“God no.” Grady wasn’t sure he could put up with another ninety minutes of schmaltz. Or Suzanne being all soft and sentimental beside him, reminding him of his mom. “I think we’ve got enough to go on, don’t you? Awful his-and-her matching Christmas sweaters, snowmen, cookie baking, ice sculptures, snow angels.”

“It’s always good to have comparison data, though. Hell—” She looked over her shoulder as she made her way to the television with the DVD. “It’s practically scientific.”

Grady shot her a lukewarm smile, not feeling remotely scientific with her ass once again distracting him. Unless it’s anatomy. Part of him wanted to pull the plug here and now, but part of him was actually enjoying the company.

No, he didn’t understand why.

He was happy with his solitary life; he didn’t need company. But sitting next to Suzanne, sharing his evening with someone other than himself, had been…nice. The light lilt of her laugh had been easy on his ear, and she smelled like peach cobbler.

Which was seriously fucking addictive. Who needed crystal meth when there was Annie’s peach cobbler?

The movie opened with a note down at the bottom of the screen letting viewers know that the set designer had hand made all the wreaths in the movie. “Uh-oh.” Grady glanced sideways. “I have a bad feeling about this.”

A feeling that was absolutely spot-on. Within the first three scenes, there’d been enough wreaths to put one on every front door in America. He’d given up counting them.

“Looks like we’re going to need more wreaths,” he said.

She slid a side glance at him. “It is a little over the top, isn’t it?”

The shot cut to another scene on the front porch of the heroine’s house, which had not one, not two, not three, not even four but five wreaths. Five. All arranged artfully together like Christmas and the Olympics had given birth.

“Jesus,” he said. “Do you think the set designer was high?”

“I don’t know. I bet she’s suffering from irreparable carpal tunnel, though.”

When the shot pulled back to reveal the entire street had the same configuration of wreaths on their doors, Grady had taken all he could bear without some alcoholic fortification.

“Okay…I’m going to need some hard liquor to get through the rest of this,” he announced. Making his way to the teak cabinet he’d found in a bazaar in Turkey, he opened the chest-height doors. “I’m a bourbon guy. What’s your poison?”

For a moment, she looked hesitant, like she was going to decline, but then she said, “I like bourbon.”