The witch with an itch, p.1
The Witch With an Itch, page 1
Copyright © 2022 by Virginia Nelson
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is coincidental.
This book contains content that may not be suitable for young readers 17 and under.
The Author of this Book has been granted permission by Robyn Peterman to use the copyrighted characters and/or worlds created by Robyn Peterman in this book. All copyright protection to the original characters and/or worlds of the Magic and Mayhem series is retained by Robyn Peterman.
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
The Witch with an Itch: Magic and Mayhem Universe
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Epilogue
Dedicated to Tiny Human and GamerTeen...
And to Emily, for the use of the imaginary dog name in the kraken wedding.
Flemming Fletch is a witch with the perfect life—until she gets hit by a moving truck full of her own belongings lovingly packed by her suddenly-ex-fiancé. She heads back to her hometown to stay with her high school bestie and figure out where it all went wrong, but instead of solving problems, she makes even more.
One badly cast love spell later, and she’s covered in hives. She can’t ask other witches for help—forbidden spells come with some nasty punishments, after all—so she turns to a healer. Can a guy dedicated to healing bodies possibly cure her broken heart?
Foreword
Blast Off with us into the Magic and Mayhem Universe!
I’m Robyn Peterman, the creator of the Magic and Mayhem Series and I’d like to invite you to my Magic and Mayhem Universe.
What is the Magic and Mayhem Universe, you may ask?
Well, let me explain...
It’s basically authorized fan fiction written by some amazing authors that I stalked and blackmailed! KIDDING! I was lucky and blessed to have some brilliant authors say yes! They have written brand new stories using my world and some of my characters. And let me tell you...the results are hilarious!
So here it is! Blast off with us into the hilarious Magic and Mayhem Universe. Side splitting books by fantabulous authors! Check out each and every one. You will laugh your way to a magical HEA!
For all the stories, go to https://magicandmayhemuniverse.com/. Grab your copy today!
And if you would like to read the book that started all the madness, Switching Hour is FREE!
https://robynpeterman.com/switching-hour/
Prologue
Flemming
The sun shined down on a stunning view of the Sound. The skyline of Seattle looked even better from a boat, so as Flemming Fletch sipped her mimosa, she told herself to remember the view. To remember her peace and be grateful for all her hard work and hard times paying off so very, very well. Not everyone can spend a Thursday afternoon on a boat overlooking a metroplex, she reminded herself. I should be grateful, not drowning in a feeling of everything being just a little off.
Telling herself to be grateful wasn’t the same thing as being grateful, a difference she’d been struggling with all too often lately.
“I’m so happy autumn is finally here,” her friend Savannah said, leaning back against her husband’s legs from her perch near the bow. “Pumpkin spice, sweaters, cool foggy mornings... I was so sick of all the smoke.”
It had been a bad fire season on the west coast, so Flemming could only nod, but she did point out, “I’m more of an apple cider gal, myself. Never been into the pumpkin spice thing.”
Sadie, Savannah’s twin in town for a visit, snorted. “That’s what everyone who doesn’t want to be called a basic witch says, you know. Bash the psl, embrace the cider or something.”
Flemming shrugged. “That’s the one thing I miss about back east.” They were all from a small town in West Virginia, but Flemming didn’t usually wax poetic about it. “I loved visiting orchards in the fall.”
“We have orchards in Washington,” Savannah pointed out.
Flemming shrugged. It wasn’t the same. “I’ve been thinking of visiting back east again.” Hell, if she were honest, she’d been thinking of travel in general. There were things she wanted to see, places she planned to visit, and sometimes it felt as if she was wasting her life away when she should be out seeing them.
“You’re welcome to stay with me, if you want,” Sadie offered.
Later, Flemming would find that offer particularly timely.
Arriving home, Flemming sighed as she pulled up her car’s emergency brake. Parking in Seattle was kind of awful, for the most part, but Flemming lived outside of the city in a town called Everett—now practically a suburb of the city itself. In her neighborhood, for instance, no street parking was allowed. Not problematic in and of itself, not normally, but since her fiancé’s mother’s car sat in their garage while she enjoyed a cruise to Alaska, it meant one singular parking space remained at their house... and left her parking in visitor’s parking down the street. She didn’t mind, especially not on a particularly soft Pacific-Northwest day like that one. The sun hung low, dipping toward setting entirely, and cricket song filled the air. After her reinvigorating visit with friends, she hoped to feel renewed and ready to face another boring work week. Instead...
Something felt off in her life. It had for a while. It built like a ball of lead that sat on her chest and made it hard to breathe sometimes. Other times, it rained down in intrusive thoughts like just drive away or quit your job. Regardless of the flavor of the feelings, she knew something was off, she just didn’t know what.
How do you change something if everything is perfect?
Her life was exactly everything she always wanted—great guy, great home, far away from the home of her childhood. She liked her coffee mug and her air plants and...everything was perfect.
Except it wasn’t.
Spotting a moving truck coming down the road, she wondered if it meant new neighbors, but she quickly forgot the possibility when she noticed the cat.
A small bundle of fur, looking more like dandelion fluff than a living animal, it meandered in a fumbling kitten way toward the edge of the curb. The orangey-yellow tone of his fur blended almost perfectly into the caution yellow of the curb, meaning there was a good chance the driver couldn’t see the animal at all. She only spotted the creature herself because of her relative angle and the movement.
“Little dude, don’t do it,” she muttered, speeding her steps. Surely the mama cat would scoop in at the last second with a rescue? Or someone else—anyone other than Flemming—would see the kitten was dangerously close to the road and save the day?
She was about twenty feet away when the kitten flopped sideways and rolled into the street. The momentum from the fall carried the dandelion fluffball a couple extra flops until it lay perfectly aligned with the approaching wheel of the moving truck.
“Stop!” Flemming cried, waving her arms. The driver of the moving truck didn’t see her, clearly looking at a device—maybe even the map toward their next destination. “Oh, damn you, stop!”
It was no use. The moving truck kept moving, and the kitten, little more than a baby, shook its tiny head in confusion, completely unaware of its approaching doom.
She could’ve used magic to stop the truck. She thought of that later, though, too panicked in the moment to do more than dive at the kitten, scooping it to safety and popping it into a bubble mere moments before the truck hit her.
She should’ve bubbled herself, too. In fact, magic would’ve come in handy, again, she had the strength to think, to heal my injuries...
Sadly, she wasn’t conscious long enough to do more than mutter, “Ah, hells,” as she got hit by a literal truck.
Chapter One
Flemming
If Flemming had to guess where she’d wake up after being hit by a moving moving truck, she would’ve guessed a human hospital or maybe the sickroom of a local healer. She did not expect to blink her eyes open to remnants of pain and the sky above her front yard. The kitten remained bubbled in her hand, so she clutched it to her chest while dropping the spell.
“What happened?” she muttered, trying to put the pieces together in an order that made sense. Cradling the kitten carefully as she struggled to sit up, she realized she’d sustained no injuries. Had she managed a bubble or healed herself or—
“You okay?” the driver of the moving truck asked. Up close, she noticed something really important about him. She’d bet he healed her on every last strand of the red hair on his head.
“I mean, now I am, yeah,” she snipped. The small bundle of fur in her hands began to purr. The driver guy was handsome, too, the kind of witch her mother would’ve wanted Flemming to fall for, if she had her druthers. The fact that he was so perfect managed to grate Flemming’s already raw nerves to throbbing fury. She spat, “I would’ve been fine entirely if you ’d been looking at the road instead of that phone or whatever you had in your hand when I waved frantically for you to stop.”
A kid in a bright striped shirt and cutoff jean shorts ran into the yard, yelling, “Hey, are you trying to steal my cat?”
She fumbled a bit trying to scramble to her feet only to find the driver catching her and balancing her. How did he go from from kneeling next to me to on his feet that quickly?
Telling herself to pay more attention to the moment, she noticed his warm hands wrapped around her elbows, the backs of his long fingers just grazing the sides of her breasts with her every inhalation. The sensation was far from unpleasant. “Erm,” she mumbled, “I’m good. Back up.”
Immediately he obeyed her, marking at least one dim checkmark in his favor. He held his palms up and ducked his head a bit, the body language implying he’d intended no offense. Her lip curled, the ghost of a smile despite the circumstances. “You’re very unexpected, moving truck driver.”
“Bruh, gimme back my cat,” the kid demanded, holding a single hand out impatiently.
“Your cat stumbled into traffic and nearly got squashed by a truck,” she explained, handing over the kitten. “Probably he’s a little young to be outside by himself.”
“Whatever,” the kid said and flicked her off as he ran back into his own yard.
“Should I have mentioned I got hit by a truck saving his cat, do you think?” Flemming said aloud.
Just then, her fiancé rushed out their front door, phone pressed against his ear. She turned to him, relieved to see a familiar face. “Babe, you won’t believe what just happened—” she began, holding her arms out toward him.
“Yeah, cancel the ambulance. No, seriously, this wasn’t a prank.” His eyes narrowed on her, and a look of such dislike carved its way across his features, her head jerked back as if from a physical slap. “You wouldn’t believe me if I tried to explain.”
Flemming’s hands dropped, but he didn’t see it since he’d already turned away from her. With only those words, Leo stalked back into the house, slammed the door, and from the otherwise silent front yard, Flemming could clearly hear the turning of a lock.
Her fingertips covered her lip as if to hold the emotions inside as her mouth gaped in shock. At first, Flemming just made a weird choking noise, because words didn’t come. Finally, she managed to whisper, “What even just happened?”
“Uh, he said to give you this when you woke up,” the driver said. He didn’t meet her searching gaze; his eyes remained firmly closed, and his head turned away from her. The strong fingers of one hand wove into the thick waves of his hair as a muscle in his jaw clenched in profile. The other hand offered a single white envelope with her name scrawled in black marker in her fiancé’s handwriting.
It felt like some scene from a movie, not her real life. Look, he’s even dramatically ignoring my agony, just like some character. Maybe this is all a dream?
She took the envelope, glancing around in confusion. Nothing made sense. She’d gone out for the day with her friends, walked down the street, gotten hit by a moving truck, and... It made more sense if it all was a nightmare rather than reality. Her finger shook as she ripped the envelope open, giving herself a papercut on top of everything else.
She sucked her fingertip, glad of the distracting pain as she read the words on the page. She forced herself not to think about the fact that pain and blood weren’t usually parts of dreams.
Hey,
So, this isn’t working for me. I packed up all of your stuff, and it is in a moving van headed back to your parents’ house in West Virginia. Here’s the contact information for the moving truck, if that destination isn’t what you want.
Best,
Leo
“What the actual fu—?”
“I don’t feel like that’s a question,” said the moving truck driver. “But I also get the feeling you’re having a really bad day. Want to get a coffee and talk about it?”
Flemming glanced up at him again, completely baffled. “Are you asking me out while I’m reading the letter where my fiancé not only dumped me, but packed up all my stuff and you’re being paid to haul it across the country?”
The guy shrugged. “Apparently. If that’s how you want to look at it, I guess.”
Flemming glanced back at the house again. Was it ever home? It never really felt like home, or at least not her home. It was Leo’s house, and she’d agreed to move in with him after they’d dated long distance for over a year.
From a distance, we really worked. Weird to think that a few years into a relationship, but...
Sure, they hadn’t been happy together, not lately. She’d been distracted by the feeling something was off, and he’d been busy at work.
He worked a lot. Like a lot a lot.
“Was he cheating on me?” she asked aloud.
The driver glanced back at his truck as if it were a lifeline just out of his reach. “Um,” he said.
“I’m Flemming,” she said, brushing her hand off on her jeans as if to clean it from contact with the lawn before offering it to him. “Flemming Fletch.”
“Seth,” the driver replied, accepting her hand in his massive palm. His hand wasn’t meaty, nor was it sweaty. It felt like a good hand, and then Flemming shook her head at her own ridiculous train of thought.
“Hiya, Seth. I’ll take you up on that coffee.” Her thoughts swirled as if tossed in a furious tornado. She needed the time to think, to figure out what was happening, and just...
That has got to set the record for the shittiest way to dump someone in history, Flemming thought. Not a call, not an awkward dinner, just...packed my shit up, and sent it toward my parents’ house. I didn’t even deserve the dignity of notification.
The tears hit unexpectedly, a hot flood of shame and hurt and otherwise horrible feelings that poured down her cheeks and soaked the neckline of her tee. Seth used the hand he still held from introductions to reel her in like an ungainly fish when she started to crumple. Instead of gentle shushing and soft pats, though, he thwacked her back hard, as if she were choking.
The unexpected thump made her suck in a breath and turn her tear-stained face up at him in shock.
“Don’t let him see you like this,” he said bluntly. After a glance at the house, he returned his glass-bottle green gaze back to her face. “I’m sure he’s watching from the windows, waiting to see how you respond to his grand scheme. Don’t let him win. The guy didn’t even care when you got hit by a truck; he doesn’t deserve your tears.”
With a hiccupping gulp, Flemming swallowed hard. “Okay, coffee,” she managed to say after another hiccup of air.
Tears still poured from her eyes, but she stiffened her spine and straightened her shoulders. So long as she kept her back to the house, he wouldn’t see the tears, and the driver was right—he didn’t deserve them.
She allowed him to lead her to the passenger side of his truck and then accepted his hand for support as she climbed up into the thing. Once in the seat, she buckled her safety belt and stared forward blankly as he got in the driver’s side and put the vehicle in gear.
She didn’t ask where they were going, because she wasn’t sure it mattered. She could probably crash at Savannah’s house, despite the fact they already had a full house with Sadie in town for a visit. She had other friends she could call...
When did it all go wrong? Her thoughts headed down the spiral again without the slightest hesitation. When she’d met Leo, she was a small-town witch who wanted adventures. They met in online, through mutual friends on social media. Short getting to know you texts soon became long conversations, then late nights spent talking instead of sleeping.
He always said just the right things...
They met in person—once. A date she planned, when she heard he’d be in the area with family for a visit. They walked hand-in-hand through the Smithsonian American Art Museum together, and she told him stories about the artworks. He responded with interest, quips, and seemed so engaged. Afterward, they had dinner at a fun nearby Peruvian restaurant. He’d kissed her before getting into his ride, and it seemed like she’d finally found The One.
From there, all of her plans focused on moving across the country to be with him. He encouraged her, showed her pictures of his place. They talked about happy ever after, and he proposed to her via a video chat unboxing of her ring. Sure, before they met, she had personal goals and plans, but once she found The One, wasn’t it smarter to focus on ensuring they could be together than all that other stuff?
