The Mistletoe Protocol

The only thing Alison Adams and Bryce Stevens have agreed on is that they're competing for the same money. Hartwell Polytechnic's Christmas fundraiser has them down as a couple.

It's a registration error with one excellent feature. Couples get scheduled introductions to donors. Alison needs funding to take her prosthetic hand into clinical trials, and Bryce knows how hard it is to get anyone to stay after a demonstration. They can leave their names on the same line, show up together through Christmas Eve, and pitch their own work. They'll just have to agree on when they supposedly started dating. The faculty group chat is already taking bets.

Between an ugly-sweater party that calls for a soldering iron and an afternoon on the frozen campus pond, Alison discovers that the engineer who once taught a robot to juggle has been paying remarkably close attention to her work. Bryce finds himself building a little mechanical mistletoe in the basement shop, where there's nobody to applaud. With their best chance at funding riding on the Christmas Eve Showcase, the two rivals have good reason to keep up appearances. It's the time they spend together when nobody's looking that makes the arrangement hard to walk away from.

A tender, slow-burn, closed-door romance.