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Christmas with a Naval Captain: A Historical Romance Collection
Harlequin Historical brings you three festive Regency romances in one collection, from award-winning author Carla Kelly.
In The Captain’s Christmas Journey, Captain Everard is escorting Verity to her governess job—and for propriety’s sake that means a convenient engagement!
In Captain Grey’s Christmas Proposal, Captain Grey had been fighting malarial fever in Savannah when he was nursed back to health by the captivating Theodora Winnings. He proposed by letter—but her reply was lost for a decade. The answer was “yes!”—but is she still willing to become his Christmas bride?
And in Christmas Promise, now that peace has broken out, Captain Jeremiah Faulk is at odds over what to do this Christmas, let alone with his life. Until a simple act of charity reunites him with his lost love—the unattainable Ianthe Mears …
Previously published
In The Captain’s Christmas Journey, Captain Everard is escorting Verity to her governess job—and for propriety’s sake that means a convenient engagement!
In Captain Grey’s Christmas Proposal, Captain Grey had been fighting malarial fever in Savannah when he was nursed back to health by the captivating Theodora Winnings. He proposed by letter—but her reply was lost for a decade. The answer was “yes!”—but is she still willing to become his Christmas bride?
And in Christmas Promise, now that peace has broken out, Captain Jeremiah Faulk is at odds over what to do this Christmas, let alone with his life. Until a simple act of charity reunites him with his lost love—the unattainable Ianthe Mears …
Previously published
328 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 22, 2024
16 people are currently reading
8 people want to read
About the author
Carla Kelly
138 books804 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Although Carla Kelly is well known among her readers as a writer of Regency romance, her main interest (and first writing success) is Western American fiction—more specifically, writing about America's Indian Wars. Although she had sold some of her work before, it was not until Carla began work in the National Park Service as a ranger/historian at Fort Laramie National Historic Site did she get serious about her writing career. (Or as she would be the first to admit, as serious as it gets.)
Carla wrote a series of what she now refers to as the "Fort Laramie stories," which are tales of the men, women and children of the Indian Wars era in Western history. Two of her stories, A Season for Heroes and Kathleen Flaherty's Long Winter, earned her Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America. She was the second woman to earn two Spurs from WWA (which, as everyone knows, is all you need to ride a horse). Her entire Indian Wars collection was published in 2003 as Here's to the Ladies: Stories of the Frontier Army. It remains her favorite work.
The mother of five children, Carla has always allowed her kids to earn their keep by appearing in her Regencies, most notably Marian's Christmas Wish, which is peopled by all kinds of relatives. Grown now, the Kelly kids are scattered here and there across the U.S. They continue to provide feedback, furnish fodder for stories and make frantic phone calls home during the holidays for recipes. (Carla Kelly is some cook.)
Carla's husband, Martin, is Director of Theatre at Valley City State University, in Valley City, North Dakota. Carla is currently overworked as a staff writer at the local daily newspaper. She also writes a weekly, award-winning column, "Prairie Lite."
Carla only started writing Regencies because of her interest in the Napoleonic Wars, which figures in many of her Regency novels and short stories. She specializes in writing about warfare at sea, and about the ordinary people of the British Isles who were, let's face it, far more numerous than lords and ladies.
Hobbies? She likes to crochet afghans, and read British crime fiction and history, principally military history. She's never happier than talking about the fur trade or Indian Wars with Park Service cronies. Her most recent gig with the National Park Service was at Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site on the Montana/North Dakota border.
Here's another side to this somewhat prosaic woman: She recently edited the fur trade journal of Swiss artist Rudolf F. Kurz (the 1851-1852 portion), and is gratified now and then to be asked to speak on scholarly subjects. She has also worked for the State Historical Society of North Dakota as a contract researcher. This has taken her to glamorous drudgery in several national archives and military history repositories. Gray archives boxes and old documents make her salivate.
Her mantra for writing comes from the subject of her thesis, Robert Utley, that dean of Indian Wars history. He told her the secret to writing is "to put your ass in the chair and keep it there until you're done." He's right, of course.
Her three favorite fictional works have remained constant through the years, although their rankings tend to shift: War and Peace, The Lawrenceville Stories, and A Town Like Alice. Favorite historical works are One Vast Winter Count, On the Border with Mackenzie and Crossing the Line. Favorite crime fiction authors are Michael Connelly, John Harvey and Peter Robinson.
And that's all she can think of that would interest anyone. Carla Kelly is quite ordinary, except when she is sometimes prevailed upon to sing a scurrilous song about lumberjacks, or warble "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" in Latin. Then you m
Although Carla Kelly is well known among her readers as a writer of Regency romance, her main interest (and first writing success) is Western American fiction—more specifically, writing about America's Indian Wars. Although she had sold some of her work before, it was not until Carla began work in the National Park Service as a ranger/historian at Fort Laramie National Historic Site did she get serious about her writing career. (Or as she would be the first to admit, as serious as it gets.)
Carla wrote a series of what she now refers to as the "Fort Laramie stories," which are tales of the men, women and children of the Indian Wars era in Western history. Two of her stories, A Season for Heroes and Kathleen Flaherty's Long Winter, earned her Spur Awards from the Western Writers of America. She was the second woman to earn two Spurs from WWA (which, as everyone knows, is all you need to ride a horse). Her entire Indian Wars collection was published in 2003 as Here's to the Ladies: Stories of the Frontier Army. It remains her favorite work.
The mother of five children, Carla has always allowed her kids to earn their keep by appearing in her Regencies, most notably Marian's Christmas Wish, which is peopled by all kinds of relatives. Grown now, the Kelly kids are scattered here and there across the U.S. They continue to provide feedback, furnish fodder for stories and make frantic phone calls home during the holidays for recipes. (Carla Kelly is some cook.)
Carla's husband, Martin, is Director of Theatre at Valley City State University, in Valley City, North Dakota. Carla is currently overworked as a staff writer at the local daily newspaper. She also writes a weekly, award-winning column, "Prairie Lite."
Carla only started writing Regencies because of her interest in the Napoleonic Wars, which figures in many of her Regency novels and short stories. She specializes in writing about warfare at sea, and about the ordinary people of the British Isles who were, let's face it, far more numerous than lords and ladies.
Hobbies? She likes to crochet afghans, and read British crime fiction and history, principally military history. She's never happier than talking about the fur trade or Indian Wars with Park Service cronies. Her most recent gig with the National Park Service was at Fort Union Trading Post National Historic Site on the Montana/North Dakota border.
Here's another side to this somewhat prosaic woman: She recently edited the fur trade journal of Swiss artist Rudolf F. Kurz (the 1851-1852 portion), and is gratified now and then to be asked to speak on scholarly subjects. She has also worked for the State Historical Society of North Dakota as a contract researcher. This has taken her to glamorous drudgery in several national archives and military history repositories. Gray archives boxes and old documents make her salivate.
Her mantra for writing comes from the subject of her thesis, Robert Utley, that dean of Indian Wars history. He told her the secret to writing is "to put your ass in the chair and keep it there until you're done." He's right, of course.
Her three favorite fictional works have remained constant through the years, although their rankings tend to shift: War and Peace, The Lawrenceville Stories, and A Town Like Alice. Favorite historical works are One Vast Winter Count, On the Border with Mackenzie and Crossing the Line. Favorite crime fiction authors are Michael Connelly, John Harvey and Peter Robinson.
And that's all she can think of that would interest anyone. Carla Kelly is quite ordinary, except when she is sometimes prevailed upon to sing a scurrilous song about lumberjacks, or warble "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star" in Latin. Then you m
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 8, 2025
If you want a book that puts the "historical" in historical romance, you need to read Carla Kelly. She does such meticulous research that each one of her books feels like it really could have happened.
Christmas with a Naval Captain is a collection of three novellas, all featuring post captains from the Napoleonic Wars as heroes. We start with The Captain’s Christmas Journey, where Joe Everard goes to deliver the personal effects of one of his lieutenants to his family and ends up escorting the dead man's sister to her new teaching job. Along the way, they keep getting mistaken for a married couple and eventually can't keep their hands off each other. Captain Grey’s Christmas Proposal is a hero-only POV novella where our main character proposed to a woman he met in Charleston, SC, while he was being treated for malaria more than a decade ago. Her response went missing, and now, 11 years later, he is determined to find her and see if she still feels the same way about him. Finally, in Christmas Promise, Captain Jeremiah Faulk reconnects with his childhood sweetheart—and dead best friend's wife—Ianthe Mears after over ten years apart. He's been pining after her for most of his life, but their social stations were too different. Now he's a successful naval officer with plenty of prize money, and he wants to keep his promise to his friend to look after his family, even if Ianthe can't love him back.
Let's take these novellas one at a time.
I really enjoyed The Captain’s Christmas Journey. Our hero is a bit jaded, having done dozens of these visits and written hundreds of letters, giving families the bad news that their loved one was killed in action. He knows how these visits go and plans to get in and out with minimal fuss. What he doesn't plan on is that he and Verity will have a pretty immediate connection, and her family wants him around after he delivers his package. I loved the dynamic between Joe and Verity, especially their practical outlook on life. The pacing was solid, and I found I locked into the story with minimal background needed. The only thing that bothered me was the fact that Verity felt the need to remind us on basically every page that she was almost 30. I got it the first time. 4 stars.
Captain Grey’s Christmas Proposal took the biggest swing of any of these novellas. First of all, it's hero-only POV, which is a very rare choice. Typically, if we get a single POV, it's the heroine. It also has an element of magical realism and deals with some of the darker sides of early American history. Our hero was born in Massachusetts, but his family were loyalists in the Revolution, so they escaped first to Canada and then England. We get descriptions of the violence they endured, and it's rough to read about. Then the book directly confronts the horrors of chattel slavery in 1802 South Carolina and Georgia. As usual in her writing, Carla Kelly does not shy away from the actual facts of history. I also think she made the right choice to go hero-only for POV because he is not directly impacted by slavery but is an outside observer, which is an easier entry point for a novella where we don't have a ton of time to fill in backstory. This was a solid outing, but I do think this one suffered for being a novella. This was a story that was begging to be a full novel. 3 stars.
My favorite of the compilation was Christmas Promise. We had two of the things I love more than anything in this world: a second-chance romance and a super-starchy hero. Miah Faulk has been on a ship for basically the last 22 years, working his way up the ladder to become a captain. He is a navy man through and through, stoically dealing with the end of the war in his own, solitary way. It's only through chance that he reconnects with Ianthe and her children and starts feeling all his feelings. I loved the dynamic between these two because they have both been pining for each other for years, but Miah was all alone on his ship, unable to forget about his dead friend's wife. I think Carla Kelly did a great job of showing the good and bad about the end of the war. England did a pretty terrible job thanking the men who fought Napoleon for years. They were discharged with no real option for life after the war, and I appreciated seeing a glimpse of that reality, even if it was from the privileged perspective of a captain. 5 stars.
Overall, this was a great collection to read for the holidays. Carla has another compilation I bought from Harlequin, and I am looking forward to reading that soon as well. 4 stars.
Christmas with a Naval Captain is a collection of three novellas, all featuring post captains from the Napoleonic Wars as heroes. We start with The Captain’s Christmas Journey, where Joe Everard goes to deliver the personal effects of one of his lieutenants to his family and ends up escorting the dead man's sister to her new teaching job. Along the way, they keep getting mistaken for a married couple and eventually can't keep their hands off each other. Captain Grey’s Christmas Proposal is a hero-only POV novella where our main character proposed to a woman he met in Charleston, SC, while he was being treated for malaria more than a decade ago. Her response went missing, and now, 11 years later, he is determined to find her and see if she still feels the same way about him. Finally, in Christmas Promise, Captain Jeremiah Faulk reconnects with his childhood sweetheart—and dead best friend's wife—Ianthe Mears after over ten years apart. He's been pining after her for most of his life, but their social stations were too different. Now he's a successful naval officer with plenty of prize money, and he wants to keep his promise to his friend to look after his family, even if Ianthe can't love him back.
Let's take these novellas one at a time.
I really enjoyed The Captain’s Christmas Journey. Our hero is a bit jaded, having done dozens of these visits and written hundreds of letters, giving families the bad news that their loved one was killed in action. He knows how these visits go and plans to get in and out with minimal fuss. What he doesn't plan on is that he and Verity will have a pretty immediate connection, and her family wants him around after he delivers his package. I loved the dynamic between Joe and Verity, especially their practical outlook on life. The pacing was solid, and I found I locked into the story with minimal background needed. The only thing that bothered me was the fact that Verity felt the need to remind us on basically every page that she was almost 30. I got it the first time. 4 stars.
Captain Grey’s Christmas Proposal took the biggest swing of any of these novellas. First of all, it's hero-only POV, which is a very rare choice. Typically, if we get a single POV, it's the heroine. It also has an element of magical realism and deals with some of the darker sides of early American history. Our hero was born in Massachusetts, but his family were loyalists in the Revolution, so they escaped first to Canada and then England. We get descriptions of the violence they endured, and it's rough to read about. Then the book directly confronts the horrors of chattel slavery in 1802 South Carolina and Georgia. As usual in her writing, Carla Kelly does not shy away from the actual facts of history. I also think she made the right choice to go hero-only for POV because he is not directly impacted by slavery but is an outside observer, which is an easier entry point for a novella where we don't have a ton of time to fill in backstory. This was a solid outing, but I do think this one suffered for being a novella. This was a story that was begging to be a full novel. 3 stars.
My favorite of the compilation was Christmas Promise. We had two of the things I love more than anything in this world: a second-chance romance and a super-starchy hero. Miah Faulk has been on a ship for basically the last 22 years, working his way up the ladder to become a captain. He is a navy man through and through, stoically dealing with the end of the war in his own, solitary way. It's only through chance that he reconnects with Ianthe and her children and starts feeling all his feelings. I loved the dynamic between these two because they have both been pining for each other for years, but Miah was all alone on his ship, unable to forget about his dead friend's wife. I think Carla Kelly did a great job of showing the good and bad about the end of the war. England did a pretty terrible job thanking the men who fought Napoleon for years. They were discharged with no real option for life after the war, and I appreciated seeing a glimpse of that reality, even if it was from the privileged perspective of a captain. 5 stars.
Overall, this was a great collection to read for the holidays. Carla has another compilation I bought from Harlequin, and I am looking forward to reading that soon as well. 4 stars.
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June 10, 2025DNF had to return library loan
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews