Hiding From Christmas: Off-the-Grid Christmas Book 1: A steamy holiday romantic escape
About this ebook
He’s been hiding from the world since he lost his family in a brutal attack.
She’s just hiding from her family for the holidays.
What happens when they find each other?
Elle
I couldn’t face the piteous glances of my family over the holidays after my fiancé Austin unceremoniously dumped me. I was too tame, too awkward, too vanilla, too risk averse. Glad he took five years to figure that out.
I’m devastated. Humiliated. And angry. I told Mom I couldn’t bear the thought of coming home for the holidays. I’d rather be alone. Anything was better than their sympathy, but my own company didn’t promise to be any better. That’s why I jumped at the chance to visit my eccentric aunt Muriel in a remote village on the West coast of Mexico.
Joe
No one would call my solitary life here uncomplicated, but on the surface it’s simple enough. After seven years in exile, I’m used to my routine and my solitude, though my grief walks beside me like a silent companion. As much as I might like to go back to my old life, I could never put the people I trust, love and depend upon at risk.
Never again.
I’m regularly reminded that the cost would be too high. Especially this time of year when a cruel gift arrives from my nemesis. My sixth Christmas alone in Mexico. The anniversary of the date I lost everything.
I’m expecting the package, right on schedule. But I’m not expecting the clumsy, beautiful, bewildering blonde that crashes into my world and turns it inside out.
* * *
This book was previously published as part of the limited edition Secret Santa: A Christmas Romance Collection charity anthology. This version contains a brand new bonus epilogue.
About the author
USA Today Best-selling author MaryAnn Clarke is a Chatelaine Grand Prize winner and Next Generation Indie Book Award finalist for The Art of Enchantment, first in the Life is a Journey series about young women on journeys abroad who discover themselves and fall in love while getting embroiled in someone else’s problems. Her Having it All series is about professional women struggling to balance the challenge and fulfillment of their careers with their search for identity, love, family and home. The first book in her newest small town steamy romance series, The Reporter’s UNLIKELY Reunion, won runner up in the 2024 Indie Writer’s Project Contest.
Always eager to fill blank pages and empty canvases with ideas swirling in her head, MaryAnn set out to write emotionally engaging stories that walk a tight rope between intelligent Women’s Fiction and heart-warming Romance.
A polymath who studied Fine Arts, Urbanism, Architecture and Gerontology at university on both coasts of Canada, she turned to her first love, writing stories, when she realized she could have more fun with fewer rules as an author, than working in an office as an architect, or in a university as a researcher. When not writing, she meditates while hiking wooded mountain trails, does yoga and Pilates to fend off decrepitude, reads eclectically, contemplates wormholes, experiments with painting abstract expressionism, kills plants and tries not to burn dinner while solving her next plot problem. Now that her chick has flown the coop, Clarke lives on beautiful Vancouver Island, Canada with her husband and cats. Although she knows she lives in Paradise, she still loves traveling the world in search of romance, art, good food and new story inspiration.
