The Night (Love in O'Leary Book 5) by May Archer

Author:May Archer [Archer, May]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2019-12-06T08:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

Gideon

As I drove home through the total darkness that was early evening in late December, I couldn’t help but notice all the lights. Lights on every damn building in town, lights on all the trees going up my street, lights on the houses, lights on the fences. And for the first time in all the years I’d lived in O’Leary, I didn’t scoff or roll my eyes —much —because I had at least as much Christmas shit—yes, including lights—thrown around my own house.

It had started a week ago with Hazel’s Santa drawing tacked to my fridge. Simple enough, right? But I’d warned Hazel Christmas decorations were a slippery slope, and I’d been right.

The next day, while we were at the bakery eating cinnamon rolls topped with a level of frosting that literally gave me heart palpitations, Hazel had mentioned wistfully how pretty the little electric candles looked in the windows of the house across the street.

Sure enough, that evening someone in a red Santa suit had rung the doorbell, and we’d found a box of brand-new window candles sitting on the porch—battery operated LED candles, no less, like someone was determined not to let me ruin her fun with talk of fire hazards and electric bills.

Psssht. Like I would have.

Okay, possibly I would.

That night, Hazel had proudly presented me with another Santa drawing for my fridge—this one kind of manic-looking and surrounded by twinkling lights that Liam agreed looked a lot like firecrackers… though he might have just been humoring me.

On Saturday, Sam had come over to watch Hazel while I worked a very long and (thankfully) quiet shift, and Liam did more photo shoots. I’d gotten home to find Hazel and Sam had decorated the trees in front of my house with ornaments made of pinecones, birdseed, and peanut butter—“Which is basically like frosting for birds, when you think about it, Gideon!”—and my whole house smelled like Cal’s fresh-baked gingerbread cookies, since a “Santa” I was pretty sure was Parker had dropped off two dozen of them, along with a freaking tub of icing so Hazel could decorate them.

Liam had said, “Is it possible for a child to literally become sugar? This cannot be healthy,” and Hazel, with a cookie crammed in her mouth, had replied, “I totally disagree,” which might have been a more compelling denial if she hadn’t sprayed Liam with cookie crumbs as she spoke.

That night, another Santa drawing had gone up on the fridge, this one surrounded by beady-eyed birds and an army of staring, gaping zombies with endlessly grasping arms.

“Gideon, they’re gingerbread men,” Liam had snickered, his laughing green eyes meeting mine over the kitchen island as we ate burgers. “Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”

Sunday, Mr. and Mrs. Claus—aka, Bill and Dhann Nickerson—had sent over a variety of decorative pillows and blankets from the Books and More, which had resulted in a bit of a skirmish at my front door, with me insisting I wasn’t opening a mother-fa la la-ing home for displaced

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