Faking Christmas With The Single Dad

I need a fake girlfriend for Christmas. Specifically, I need one by Friday.

My mother is flying in from Halifax. She thinks I've been dating a "lovely woman" for six months because I panicked on a phone call in July and invented a girlfriend to stop the annual lecture about how my daughter needs a mother figure and I need to stop "hiding on a mountain like a bear with commitment issues."

Her words. Verbatim.

Now Mom's coming to see the town Christmas festival, meet the girlfriend, and "evaluate the situation." I have four days to find a woman willing to pretend she's in love with a grumpy single dad with a five-year-old who asks every adult she meets if they know any dinosaur facts.

The baker who just opened a booth at the Christmas market said yes.

I don't know why she said yes. She moved to Crimson Hollow three months ago. She's covered in flour more often than not, she sings off-key to Christmas music at a volume that should be illegal, and she apparently tells my daughter bedtime stories through the wall of the apartment we share because she lives in the unit next to mine and Bria figured out that if she knocks, the nice cookie lady knocks back.

She has conditions. I pay her booth fee for the Christmas market. I fix her oven, which she claims has a vendetta against her. And I never, under any circumstances, kiss her in front of Bria unless she initiates it, because Bria's feelings come first.

I agree to everything.

What I don't agree to is the way my chest does something dangerous every time she tucks my daughter's hair behind her ear and whispers, "Tell me a dinosaur fact, sweet girl."

This was supposed to be fake. She was supposed to be temporary. My daughter was not supposed to start calling her "my Noelle" to everyone in town.

And I was absolutely not supposed to fall in love.

Christmas With The Fake Mountain Daddy is a holiday romance featuring a single dad who lied to his mother and got exactly what he deserved, a baker who said yes for the money and stayed for the man, one five-year-old matchmaker with a dinosaur obsession, fake dating at a Christmas festival, a meddling mother who sees everything, snow, cookies, and a love story that starts as a performance and ends with a family nobody expected. Steamy. Sweet. Guaranteed HEA.