The Fool by H.P. Mallory

KATE:
You know that quote about most people living quiet lives of desperation? Well, that pretty much describes me to a T.
I’m middle-aged, divorced, built like a tree stump, with nothing but a failing romance-writing career to call my own. Yep, no kids, no social life and no pets—not even a chinchilla to greet when I walk through the door of my crappy apartment.
The only thing I do have? Spare Tire Sandy who lives around my waist. Oh, and a nicotine habit I’m desperately trying to kick.
When my eccentric Aunt Artemis ups and dies, leaving me her ‘castle’ in Vermont, I start thinking maybe my luck is taking a turn for the better.
Yeah, no.
The property, in the tiny town of Maplewood, is literally a castle but not like something you’d see in Scotland. This is more like Medieval England had a battle with The Tarot and neither won.
Which means it’s going to be a bitch and a half to sell.
To make matters worse? There’s a tenant in ‘Tarot Castle’ and not like the squatter sort—more like the talking goat sort. Right—Rocco sounds like a New York mobster which is grating enough, but throw in the fact that I’m now responsible for him and I’m not a happy camper.
And let’s not even discuss the shrunken head, Yolanda, who literally WILL NOT STOP TALKING!
The only person who can help me make sense of my new inheritance is Luke Montgomery, owner of the coffee/ bookstore in town. Luke is friendly, really hot in a J. Crew sort of way, and also annoyingly hush-hush about the legacy I’ve apparently been born into: some BS about being a Daughter of the Moon.
And then there’s Magnus Stormrider, my self-proclaimed guardian, who looks like the love-child of Conan the Barbarian and Fabio. The best way to describe Magnus? If the ground opened up and swallowed him whole, I wouldn’t mind—not for one second.
According to my aunt’s never-ending posthumous letters that keep appearing from literally nowhere, I’m supposedly on the journey of The Fool, the first card of the Major Arcana of the tarot.

And that’s pretty damned fitting because if there’s one thing I’m sure of—it’s that I was the biggest fool to have ever agreed to come out here in the first place…