Only December by Noelle Adams is a Christmas-themed novella featuring an age-gap romance between a widowed philosopher and a freelance housekeeper. It’s a sweet, low angst read with some spicy scenes but isn’t particularly memorable.

Mona is a housekeeper who takes on a variety of jobs at will. Most of them are short term, many include logistical planning, house organization (like getting rid of clutter), and general all-round housekeeping tasks. She was supposed to be taking a vacation after several months of hard work, but she couldn’t resist taking on one more client for the month of December. The task involves giving the couple who normally take care of the house a couple weeks of vacation before getting ready for eighteen family and friend guests for Christmas week. Mona is very comfortable with the type of tasks required for this kind of situation, and the money offered for the job is too good to pass up.

When she meets her employer, Douglas, he is definitely the reclusive type. He spends a lot of time in his study, writing and reading. He’s very wealthy and lives in a beautiful, large house on a lake, so it’s no surprise that he has regular household help. Mona feels that Douglas is missing out on things by sticking to his study so much and offers to help him break out of a rut by doing something with her every day. They are alone for the first couple of weeks of her residency and as she draws him out of his shell, she finds that he’s really an interesting fellow – and he’s definitely very attractive. One thing leads to another, and they become intimate. But the guests will arrive soon, and Mona’s only there for December. Can a holiday fling turn into a real-life romance?

There are certainly aspects of this story that I enjoyed. The house and setting sound beautiful and I enjoyed both Mona and Douglas’s characters. In a change from the author’s normal style, while the story is related from Mona’s point of view, we get some sense of what Douglas is experiencing as he’s started journalling, so all his thoughts about Mona are written on the page. I appreciated getting his perspective in this way. Douglas is quite romantically vulnerable, having not been with anyone since his wife died ten years before (and she had been his first and only lover) so the love scenes between him and Mona are touching and emotional. After spending so many hours alone, the return of the regular housekeepers and the Christmas guests is an abrupt return to reality. I’ve got some quibbles with how the second act plays out (and it’s definitely an insta-love story) but the pair get their expected happy ending. It’s not my favourite Christmas/Holiday story by this author – that would be Christmas at Eden Manor, a linking book for the Heirs of Damon and Eden Manor series which is also an age-gap romance and made my Best of 2016 list. But Only December may satisfy a sweet tooth for holiday fluff.