Decorated in Christmas (Colors of Scandal #11.5)

Sometimes fate doesn’t give you what you want, because something better is in the offing.

Captain Elias Frampton is a man without purpose. Five months after being jilted, he’s ready for a new chapter of his life. Undecided about whether he should return to the sea or find a position in England, he embarks on a trip up the Cornwall coast, but his coach is caught in a winter storm squall, forcing him to take the last room at a posting inn of a fishing village. It’s just the place for him to gain a new perspective.

Miss Helen Everly’s dreams for her life are all but forgotten. She cares for her ailing father, as well as running the Brown Hart Inn he owns, because that’s all she’s known. It’s a good life and a happy one, as long as she can find something positive in each day. Yet, it’s also a lonely life. Men in the small Cornish village keep the sea as a mistress and aren’t the marrying type. Yet, Christmastide is a time for miracles, and she’s not above sending up a prayer for hers.

As Elias and Helen are thrown together by unique circumstances, and they enter into an odd friendship, they both try to ignore the sparks flying between them, due to past disappointments. But during traditional Christmastide entertainments and a few stolen kisses, they come to discover everything they’d previously believed about romance had been wrong, and that love is so much sweeter when it arrives unexpectedly.