turns it over to examine the address. Suddenly, the angle has changed and her face looms close. It startles me.

Tannith mimics a gasp, pretending to be Gwen. ‘Who could it be from? Why, Cousin Tannith!’

My nemesis of the inedible dinners stares long and warily at the back of the envelope, her forehead crumpling into deep lines. She probably wonders why you sent her a letter when you live right across town.

Tannith clucks happily. Pretty soon she’ll be wondering all sorts of other things. Poor Gwen! I’ve ruined her Manilow high.

With one eye still on the envelope—she can’t seem to look away from it—Gwen stabs at the front door’s lock with her key, but misses. Tannith smirks as her cousin makes a second try. Gwendle-bug’s already discombobulated.

I yawn. Are you going to watch that lamp all day?

She sneers at me. You’re one to talk. I’ve seen you staring at it for hours.

What’s so strange about that? The lamp’s bubbles go up and down constantly. Tannith calls it a lava lamp. Occasionally it mesmerizes me. I resent her poking fun at a weakness I can’t help.

You wouldn’t want to watch her either if you had my memories. I still can’t believe you left me with her.

She clucks at me in disgust. The least you could have done was a little useful spying.

How could I spy? I could barely think. I was humiliated and patronized, and I was starving.

She laughs. Laughs.

Does she truly have so little empathy for me? Rage grips me and I twitch all over.

No claws, she warns.

"I had to eat dry food for an entire week. Pellets!"

Give me a break. I’ve seen you eat bugs. She swings her curtain of hair over one shoulder.

Oh, that hair. I think she does it on purpose. She knows how it affects me. But for once I try not to let her see it. I turn away, tail in the air. "I’ll get over it as soon as you apologize."

She smiles, and for a split second I bask in her radiance. Don’t hold your breath, hairball. One manicured hand swats me off the table with surprising force. I go sprawling to the floor, just managing to land on my feet and retain my dignity. Such as it is. I glare at her, but Tannith’s forgotten all about me. She’s back to peering into her lamp again, completely focused on Gwen.

Chapter 2

Gwen

I was still humming Copacabana to myself when I spotted the mint-green envelope clothes-pinned to the mailbox. The humming stopped when I turned it over and saw the T in elaborate foil script on the envelope’s flap. T for Tannith.

Give me strength. Not today. I didn’t have the energy to deal with Tannith.

It had been a garage clearing day. Not that I should complain. Garages are the bread and butter of Abracadabra Odd Job Service. Without garages I’d go broke, and I and my two employees would be spending our free time at the unemployment office. And yet...

So. Many. Garages. And Mrs. Caputo’s had been stuffed to the rafters with boxes accumulated over decades. Boxes of clothes, quilts and blankets, ancient kitchen ware and dishes, household files going back decades. Boxes of abandoned crafts. Broken sports equipment. Most of all, there were Christmas decorations—cartons stacked halfway to the rafters with broken ornaments and tangled strings of long-dead lights. These sat alongside the towers of disintegrating newspapers and dusty stacks of National Geographic, which she said she couldn’t throw away because they were her husband’s. Her husband died in 1986.

And then there were the shelves of hoarded stuff—jars of rusty hardware, jars of marbles or seashells or pebbles, and sometimes just empty jars; old gardening pots; broken ceramics; yellowing books. For it all, filth was the common denominator. No matter how it was stored, everything was rusty, water-stained, or ruined by bugs, mice and other rodents, or birds. A whole day of work, and we’d only managed to clear out enough space to move things to when we tackled Mrs. Caputo’s attic. Our next task.

After a day of garage cleaning, all I wanted was a soak in the tub and to relax. A letter from Tannith was not going to relax me.

Tannith, with whom I’d been raised, was all right under controlled conditions and in small doses. But that envelope looked like it contained an invitation, and just the thought of an entire future evening devoured by the self-styled Siren of Zenobia filled me with dread. Not to mention, getting Daniel to go would take wheedling, and I hated to wheedle him. I hated to ask anything of him at all.

Daniel, the man I’d been living with for three months, had stated his dislike of Tannith early on. She’s the kind of woman who can’t stand not to be the center of attention.

And to think, I’d been worried about introducing them. Physically Daniel was just the sort of man Tannith cycled through regularly—tall, muscular, brainy but not necessarily worldly-wise. And sure enough, when she’d met him, Tannith had arched a brow at me as if to say, You’re punching above your class with this one.

Which made me do a mental fist-pump when Daniel had seemed oblivious to Tannith’s charms, even though she never failed to turn them on full-blast when he was around. I loved him for this…yet I didn’t quite trust him. How could he not fall at Tannith’s feet like every other man I’d ever encountered?

I let myself into the house and wandered to the kitchen. I dropped the envelope on the breakfast table while I fixed myself a cup of coffee from one of the pods Daniel deplored. He kept pushing them and the machine they belonged to toward the back of the cupboard.

People made coffee for centuries without creating piles of plastic waste, he’d lectured me more than once.

He was right, of course. But my pod machine was so handy. Especially after spending an afternoon in a garage full of dust and mouse poop, when I just needed a quick caffeine pick-me-up to handle whatever my witchy nemesis had in store for me. Good to the last drop of guilt.

Anyway, Daniel was not here to scold. Cupping my steaming mug, I dropped into a chair at the chrome dinette to contemplate the green envelope again. It had to be dealt with. If there was a party, Tannith would expect an RSVP yesterday.

I opened the envelope, unfolded the letter, and scanned the