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Little Bandit Press
September 25, 2026


A Mustang River Christmas

It might be getting colder in Mustang River, but in this cozy Christmas novella things between chef Laney Forrester and ranch hand Pike Malone the nights are starting to heat up...

Laney Forrester has never met a challenge she couldn’t tackle with determination and sheer force of will. So when she agrees to co-chair Painted Ridge Resort’s charity Christmas displays—and create a spectacular gingerbread replica of the resort for the lobby—she’s confident she’ll figure it out.

There’s just one problem. Laney may be a talented chef, but she is definitely not a pastry chef. And with Christmas fast approaching, her masterpiece is looking more like a holiday disaster.

Then Pike Malone comes to her rescue. The charming ranch hand with the easy smile was once the executive pastry chef at a luxury Wyoming resort. He agrees to help Laney after hours, on one condition—she gives his twenty-two-year-old daughter, Chloe, a chance to train in the Painted Ridge kitchen.

Laney is happy to agree. She and Pike have had electric chemistry from the start, and after love cost her her livelihood, her home and her heart, a hot holiday fling is exactly what she needs.

But Pike’s past is more complicated than anyone knows. An injury ended his career and sent him spiraling, costing him his marriage and his relationship with his daughter. He came to Mustang River hoping to rebuild what he lost—and he can’t afford another mistake.

As late nights over gingerbread become intimate conversations, and intimate conversations lead them into bed, Laney begins to want more than the uncomplicated affair she planned. But can two people still carrying the wounds of the past build something strong enough to last beyond Christmas?

Also In this Series:

  • Stone Cold Cowboy

    June 1, 2026

  • Last Chance Cowboy

    July 14, 2026

  • Slow Hands Cowboy

    August 18, 2026

  • Wild Card Cowboy

    September 22, 2026

Excerpt

Chapter One

Laney Forrester was having a royal icing-related issue. No matter how hard she tried, she wasn’t getting the right combination of flavor and the cement quality that she needed to get this mock gingerbread house to hold itself together.

She had never met a single thing that she couldn’t DIY. There wasn’t a video online that would go unsearched, there wasn’t a stone she would leave unturned when it came to figuring out information so she could just do the damn thing herself.

But she was starting to feel like she was in over her head, which she hated.

It reminded her of long nights trying to get a business plan together, trying to get her restaurant up and running, trying to move out of the realm of food trucks and pop-ups, only to have her ex continually telling her that she wasn’t good enough, that she was never going to make it. That she couldn’t do it. Only to have that be revealed as true when he stole the money that she had saved up for the deposit on her own brick and mortar, and left her absolutely in the lurch.

She had an allergy to failure. Especially failure that she shouldn’t have to own as hers. Unfortunately, even though the restaurant collapsing hadn’t been her fault, she bore the scars and consequences.

She liked her life here in Mustang River, she really did, but it didn’t mean that the pain of that previous failure didn’t linger.

It didn’t mean that it didn’t affect her. Which was perhaps why she was now sitting in the kitchen of the Painted Ridge dining room covered in icing.

She was not a pastry chef.

Agreeing that her very first gingerbread house that wasn’t just something she was doing at a kitchen table should be a giant display for the gingerbread jubilee that the ranch was hosting, set up in the lobby, a scale model of the resort, had been foolish on her part. She could admit that now.

Now that she was in the middle of icingpocalypse.

Her gingerbread tiles weren’t holding, and she could admit the miniature frame she’d built out of wood was…crooked. Which was so irritating because she knew how to use power tools. She wasn’t a novice at building or remodeling. She’d done enough of her own renovations on the three different food trucks she’d built out, and on the restaurant that she’d lost to be pretty confident in her carpentry skills. But somehow this was making her a worse baker, and a worse construction worker.

She growled and looked at the time. She had a job interview soon. She didn’t like being the boss. That was one thing she struggled with when it came to owning her own business. Mainly because she wasn’t afraid of being a hardass, and sometimes she was too much of one. And often, she didn’t straddle the line well between good leader and asshole.

Or at least, that’s how people perceived her.

She had learned a long time ago that when the highest compliment people who knew you could pay was: you don’t care who you make mad. It wasn’t really that much of a compliment.

She looked at the application that she had printed off and had sitting on the counter.

Chloe Malone.

Twenty-two years old, applying for a sous chef position.

That was young, and she didn’t have much in the way of experience outside culinary school. Though that she’d been to culinary school at all felt like a minor miracle. But that also meant that she surely wasn’t local. Laney was stereotyping, but in the few months since she’d moved her, she’d discovered a pattern.

Locals were often eager but powered by enthusiasm rather than expertise. And if she did manage to find a fully qualified candidate from elsewhere, she could be certain they’d be gone expeditiously.

People would move to small towns because they romanticized them, and then they would discover that they found them very boring. Or, they would decide that they finally needed to leave their small town, because it wasn’t doing it for them anymore.

Whatever the reason, she found that keeping employees was not the simplest thing out here in the middle of nowhere.

The job market was competitive, and when they found people who were committed to staying in the area, they found people that wanted to stay, but that was just one of those things. It was hard to tell right off the jump if somebody was a stayer or a goer. And that put Laney in situations like this.

Not the icing. The icing was still all her fault.

She stood back and looked at the prototype that she was fiddling with. She was going to have to start construction on the real deal soon. The opening of the gingerbread jubilee and Christmas tree extravaganza was upon them.

Well, she had a week or so.

They would be putting gingerbread houses and trees made by people in the community on display in one of the venue barns at the resort. And the large gingerbread house that Laney was making was going to be set up here in the lobby, sparkling brilliantly and smelling delicious, if she could manage to get her stuff together.

She had a great sensibility for cooking. For flavors.

Her gingerbread tasted amazing. It was the part where it had to be load-bearing gingerbread that was causing her issues. But because Laney was somebody who also knew how to build furniture, she had figured that she could wed her expertise with cooking, with her building skills.

No such luck so far.

She took a step back, and ran into something hard, solid, and human.

Her stomach plummeted, and she caught the scent of a spicy cologne, along with the scent of hay and skin before she turned.

She should have known.

Because there was only one man, one person, that she was that attuned to on the ranch.

“Pike. You scared me to death.”

“Sorry about that.”

Pike and all his charm had been busy working her up into a fantasy frenzy for the last few months. She was physically so, so into him. He was gorgeous. Dark brown hair with gray at the temples, smile lines that made her knees go weak. And he was competent. She had watched him do work on the ranch, and he was just good at everything. People didn’t take him seriously because of his demeanor, but she knew real, bone-deep competence when she saw it. She also knew a leader.

She worked in professional kitchens, had spent the last twenty years of her life doing that. They were fierce, male-dominated environments, and it was where her own ferocity had bloomed and grown.

She could tell when somebody had head chef energy.

Pike had that kind of energy. It made it feel strange that he was here, on the ranch, working for other people, taking a back seat in the proceedings, and seeming happy to do so.

But, people contained multitudes.

Still, it was that leader in him that caused her stomach to tighten up whenever he was around. Feeling uncomfortable, or like someone had power over her had always made her mouthy. And Pike was no exception to that general rule. When he was around, she just said things.

“You ever going to give me that one-night stand?” she asked.

Might as well shoot her shot. He wouldn’t take it seriously, of course.

But she was serious.

She hadn’t had sex in months. The dissolution of her previous relationship still stung like it was fresh and she hadn’t even found anyone to blow of some steam with yet.

Being a chef was a high stress job and back in the Bay Area it had put her in the path of other people with high stress jobs who had the same ethos she did. Work hard, play hard. Get some whenever possible.

But then she’d gotten into a long term relationship, and that had twisted her up and bent her in so many ways she just wanted to feel like the Laney she’d been before all that.

Like Laney in her twenties who would have gotten a new tattoo and a new partner in less than twenty-four hours. Pike made her feel like that.

Like she wanted to be wild and lose her head for just a little bit.

He lifted his brows. Flirting with Pike aggressively was sort of how she interacted with him. And the best part was he didn’t really think she was serious. So she couldn’t embarrass herself. Except, she was absolutely serious, and if he took her up on it…

“Sorry, I have to work tomorrow. But I did come to ask a favor of you.”

That almost hurt. Pike was as dedicated to ignoring her advances as she was to making them. She had a feeling he thought she was doing a bit. She kind of was. But also if he said yes she’d do it in a heartbeat.

“A favor?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Not a sexual favor, though.”

“I’m afraid not.” He smiled, and she was almost sure that there was something like regret in his gray eyes. It made her stomach twist. “What the hell are you doing?”

She turned around and looked at the mess of gingerbread. “Oh. I’m making a gingerbread house for the jubilee.”

“It looks to me like you’re making a gingerbread mess.”

“I’m sorry, are you an expert?”

Something sharpened in his eyes then, and it was like a knife turning between her ribs. Oh. She had the sudden urge to take a step back and say yes, chef, and that was not an urge that overtook her very often. She had been the boss for a good long while. People said yes, chef, to her, not the other way around.

“I might be,” he said.

Shit. People didn’t say it like that if there was a possibility they weren’t an expert. She was well familiar with the sort who postured and tried to make a case for the fact that they were the best in whatever field they were in. Pike didn’t do that. And maybe that was why all along she had sensed there was something more to him. Maybe that was why, all along, she had sensed that he had hidden depths.

“Seriously, are you? Because I have gotten myself into a very deep hole.”

“That is a shame. And, I want to talk to you about the favor that I’d like, and then we can talk about your gingerbread house.”

“I kind of need to talk about the gingerbread house first.”

“Okay. I know how to make a gingerbread house. I don’t mean, like, a little gingerbread house that is going to sit on a table. I mean the kind they do at theme parks. The kind they do at massive, luxury hotels.”

“You agreed to take that on by yourself?”

“The team is going to help.”

“There is a fair amount of mathematics and engineering involved in that kind of thing.”

“I get that. I’m actually pretty good at that part.”

“But you’re not a pastry chef.”

“No. I’m not.”

“Isn’t that always the way. Your kind always thinks that you can just step right in and bake a cookie, because how hard can it be? Cooking is often a science experiment, culinary finger paint. Baking is a hard science. You have to have a firm understanding of that science if you’re going to make it work.”

He looked like a different person. Like an entirely new entity as he stood there lecturing her on the exacting nature of the art of baking. “I need you to agree to do the favor for me first. Because that’s time sensitive. And then afterward, you can look me up, and you can tell me if you want my help.”

“That feels out of order.”

“Chloe Malone,” he said, breezing right past everything she’d just said.

“Yeah, she’s coming in for a job interview today. Do you know her?”

“Yeah. I know her. She’s my daughter.”

For the second time in the space of thirty seconds, her perception of Pike was completely turned on its head.

He had a twenty-two-year-old daughter. Someone who was old enough to work in her kitchens. She supposed she was physically old enough to be Chloe’s mother, but as she was nobody but one cranky orange cat’s mother, she didn’t really think of herself that way.

Pike was only a few years older than her; she was pretty sure. Which meant he’d been a young father, and the number of follow up questions she had was monumental.

“She’s your daughter?”

“Yes.”

And then she felt… embarrassed. “I didn’t know you were married. Sorry. I probably shouldn’t tease you the way that I have been.”

He lifted a brow. “I’m not married. Like so many things in life, that story is complicated. But I’m not here to talk to you about that, I’m just here to talk to you about Chloe. I would really like for you to give a chance to her. I want her here. On the ranch. I want her to be able to live with me in Mustang River.”

“That’s great. But what if it doesn’t work out? Because that’s going to make things very complicated.”

“If it doesn’t work out, or you’re having issues with her, I just need you to tell me. Because if you’re having issues with her, I can probably help her figure out what she needs to change.”

Underlying this whole conversation was the obvious truth that Pike had experience in kitchens. Which meant that she could level with him.

“You know how high stress these environments are, I assume.”

“Yeah. I do. She just graduated from culinary school.”

“Yeah, I saw that on her resume. Culinary school. Must be fucking nice.”

“Right?” he asked. “Different life. Different opportunities available to her. Certainly than there were for me. Obviously than there were for you.”

She wanted to dig deeper into that, but also didn’t, because she shouldn’t go getting into the particulars of Pike.

Being attracted to him was one thing, enjoying a little bit of banter with him was one thing, getting to where she knew him was quite another. In this whole conversation, she had learned more about him than in any of their other conversations in the months past.

Not that they had ever talked about anything real. They had just been shooting the shit. That was what he liked to do, at least in her experience. This was the first time she’d ever encountered his intensity. His sincerity.

He was a father.

It was going to take her some time to come to terms with that.

“So if I hire your daughter, and it doesn’t work out, and I explain the whole situation to you, and you try to communicate to her in a way that you think I can’t, and it still doesn’t work out?”

“It’s your kitchen. You have to do the best thing for your kitchen. No hard feelings. I just want her to have a chance. She’s inexperienced, she knows things from a theoretical perspective, but she hasn’t worked in this environment for real yet. I think this is a good starting point.”

“I’m kind of tired of being people’s starting point,” she said. “It’s creating too much turnover.”

“Fair enough. But you hire young people, that’s what you’re going to get.”

“I know. I don’t like to be sexist, considering that I am a woman in the kitchen, but young girls particularly are a risk.”

“Don’t be sexist then. I’m just saying, give her a chance, and you’ll have backup from me if you need help figuring out how to manage her.”

She hesitated, because she didn’t necessarily want to take on a whole project. She hesitated, because she hadn’t really wanted to deal with the unknowns of hiring somebody so young. But she also wasn’t in a position where she could have rejected Chloe if they didn’t immediately vibe anyway.

She had to take the qualified applicants that she got. A lot of people wanted this job with no experience, and she didn’t have any time to train somebody from the ground up. If they couldn’t do mise en place, she didn’t have the time.

Culinary school would at least have taught Chloe the basics.

“All right. I’ll do it. For you.”

“Great. And don’t tell her that.”

“I’m not lying to her. That’s just going to come around and bite you in the ass, Pike.”

“How do you know?”

“Have you… met your daughter? Or any woman? Nobody wants to feel like they got a job because somebody else pushed for it, but they really don’t want to find out at a weird point later. I’m happy to tell her that you vouched for her. But I promise that’s the way that I’ll frame it. Still, I think she needs to know that you’re involved.”

“If you say so. Chef.”

She ignored the kick of arousal that flooded her veins when he said that. Chef. All sardonic and technically respectful but not at all, actually. “I do.”

“Great. Hopefully the interview goes well. I promised Chloe that I’d have dinner with her tonight, but you look me up, let me know if you want my help, and if so, I’ll meet you here tonight after hours.”

“Okay,” she said.

And then, Pike turned and walked away, leaving her standing in the kitchen by herself, feeling like she might have just hallucinated the whole thing. After that, she didn’t have very long to get ready for the interview. She washed all the icing off of her hands, and walked out into the dining room just in time for a young woman with the same brown hair as her dad, wide, earnest blue eyes, and a thin build walked in. She was dressed all in black, and had her hands clasped in front of her. Her hands were tattooed. She definitely already looked like she belonged in a kitchen.

“Hi,” she said, authoritative. She took a step forward and shook Laney’s hand. “I’m Chloe.”

“Nice to meet you. I’m Laney Forrester. I just want to tell you, your dad stopped by earlier. Told me that you’re great.”

The expression on Chloe’s face was hard to read. She wrinkled her nose, then smiled just a little bit, but at the same time, her eyebrows furrowed. “Well, that was nice of him. But I hope he didn’t need to do that.”

By the end of the interview, Laney was sure that he hadn’t, in fact, needed to do that. Chloe was competent and delightful, and definitely knew what she was doing. All her same reservations about somebody young persisted, but they were surmountable.

She offered Chloe the job on the spot.

After saying goodbye to her, and nailing down her start date, Laney went back into the kitchen and did exactly what Pike had suggested.

She Googled him.

And after reading everything she found, she sent him a text.

Yes. I want your help.

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