Merritt Ashby came home to Peppermint Falls for one last Christmas. She has no intention of staying.

At fifty, newly divorced and facing an empty nest, Merritt has a plan: restore the Vermont cottage her grandmother left her, sell it as soon as the will allows, and get back to her life in Hartford.

Then she finds Nate Holloway standing in the driveway.

Nate was Merritt’s first love—the man she left behind when she chose a future outside their tiny hometown. Now he’s fifty-one, frustratingly handsome, and the contractor her grandmother secretly hired before she died to restore the family’s three Christmas cottages.

Nan left one final condition: the cottages must be made whole before Merritt or her sisters can sell.  Which means spending the weeks before Christmas repairing Mistletoe Cottage alongside the one man Merritt has spent three decades trying not to remember.

But as Christmas draws closer, old traditions return, and Mistletoe Cottage begins to feel like home again.  She came home planning to sell a cottage and return to Hartford. Instead, she may have found the one thing she never expected—a reason to stay.

Titles in the Peppermint Falls series include:  Mistletoe Cottage ~ Cocoa Cottage ~ Peppermint Cottage ~

This is a no-spice romance, perhaps with closed-door or fade-to-black scenes. Tension and kisses might be involved.

Title:  Mistletoe Cottage
Series:  Peppermint Falls #1
Author:  Liv Hollis
Published:  October 1, 2026
My Rating:  4.5 stars

Mistletoe Cottage is the first novella in the Peppermint Falls series.  It’s sort of short, definitely sweet, and packs a powerful emotional punch in a second-chance romance that easily swept me in and captured my heart.  Three sisters chose to leave their childhood home in Peppermint Falls years ago, but now they need to return and face not only the passing of their beloved grandmother… but perhaps her long-overdue matchmaking shenanigans as well.  Nan might be gone, but her presence, her influence, and her not-always-subtle hints remain for Merritt, Rachel, and Jenna to feel and follow… or sell and leave.  The choice is theirs alone… but is it really?

I loved Merritt and Nate’s romance.  High school sweethearts, it was almost a foregone conclusion they’d build a life together… except one wanted to leave for the outside world, and the other wanted, perhaps even needed to stay.  In the end, they were teenagers who saw life differently than the fifty-something adults they are today, so they made choices, and life moved on.  Differently, perhaps, but not without regrets.  Maybe it’s time to see if “might have been” can turn into a future for them both.  Watching them reconnect, seeing the sisters return home and begin to get to know them as well was a delightful experience.  Their story is well-written, so emotional, and definitely no spice.  I had fun here, and I’ll be following this series/trilogy because now I need to know more.  If this sounds like your kind of Christmas Romance, then you’d love Mistletoe Cottage.

*I received an e-ARC of this novel from the author or the author’s team via Booksprout, and I sincerely thank them for their trust. I chose to leave a review with my personal opinion of this book.*

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