All the Rules of Heaven (All That Heaven Will Allow #1) - Amy Lane Page 0,19

for his duties, but apparently Tucker wanted leave to tear into the walls and change the world before Angel could even understand it.

It was infuriating. And Tucker? Tucker was two steps ahead of him, with or without his pleas to just please, for the love of all that was holy, slow down.

“Wow,” Tucker breathed, doing a slow pivot of the room. “Angel, look at this place. It’s like they just packed and left. I swear, there’s hardly any dust.”

Angel blinked. “That usually means the ghosts are busy,” he said, hoping Tucker would listen. “Agitated ghosts are unhappy ones. This could be a not-great sort of place to deal with your first—”

“Look!” Tucker interrupted without even slowing down. “The desk. Did you see the desk?”

“Yes, I see the desk where the letter was,” Angel said, disconcerted enough to blurt out the truth—the one that had so frightened Ruth.

“Really? You can read the visions in my head?”

Oh no! Tucker had only just gotten there. “Yes! But how did you—”

“Well it only makes sense,” Tucker said, and Angel wanted to cry with the simplicity of that acceptance. Oh God—how much easier it would have been between Angel and Ruth if the older woman had been able to see that he wasn’t trying to intrude on her mind. The ghosts were projected into his consciousness, like movies on a screen.

“If we’re working together,” Tucker continued, “you’ve got to see too, and you need me for something. But the desk—do you see it?”

Delicate scroll-footed maple wood, almost sensual with the curved facades and the narrow little “ankles” that attached the feet.

“It’s beautiful,” Angel said softly, skating an incorporeal finger over the surface. He frowned. It should have been humming with voices, this desk. It had sat there during the most intimate revelations of more than a hundred years of visitors to Daisy Place. It should have been a quieter, softer version of the doorknobs.

“It’s silent,” he whispered, not feeling a single hum. “Tucker, open the drawers. Is there something in here? Coating the wood? Embedded in it?”

Tucker frowned and turned away from wondering at the wallpaper and reverently finger-petting the antique quilts.

“The desk?” He held his hand over the wood just as Angel was doing. “That’s odd. It’s giving off the same vibe as the quilts. Sort of like it’s absorbed more energy than it’s emanating.” He pulled out the lower drawer and then closed it, shrugging when it proved empty. The one in the middle had antique stationery in it, as did the one on the top right. The bottom left had a hole punch that revealed nothing more to Tucker than a bored child and a ruined bus ticket. And so on, right up to the top middle.

Tucker reached out to pull on it and then snatched his hand back, as though from a stove. “It’s burning,” he hissed. “Freakishly hot. Angel, can you feel that?”

Angel held out his own ghostly hand and let out a gasp. “There’s… oh dear. Tucker, there is power in this drawer. In this one in particular. You must take great pains to not touch the metal without my—”

Tucker was ripping off his shirt, and Angel paused in all the things.

Tucker Henderson had a beautiful mortal body. Long-muscled, lean. His ribs were maybe a little too prominent, but Tucker probably expended energy at an amazing rate. He had a small spot of dark curly hair on his chest, vibrant against his pale skin, which was now flushed with pink, probably from his frantic journey through the house and up the stairs.

Angel had seen him naked—that morning, in that woman’s bed—but he hadn’t appreciated him, hadn’t been able to imagine the heat coming off his body, the faint smell of sweat and fabric softener, the tang of salt.

Hadn’t imagined the taste of Tucker’s skin.

Angel’s body—his incorporeal, imaginary construct of psychic energy—began to do uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing things. For a moment, the place where his chest should have been began to burn, and he reminded himself to breathe.

Then remembered that breathing was an illusion, and constructs of psychic energy shouldn’t need to process oxygen. He did it anyway, because there was something soothing about the repetition, and concentrated on watching as Tucker rattled the metal-fastened drawer until the lock gave.

The burst of psychic energy that crashed into them both knocked Tucker on his ass and sent Angel into a vertigo spin around the room. When he finally managed to pull himself together, so to speak, Tucker was struggling to