A Summer Christmas

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She pulled him out of a rip. Then she told her mother he was her boyfriend. Bronte Callister is the captain of the Tallow Bay surf club, on a long beach on the New South Wales coast. It's two weeks before Christmas, it's thirty-four degrees, and her ex-fiancé is marrying somebody else at the club on Saturday. The whole town is waiting to watch her watch him. Wes Harland is a fire investigator from California on a three-month exchange. He walks straight past the flags into the only rip on the beach on a Friday afternoon, and she has to go in after him in front of forty people. The next night, at the club Christmas party, her mother shouts across two hundred people that he's Bronte's boyfriend. He puts his arm round her and doesn't let go. He has his reasons. Somebody has been lighting small fires on the headland every few Saturdays, each one closer to the old club boatshed, and in a town that won't talk to outsiders, a local girlfriend opens doors. Then the club's tower fund turns out to be empty. Eighty-six thousand dollars, raised by three Christmas raffles, is gone. And the only record of who held the card is in a filing cabinet in the boatshed. A Summer Christmas is a fake-dating romance with a real mystery. It has a Santa who arrives on a jet ski, a Christmas Day cricket match on the sand, a roast dinner in thirty-four degrees, and a cockatoo who repeats everything he has heard, including the one thing somebody didn't want repeated. For readers who want: • A fake relationship with rules on a napkin, and the rules breaking one by one • A mystery solved with a stopwatch, a bank printout and an exercise book in pencil • Australia at Christmas: surf, sausage rolls, carols on the sand and a hot westerly • A heroine who saves people for a living, and a hero who learns to be saved • A happy ending that has to be earned A standalone novel with a happy ending. Sensual, not explicit: one love scene, implied and never described. Mild language. A bushfire and a burning building, with no one killed.