Witch Is The New Black (Paris, Texas Romance #3)

As some of the seniors and Calla Ryder, the director from the senior center, hosed the inside of the barn, Ridge eased Bernie out of his arms and toward an old, rotting barrel. Likely one of the very barrels his brother had used to store some of his infamous hooch.

Setting her down, he fought not to bellow a scream of frustration—not so much at Bernie, but at the way shit had piled up here.

Goddamn it. He didn’t need one more thing to add to the list of things that needed doing for his ailing legacy.

The farm. His parents’ pride and joy and, at one time, proudly called Donovans’ Crest.

Cue the beating of his father’s fists to his chest in caveman fashion.

Nowadays, it was more like Donovans’ Disaster. In full-on disrepair and in need of more work than even he, as a warlock, was capable of handling alone. With his brother Finn on the run from the Council, Ridge was totally solo in this and it was all he could deal with.

And Baba Yaga’s order that he take on Bernice Sutton to help him clean the place up as her community service left him resentful and pissy as all hell. But no one said no to Baba, the head witch in charge. Not if you liked living.

It wasn’t that Baba was a bad ruler over witchdom. In fact, he rather liked her at a party. She did a hella sprinkler to just about any ’80s tune the DJ played. But she was a pushy, interfering queen when not in a social setting.

Pushing him to come back to his parents’ defunct farm…pushing him to fix the place up even though she knew it was mostly immune to any type of laborious magic after a spell his father had placed on it so his sons would learn the value of hard work.

Which left him unable to snap his fingers and restore it to its former beauty well enough to suit Baba Yaga.

He’d looked high and low for anything his father might have left behind—an incantation scrawled in one of his many journals, a book of magic—anything with the key to breaking the spell so he could clean it up and go back to his life in Dallas. At this rate, it would take a full year to just get things up and running again.

No one else’s magic worked on Donovan land, either. Sure, he could whip up some candlelight, make a meal appear on the table, but the nitty-gritty of the farm work, like tending the animals, fixing broken fencing, baling hay—that was all manual labor.

His father had been a stickler for keeping the farm a place primarily magic-free, following the old order of rules, wherein being found out by humans was unthinkable.

He’d wished his father had lived long enough to catch a few episodes of iZombie or Lost Girl for a more enlightened take on living as a warlock in the twenty-first century.

But Ramsey Donovan often said nothing could replace sore muscles and gritty eyes after a hard day’s work on the farm, and he wouldn’t have fluffy magic wands and pansy-ass spells taking their place.

For the most part, Ridge agreed with his father, and if he ever had children, he wanted to raise them in just the same way. He’d learned how to fare, and fare well, in the human world because he knew the lesson that hard day’s work offered.

Except for right now. Right now, he’d give his left arm and a lung to be able to snap his fingers and fix this.

Finn had left the old homestead a goddamn mess, taking off without a word and leaving the few horses and livestock in peril, meaning Ridge’d had no choice but to come back and handle the aftermath.

Today, looking at this Bernie Sutton—her cheeks a mixture of red from the heat and black from the soot, her hair plastered to the side of her face with sweat—he wanted to haul Finn’s ass back here and hold his head under in the water trough until he screamed uncle.

But despite his resentment, there were the older witches and warlocks from Hallow Moon Senior Center to consider. They loved this place, and when Calla, his old buddy Nash’s wife, had asked if she could bring them out here for some daytrips to spend time with the animals and on the trails bordering the farm, he couldn’t say no.

Then add in the pressure from Winnie Foster-Yagamowitz, who ran a rehabilitation house for the parolee witches with her husband Ben.

Winnie, who, with pies and casseroles and fancy double talk, had convinced him to help his community by employing some of the women she housed, and he found himself with a bunch of seniors and ex-inmates at one point or another every day.

Winnie and Calla were already a force of charm and persuasion. Stir into the mix Winnie’s daughter Lola, irresistible in her own six-year-old right, and he’d been doomed from the word jump.

Most times, the aging senior witches and warlocks were less help, more shenanigans, but they made him laugh, something he realized he sorely needed these days.

What he didn’t need was some crazy witch on parole, burning his barn down because she was angry about serving her parole shoveling horseshit.

Clive Stillwater clapped him on the back, his craggy face lined like a road map to his long life. “Where the hell’s my buddy Petey gonna sleep tonight if some crazy ex-con’s burnin’ down his stall?”