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Holly in turn held a stuffed turkey like she wanted to bash Declan over the head with it. “Christmas music is cheerful and uplifting. If your ears are bleeding, maybe you should see a doctor. Or an exorcist! Is it black ooze coming out, by any chance? If you’re possessed by a demon that hates Christmas, that would explain a lot.”
Merry snorted, ducking behind shelves of fall garland.
“I am not possessed, I’m just not a Christmas freak! It isn’t even Thanksgiving! Can’t you play smooth jazz like a normal human instead of this holly-jolly garbage?”
The man hated Christmas, the whole holiday season, Merry thought. She grinned at her silent paraphrasing from How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but it was true. Declan had taken over his father’s hardware store next door last year when his dad semi-retired, and apparently the walls between the businesses were thin. He’d complained about the music more than once and hadn’t stopped there. He’d been rather vocal that the tree lighting ceremony in the town square was a fire hazard, the light parade equated to a public disturbance, and that Evergreen Circle would cause a full-blown community power outage one day with its animatronics and blow-up displays. If he’d been a seventy-year-old curmudgeon, it would have been one thing, but he was the same age as Merry.
And boy, did he get on her sister’s one last nerve.
Holly held the stuffed turkey by the neck and Merry smothered a giggle. If that thing had been alive, her sister’s grip would have broken its neck.
“Who hurt you, Declan?” Holly cocked her head to the side. “Why are you the man who hates Christmas?”
“I don’t hate Christmas. I think there is a time and place for Christmas music and décor…like December.”
“That is your opinion. You have voiced it, I hear you, and now you can take your Grinchy behind back to your whosits and whatsits store.”
“It’s a hardware store!”
“I know!” Holly shouted, launching onto her tiptoes to stand nose to clavicle with him. “It’s from The Little Mermaid.”
“I’ve never seen it.”
Holly placed a hand on her chest and gasped. “No wonder you are such an angry-pants.”
Declan bent over Holly, his eyebrows snapped together. “I swear to God, Holly, I am going to dismantle your sound system if you don’t turn that shit off.”
“Go ahead and try, but my speakers will come back bigger and louder!” Holly finally whacked Declan with the turkey on the shoulder. “Now git, before your negative energy ruins Bublé for me.”
Declan roared, a guttural low growl that grew as his hands went up in the air. “Impossible woman!”
“Obnoxious miser!”
Declan slammed out of the shop and marched past the window where two scarecrows were kissing.
“Whew, I would not want to be his next customer,” Merry mused.
Holly smirked at Merry. “I swear, fighting with that man is the best foreplay.”
Merry sputtered. “You’re sleeping with Declan?”
“Of course not!”
“Thank God! I was going to commit you.”
Holly tilted her head at an angle, staring off. “Maybe if he shaved off the beard and had a personality transplant.” She shook herself, frowning. “Nope, never mind. Not gonna happen. I could never be with anyone that cantankerous. But arguing with him boils my blood until my whole body is tight and I just need one really good—” Her eyes rolled back in her head and she twitched as she let out a loud, high-pitched “oh!”
“You are disturbed.”
“You’re telling me you don’t have the best sex when you’re pissed off?”
“What’s sex?” Merry deadpanned.
“You haven’t been with anyone since that horse’s ass from Denver?”
“Killian. And no, I haven’t been with anyone since.”
Holly grabbed onto the side of the counter, as if the shock of Merry’s lack of bedroom antics had somehow knocked the wind out of her. “Are you sure it still works? It might squeak or crack from lack of use.”
