The Christmas Committee Clause

Two neighbors want the same Christmas reunion and run it in different ways, under a sunset clause that expires at midnight on December twenty-third.

Product photographer Leah Price has one last December in Dunford, New York: finish packing her late mother's apartment, close the sale in January, and start her new studio job in Albany. When longtime organizer Connie Webb breaks her hip, sixteen-unit Barton House is left without anyone to run its Christmas reunion. Leah agrees to co-chair it with the neighbor upstairs, and the next morning she puts the endpoint in writing: the committee ends at midnight on December twenty-third, and no role carries forward into next year.

Freelance theater sound engineer Ben Navarro has rented upstairs for five years, and he knows what the building loses if former residents stop coming back. He signs Leah's one-page agreement to keep the doors open, even as a six-week January touring offer forces him to confront how easily he gives away his evenings to jobs nobody asked him to take.

Between loaning her mother's walnut dining table, sorting old reunion photographs, and staging a mock arrival where Ben plays a returning guest to test Leah's program, their competing methods turn into dinners, easy teasing, and an attraction neither wants to pack away.

When January pulls them in two different directions, event success cannot buy them a future. To build something that lasts past Christmas Eve, Leah has to keep the job and the move she chose and stop trying to earn them by making everyone happy first, and Ben has to prove he can hand off the room and choose a life with her.

This book includes explicit, open-door love scenes between two consenting adults.