Stranded With The Grumpy Mountain Man
(2026)(A book in the Grumpy Christmas Mountain Man Season 2 series)
A novel by Deidre-Ann Anderson
I haven't celebrated Christmas in four years. Not since the year everything good in my life decided to exit at once. Wife. Job. The house with the ridiculous amount of lights she made me hang every November.
Now I live in a cabin in the mountains above Crimson Hollow, and the only December tradition I keep is ignoring every invitation that shows up in my mailbox.
This year's problem isn't an invitation. It's a woman. On my porch. In a snowstorm. With a dead car battery and the kind of indignant expression that says she'd rather freeze to death than ask me for help.
Too bad. I'm not letting anyone die on my property. That's more paperwork than I'm willing to do.
So she's inside. Dripping on my floor. Looking at my empty walls and my bare mantle and my complete lack of holiday decorations like I've personally offended her.
"You don't have a single Christmas anything," she says.
"Correct."
"That's the saddest thing I've ever seen."
"You're dripping on my hardwood."
She's in town for Club Crimson's annual Christmas Gala planning. She's a designer. Apparently she makes Christmas "an experience" for people, and my cabin is an assault on everything she believes in.
The storm pins her here for three days. Three days of her hanging makeshift decorations from my curtain rods, singing carols off-key while she cooks in my kitchen, and slowly, carefully, without asking permission, thawing every frozen thing inside me.
I don't want Christmas. I don't want lights or carols or another person making my cabin feel like a home.
But she's already here. And the ice around my heart has never melted this fast.
Stranded With The Grumpy Mountain Man is a Christmas forced proximity romance featuring the grumpiest Grinch on the mountain and the holiday-obsessed designer who melts him one string of lights at a time. Snowstorm, cabin, no escape, grumpy/sunshine, Club Crimson's Christmas preparations as the backdrop, "I hate Christmas" to "I hate Christmas without you" energy, and the kind of warmth that can only come from two stubborn people learning to let each other in. Steamy. Heartwarming. Guaranteed HEA.
Genre: Romance
Now I live in a cabin in the mountains above Crimson Hollow, and the only December tradition I keep is ignoring every invitation that shows up in my mailbox.
This year's problem isn't an invitation. It's a woman. On my porch. In a snowstorm. With a dead car battery and the kind of indignant expression that says she'd rather freeze to death than ask me for help.
Too bad. I'm not letting anyone die on my property. That's more paperwork than I'm willing to do.
So she's inside. Dripping on my floor. Looking at my empty walls and my bare mantle and my complete lack of holiday decorations like I've personally offended her.
"You don't have a single Christmas anything," she says.
"Correct."
"That's the saddest thing I've ever seen."
"You're dripping on my hardwood."
She's in town for Club Crimson's annual Christmas Gala planning. She's a designer. Apparently she makes Christmas "an experience" for people, and my cabin is an assault on everything she believes in.
The storm pins her here for three days. Three days of her hanging makeshift decorations from my curtain rods, singing carols off-key while she cooks in my kitchen, and slowly, carefully, without asking permission, thawing every frozen thing inside me.
I don't want Christmas. I don't want lights or carols or another person making my cabin feel like a home.
But she's already here. And the ice around my heart has never melted this fast.
Stranded With The Grumpy Mountain Man is a Christmas forced proximity romance featuring the grumpiest Grinch on the mountain and the holiday-obsessed designer who melts him one string of lights at a time. Snowstorm, cabin, no escape, grumpy/sunshine, Club Crimson's Christmas preparations as the backdrop, "I hate Christmas" to "I hate Christmas without you" energy, and the kind of warmth that can only come from two stubborn people learning to let each other in. Steamy. Heartwarming. Guaranteed HEA.
Genre: Romance