Mar'Li was dead, to begin with--dead gorgeous anyway.With his glittering green skin and unfathomably sweet nature, the eight-foot tall alien handyman has me mesmerized from the moment I meet him. It's a great distraction from the fact that every other human on this stupid planet has found their perfect "mate."Me? I hate it here. I'm a regular old Scrooge. Yet I'm the one putting together a good old-fashioned Dickensian Christmas party for everyone.When Mar'Li drops into my room, rattling chains through the air duct, I have questions. But he's got some too--about the human definition of kissing, which I'm only too happy to demonstrate.Only problem is his species doesn't mate. Or, well, they do but they--to put it kindly--"hit it and quit it." So me getting my very own alien mate is out of the question.What's worse, the overly cheery shapeshifter is the one person helping me put this stupid holiday celebration together. It wouldn't be so bad if his culture wasn't so frank about their baser desires--and if Mar'Li would stop trying to cheer me up with trips to the Holodeck to show me my Christmas past.I don't want to be just a plaything. Even if I do wonder what his Christmas spirit feels like under my fingers.Deck the Holograms is a reverse grumpy/sunshine adaptation of A Christmas Carol, with a lonely interior decorator FMC as Scrooge, a shapeshifting sucker-fingered alien as the visiting spirits, and the wackiness of a Holodeck that operates off of the inconsistency of human memory. This is the final book in the Regency Alien Planet series, and yes, we're releasing them out of order here.
