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    Mistletoe in Paradise: A Christmas Novella
    Mistletoe in Paradise: A Christmas Novella
    Mistletoe in Paradise: A Christmas Novella
    Ebook113 pages1 hour

    Mistletoe in Paradise: A Christmas Novella

    By JILL SHALVIS

    3/5

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    About this ebook

    Problem Number One – Getting There

    Old childhood friends each fly separately to join their families on what’s been an annual holiday themed yacht adventure. Secret ex-lovers, Hannah and James are determined to make the best of things…

     

    Problem Number Two – Getting Stuck.

    When everyone but Hannah and James gets held up in an airport snarl, it leaves them stuck together for four days, making Hannah’s already problematic trip a whole lot harder to face. Especially because she comes bearing more than just gifts…

     

    Problem Number Three -- Falling In Love (again)

    As the former lovers try to make the best of the Christmas snafu, they soon realize that the best things in life can’t be planned and sometimes love is sweeter the second time around. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateDec 1, 2020
    ISBN9780062993021
    Author

    JILL SHALVIS

    New York Times bestselling author Jill Shalvis lives in a small town in the Sierras full of quirky characters. Any resemblance to the quirky characters in her books is, um, mostly coincidental. Look for Jill's bestselling, award-winning books wherever romances are sold and visit her website for a complete book list and daily blog detailing her city-girl-living-in-the-mountains adventures.

    Read more from Jill Shalvis

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      Book preview

      Mistletoe in Paradise - JILL SHALVIS

      title page

      Contents

      Cover

      Title Page

      Contents

      Prologue

      Chapter 1

      Chapter 2

      Chapter 3

      Chapter 4

      Chapter 5

      Chapter 6

      Chapter 7

      Chapter 8

      Chapter 9

      Chapter 10

      Chapter 11

      Chapter 12

      Chapter 13

      Epilogue

      About the Author

      Also by Jill Shalvis

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      Prologue

      Christmas, twelve years ago

      Fourteen-year-old Hannah Banfield stood at the very edge of a cliff. Not a mental cliff, which would have been less terrifying. Nope, she was stupid enough to be standing on an actual rocky bluff, toes hanging off as she stared down at the Caribbean blue-green sea swirling hundreds of thousands of feet below her.

      Twenty, came the amused male voice at her side. It’s twenty feet.

      She slid her gaze to James Webber, ancient and full of wisdom at age fifteen. We’re going to die.

      Tall, gangly, his messy dark brown hair weeks past needing a cut, he flashed her his crooked smile. His board shorts hung nearly to his knees, one of which was scraped and bleeding from when she’d accidentally tripped him on the hike up here. We’re not going to die, he said.

      How do you know?

      Because I won’t let it happen.

      She closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath at his low but firm tone of confidence, letting it fill her. When the humid, salty sea breeze warmed her, she opened her eyes and stalled by looking around her at the small private island where their families always spent at least one day of their Christmas getaway. She took in the bright white sand, palm trees, and lush green bluffs, all of which were just about as far away from her snowy mountain view at home in the California Sierras as she could get.

      James nudged her. You know how I know we’re going to live? Because Jason did. Look.

      They both eyed James’s brother in the water below, waving wildly up at them. A year older than James, Jason was their fearless leader, and as such, he’d jumped first.

      Their moms were BFFs. The women had grown up together, but as adults now lived on opposite coasts in the United States. Since Hannah’s stepdad, Harry, was a year-round captain of a charter yacht, the two families booked the ship before Christmas every year to be together. They had what was called a bareboat charter, meaning they did all the work of the crew to make it affordable, not that any of them had ever minded. Well, except maybe her mom, who didn’t like to cook and clean off the boat, much less on it.

      For James and Jason, the annual trip was a chance to get away from the cold New York winters. But for Hannah, it was so much more. The weeklong cruise from Miami to St. Thomas and back was a place where she could be a kid, since her life in Real World was very different from that in Vacation World. For this one week she got to be . . . well, free. Happy. Plus, she considered the Webber brothers her two closest friends, trusting them more than anyone else.

      You’ve got this, Hannah Banana, James said softly.

      He might be the wildest, most adventurous person she knew, but he’d never put her in danger. So she drew a deep breath and stared down at the water one last time. She wanted to do this, wanted so much to show that she could be spontaneous and fun, too, though she wasn’t. Were there sharks in the Caribbean Sea? There were, right? She swallowed hard. I don’t think I can, she whispered.

      Hey. Hey, it’s okay. His bigger, warmer hand slid into hers and squeezed. But you know I’ve got you, though, right?

      She looked into his warm blue-green eyes, the same color as the sea below, and just like that, she believed. He always had her. Maybe all of the other people in her life had let her down, but never him. Not once.

      So she gave a slow nod.

      Smart enough not to give her another second to think about it, he simply jumped, tugging her with him into the balmy Caribbean air.

      Chapter 1

      Four days before Christmas, present-day

      Hannah stood on a dock in Miami in front of the ship aptly named The Therapist. The seventy-foot motor yacht, a good decade past its prime, was decorated for the holidays within an inch of its life. Staring at it with dread, she wished she hadn’t chosen this month to cut back on wine. Because she’d taken two planes, a train, and an automobile to get here, and worrying about blood pressure and heart disease was taking a back seat to what she was going to face on the ship.

      Unfortunately, she was on a mission, and sucky as that mission was, she owed it to the man who’d raised her to do this in person, even if her palms were sweating.

      And the backs of her knees.

      The mission—tell her stepdad, Harry, that her mom wanted a divorce, and by the way, the papers were right here in her bag for him to sign. Oh, and Merry Christmas.

      Easy peasy.

      Except she loved Harry. He was the only dad she’d ever known. He’d brought fun and adventure and humor into her life when there’d been so little before him. She loved his slightly run-down but beloved yacht, the one she’d spent every Christmas on for as long as she could remember to escape winter by sailing through the Caribbean.

      At least until six years ago.

      Ahoy, Smalls! came Harry’s booming voice from the boat deck. He stood there in Bermuda shorts, a brightly flowered short-sleeved shirt, and a Santa hat on his Albert Einstein hair, looking like . . . home. Come aboard, he called out, this baby ain’t going to sail herself.

      Knowing the truth of that, Hannah laughed, then opened her purse and pulled out a big red bow, setting it on top of her head as proof she’d come through on her word that this year, her holiday gift to him was her presence on The Therapist.

      She headed up the passerelle, the platform from dock to ship, which in itself felt odd. For all the years she’d come here, she’d never once walked onboard. Nope, she’d flat-out run, racing to pick out her cabin in order to get the one she wanted—the one with the porthole—before it was snatched up by James and Jason.

      But that was then. Things had changed.

      In a big way.

      At the end of the passerelle, she kicked off her boots and dropped them into the waiting shoe basket. As was traditional on boats like this, shoes weren’t allowed, and as she stood there in her bare feet, taking it all in, a pit grew in the bottom of her stomach. It’d been this very boat that had eventually caused the split between Harry and her mom, almost ten years ago now. Harry had been gone almost all the time on charters, and finally her mom had said, It’s me or the boat. Harry had chosen the boat.

      By the time he’d realized his mistake, her mom had moved on.

      Hannah had worked hard to not judge Harry for picking the boat over his family. Her mom was a difficult woman. Hannah got that. Well, mostly she got that.

      Seen from the perspective of Hannah’s adult eyes, The Therapist was a little rough around the edges now, but was still pretty amazing, with its five-foot cockpit extension, huge teak-top deck half-covered and half-open

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