happened here—heartbreak or falling in love or losing a loved one—that soul will stick around too. But your aunt was the only person who died in her room for a good seventy-five years.”
“Ooookay? So I can face the psychic residue of total strangers or the psychic residue of a poor woman who was lonely and bitter and pissed off that she was locked up in this mausoleum with no company and no help. Which one ever shall I choose?”
Ouch. “How do you know she was lonely and bitter and pissed off?” Angel asked plaintively. He liked to think they’d achieved a certain rapport in the later years, a certain job satisfaction, as it were. He’d certainly missed her when she’d passed. He’d even mourned her passing, although he seemed to exist with the certainty that she was much happier now.
“Because I’m lonely, bitter, and pissed off already,” Tucker snapped. “And I just got here.”
“Well, not too lonely,” Angel sneered, wishing he could get that vision of Tucker, sleepy and sex-sated, out of his mind, but it kept playing back on a loop. There was a certain… touchability to Tucker’s body, although Angel had no memories of ever being able to touch.
Tucker leveled a flat gaze at him. “You go ahead and think that’s what you saw,” he said, no inflection in his voice whatsoever. “In the meantime, show me to my room. I’ll take the one without Aunt Ruth, thank you very much.”
“Of course,” Angel mumbled, feeling shamed for no good reason at all.
Tucker grunted. “Do you have a name?” he asked after a moment.
“Angel,” he said, brightening. “That… that is my name.” Because that’s what Ruth had called him, right?
“You don’t sound too sure,” Tucker said suspiciously, and Angel fought the urge to just disappear.
“Your aunt called me Angel for fifty years,” he said with dignity. “You may call me Angel too.”
Tucker grunted. “Of course,” he muttered, and Angel had to fight the impulse to thunk his head against a wall. For one thing, his head would probably go through the wall again, and Tucker had made it clear he’d had enough of that.
Don’t Touch That, Dammit!
TUCKER WAS exhausted.
Sex for epiphanies usually did that to him—it was one of the reasons he’d been so dependent on his aunt Ruth’s generosity and his parents’ inheritance. Besides never knowing when he’d have to duck out on work, there was the fact that his sex life would literally kill him if he didn’t take a day to rest.
Between that and the damned doorknob, he felt like he’d dragged his ass after his annoyingly obtuse guide through at least three miles of dark, psychically burdened tunnels in a tour of the old hotel. Finally they ended up back near the kitchen in order to find the one room that was not filigreed, curlicued, paisleyed, or cabbage-rosed to goddamned death.
“What?” Tucker asked grumpily, taking in the plain twin bed with a wooden frame, a single blanket, and hospital-white bedsheets. “Are these the maid’s quarters or something?”
“The live-in nurse’s,” Angel said, apparently not getting the irony. “Ruth had cleansed the entire room the year before, so she stripped it down and ordered the furniture. The nurse cleaned out everything before she left, and she seemed like a happy girl….”
Tucker set his suitcases down, ran his fingers over the top of the clothes bureau, and closed his eyes. “She’s off to get married,” he said, smiling because weddings still made him happy. “And she loved Aunt Ruth, even if she thought the old bat was looney tunes.” He grimaced. “Abi the nurse’s words, not mine. But yeah. She was innocuous enough. I’ll be fine here.” Being an empath had its uses sometimes—getting a reading like that was one of them.
The room really was stripped down—the wallpaper had been removed and wood paneling installed, and the floor had been sanded to boards and then stained. Plain wood, spartan and unfettered with tragedy.
“It’s like she made it for me,” Tucker muttered. He toed off his shoes and placed them neatly at the foot of the bed, then pulled off his shirt and his jeans and folded them loosely to put on top of the dresser.
“What are you doing?” Angel sounded scandalized. “You’re not going to… to….” He made vague motions that got really specific just as he—ghostly apparition that he was—blushed.
Tucker squinted at him. He was looking less and less like Damie by the minute, and something about his slightly pointier features was getting more and more appealing.
“No,