All Tied Up with the Naughty Mountain Man

She stopped believing in Christmas promises the December she lost her home. He’s the man who puts his whole heart in the window to make her one she can keep.

I’ve spent twenty-three years not believing in anything that comes wrapped in a bow. The December I was twelve, I wrote Santa a letter asking for one thing, our house, and in January we packed the ornaments in a box marked KITCHEN and never opened it again. Since then I’ve learned to keep moving: a couch here, a seasonal job there, a bus ticket always in my pocket. I tell everyone I’m not staying before they can ask. None of it’s real, not the twinkle lights, not the window displays, not anyone who promises it’ll work out. If I don’t believe in it, it can’t be taken.

Then Arch Lindgren pulled the help-wanted card out of his toy shop window before I’d even finished asking about it, hired me on the spot, and looked at me as though he’d been waiting for me to walk through his door.

He runs Lindgren’s Toys, the shop his grandparents opened on Prospect Street more than sixty years ago. He builds the same Christmas window from his grandmother’s sketches every November, wraps every gift for free, and answers every child’s letter to Santa by hand. He’s big, bearded, quiet, a dozen years older than me, and certain about me from two minutes after nine on the morning we met. But he hasn’t wound the tin carousel on his top shelf in four Christmases, and the man who gives this whole town its magic hasn’t felt any of it himself since the day his grandmother died. He looks at me and sees a future. I look at the bus leaving Tuesday morning and wait for him to figure out I’m temporary.

But Arch is done keeping the one thing that matters on a shelf. Three days is all he needs to know that a gift wrapper who doesn’t believe in Christmas is the only thing he’s ever wanted for himself. And on the night of the town’s window walk, with Prospect Street crowded at his glass and my bag already on my shoulder, he takes down the carousel he swore wasn’t for sale and puts it where the whole town can see, before I can walk out under his grandmother’s mistletoe and catch my bus.

All Tied Up with the Naughty Mountain Man is the first book in the Copper Peak Mistletoe series. Expect steamy, standalone Christmas romances where mountain men who swear they’re done with the holidays fall hard and fast for the women who make them believe again, packed with small-town holiday magic, mistletoe kisses, ticking-clock instalove, and guaranteed HEAs.