Do I need to read the other novellas in the Under the Mistletoe collection first?

No. Merry Ever After is Tessa Bailey's own complete, standalone story within a five-novella Amazon Original Stories collection (alongside entries by Ali Hazelwood, Olivia Dade, Alexandria Bellefleur, and Alexis Daria). Each novella has different characters and can be read independently in any order.

How long is Merry Ever After?

It's a short novella — about 58 pages, meant to be read in a single sitting — rather than a full-length novel, consistent with the other entries in the Under the Mistletoe collection.

Merry Ever After

Reader reviews of Merry Ever After

Sienna Cowen · 2026-08-13T06:28:21.000000Z

I picked up Merry Ever After because the first book in this collection wasn't too bad and I have heard good things about Tessa Bailey. But in my opinion, this was just not it. Despite this being a Christmas book, there was no Christmas, which just seemed strange to be. Instead, it was about how large on man could possibly be and how quickly I could finish (and not in the good way).

Novella Contemporary Romance Romance

Pages: 58
Published: 2024
Language: English

Synopsis

Evie Crowe has moved to a small town to start over as a single mother. She works at a thrift shop by day, and in her spare time she chases a quiet ambition: taking secondhand clothes apart and sewing them into designs of her own. Romance is not on her list.

Luke Ward is a big, soft-spoken farmer with one persistent problem, which is that no pair of jeans ever fits him. He keeps coming into her shop anyway, and the excuse of alterations soon wears thin. What starts as a fitting turns into a quick, flirtatious holiday fling.

Luke has other plans for it. He has decided he wants the fling to last, while Evie, still rebuilding, has to decide what she is willing to let in.

This is a contemporary small-town romance with a lot of banter and an explicit, spicy heat level. It is short, a novella that reads in a single sitting, and the pace is quick and the mood warm. It was released in November 2024 as one of five standalone holiday romances in the Amazon Original Stories collection Under the Mistletoe, and it can be read without the others.

9 reviews