I’m a long time fan of Zoe York and her Pine Harbour and spinoff Kincaids of Pine Harbour series (Love in a Sandstorm and Fearless at Heart are two of my favourites novels) and it’s always fun to revisit favourite characters and locales. That’s what led me to The Ex-Mas Breakup, starring Garrett Kincaid and Rory Minelli (relatives of characters from the aforementioned series). It’s a second-chance romance, with a good dose of holiday cheer and is spicy from the get-go.

Rory and Garrett have broken up. After years together, the strain of Rory’s decade-long single-minded focus on her career (she’s now the chief resident in ob/gyn at a local hospital and unsure where she’ll go after she finishes her residency) resulted in Garrett calling it quits in April. In August, after not having spoken – other than via a few text messages in the ensuing months – Rory can’t resist texting Garrett with a booty call request and he delivers (boy, does he ever deliver, cue the flames on the pages!) In September, and then in October, more messages, more hot sex. But it doesn’t mean they’re back together. Oh no, they can barely last for ninety minutes without getting into an argument, and sex alone isn’t going to fix their relationship.

In December, when Rory’s car dies and she reaches out to Garrett, it becomes clear that they’re going to end up driving home to Pine Harbour together for the holidays – meaning several hours spent in Garrett’s car, alone. And it turns out that neither of them has told their families they’ve broken up, so when they show up at Rory’s family home, a place where Garrett has been welcomed for years, it’s only natural that they get to share a bedroom – with only one bed. Faced with telling their families the truth and ruining Christmas (especially as one of Rory’s sisters is already going through a rough marriage patch), Rory and Garrett make a pact to pretend to be a couple through the holidays, with plans to ‘officially’ break up after, maybe even while still with the family so it’s all out in the open. But in the comforting embrace of family and away from the pressures of work, Rory and Garrett start to reconnect, and not just through sex. Can their relationship be mended for good?

As I said above, I enjoy visiting Pine Harbour and it was lovely to reconnect with so many familiar secondary characters. But don’t worry, if you haven’t read the others this still works fine as a standalone story. It’s full of lots of steamy scenes (like, really, a lot) as Garrett and Rory are long-time lovers and each knows what the other likes in bed. In a way the sex is almost too much, and I would have liked to see Garrett and Rory spend more time talking and less time figuring out how to give each other orgasms. But it’s clear that the reasons for their breakup were valid, as they’d lost the ability to communicate with each other. This holiday time is a chance for Garrett to really get his feelings out in the open, to explain why he made the decision to step away from their relationship, and for them to talk without arguing. There’s some silliness with Christmas gifts that I don’t think add to the story; I was more interested in the relationships between Rory and her family than the gifts they were getting. What I did like was seeing Garrett and Rory open up to each other emotionally again and reconnect. It’s clear that they still love each other and they’ve just lost their way, so this time together gives them a chance to turn things around. The happy ending is satisfying. If a spicy Christmas romance is what you’re looking for, you’ll definitely get your wish here and while this isn’t one of my favourites by this author, it’s still worth the read.