#6 in the Diamond Creek, Alaska romance series
This was disappointing. I was looking forward to a holiday book, but it really had nothing to do with Christmas. Despite its name, the book basically ended with Thanksgiving, then skipped ahead to the following year. It was just OK for me. Travis, our hero, was great. He was quiet and sweet, a firefighter who is a solid and dependable guy. When he saves Janie from a ferry accident, he suddenly "sees" her and falls for her right away. Janie, on the other hand, is a single mother of an adopted daughter, and she is very gun shy about relationships after a bad history with her stepfather. Janie is less appealing because she spends so much time waffling about Travis. Everyone tells her he's great and trustworthy, but she just keeps being undecided--first leading him on and being overwhelmed with passion, then backing away for several days, then coming back for more. I couldn't understand why he kept sticking around. And I thought that Janie's daughter was about 11 or 12 years old because of the way Janie parented her, and I was shocked to discover she was a senior in high school! With Janie's fairly strict discipline of Stella, I was then further surprised that Janie had no problem with Travis sleeping over. There were some exciting moments based around Travis's firefighting job. And when things worked between them, Janie and Travis were definitely hot together. It was the off-and-on nature of their relationship that drove me crazy. All that being said, I am interested enough in the series to go back to the beginning and catch up with the characters. There were mentions of couples from previous books that caught my interest.