Christmas, Off The Record
(2026)(The fifth book in the Ashwood Falls series)
A novel by Annie Carlisle
A travel writer with a content calendar. A sheriff with a past he outran. One rigged Secret Santa bowl, and a town that has never once minded its own business.
Reagan Hart came to Ashwood Falls, Alaska, to write one cozy Christmas piece and get her real byline back. What she got: an off-grid cabin she booked by accident, a wood stove with a secret lever, a moose with a criminal record, and a raccoon who files things. She has thirty days, one bar of cell signal at the top of a frozen ridge, and platform boots with the traction of two bars of soap.
Sheriff Cole Merritt has spent three years being nobody’s story, in the first town that never asked about Anchorage. He knows two things the moment Reagan steps off the plane: she has a notebook, and she is going to be a problem. He is right on both counts. He pulls her out of the woods, out of Miller Creek, and away from her own front door when a bear comes calling — with the energy of a man who would very much like to stop rescuing her and cannot.
Then the town’s Secret Santa bowl pairs them together — and nobody in Ashwood Falls is surprised, because Dotty runs that bowl the way she runs everything: with intent. Now Reagan is hand-wrapping a sixteen-dollar map with her whole heart written in the margin, Cole is building something in cedar he can’t take back, and her editor is dangling the one story that could rebuild her career: his.
She isn’t that kind of journalist anymore. But the deadline is Christmas Eve, the whiteboard at The Grizzly is keeping count, and the whole town is betting on rescue number five.
Christmas, Off the Record is book six in the Ashwood Falls series — a laugh-out-loud, Hallmark-warm, open-door holiday romance with enemies-to-lovers banter, forced proximity, a Secret Santa gone wonderfully wrong, a dog who picks his person, and a HEA that glows like the Northern Lights. Each book stands alone.
Genre: Romance
Reagan Hart came to Ashwood Falls, Alaska, to write one cozy Christmas piece and get her real byline back. What she got: an off-grid cabin she booked by accident, a wood stove with a secret lever, a moose with a criminal record, and a raccoon who files things. She has thirty days, one bar of cell signal at the top of a frozen ridge, and platform boots with the traction of two bars of soap.
Sheriff Cole Merritt has spent three years being nobody’s story, in the first town that never asked about Anchorage. He knows two things the moment Reagan steps off the plane: she has a notebook, and she is going to be a problem. He is right on both counts. He pulls her out of the woods, out of Miller Creek, and away from her own front door when a bear comes calling — with the energy of a man who would very much like to stop rescuing her and cannot.
Then the town’s Secret Santa bowl pairs them together — and nobody in Ashwood Falls is surprised, because Dotty runs that bowl the way she runs everything: with intent. Now Reagan is hand-wrapping a sixteen-dollar map with her whole heart written in the margin, Cole is building something in cedar he can’t take back, and her editor is dangling the one story that could rebuild her career: his.
She isn’t that kind of journalist anymore. But the deadline is Christmas Eve, the whiteboard at The Grizzly is keeping count, and the whole town is betting on rescue number five.
Christmas, Off the Record is book six in the Ashwood Falls series — a laugh-out-loud, Hallmark-warm, open-door holiday romance with enemies-to-lovers banter, forced proximity, a Secret Santa gone wonderfully wrong, a dog who picks his person, and a HEA that glows like the Northern Lights. Each book stands alone.
Genre: Romance