on the desk. Yes, she was right. It didn’t matter what shape or gender she wore—they had a job to do.
“Yeah,” he said after a moment of sorting objects. A diamond hairpin, a shell from a beach, a cameo brooch, a tortoiseshell comb. He’d hit the jackpot in the delicate dresser near the bed. The dresser itself stood on tall, thin, spiderlike legs, and it held almost entirely women’s toiletries. “I’d say these would all be good.” He picked up a glass paperweight with dreamlike strands of green winding through the glass and a single bright orange fish. It was large and heavy—bigger than a softball—and it would have been exquisitely beautiful, but a sizable chunk of glass was missing from the bottom. There was also some unpolished glass roughing up the bottom, as though something had been glued or affixed to that part of the weight to make it flat. It had a surprising heft to it—a ten-pound paperweight?—and Tucker couldn’t figure out if it was physical or psychic, but he had trouble looking at the weight for more than a moment. His gaze kept shifting off of it, glancing to other things.
“This is bad,” he murmured thoughtfully, holding it in two hands. The skin under the gloves got hotter, and the object seemed to get heavier, almost bowling ball heavy, as he stood.
With great deliberation, he put the weight on the far end of the desk, with the snuffbox. Then he put the women’s toiletries on the other end, pending Angel’s examination. He put the green, uhm, bottle on that end, figuring that would mark the good side, and then put the hole puncher and the pen and the “Oh my God fifty people going potty can you imagine the boredom!” polished wooden dowel from the toilet paper holder in the middle.
“Okay, so how’s this?” he said. Angel stood up after one final pass to make sure the kitten would stay and sashayed over to stand next to Tucker. Tucker closed his eyes and inhaled, smelling nothing but imagining flowered body spray in the place of lime and musk.
Either smell turned his key.
“So we’ve got good, bad, and boring,” Angel observed. “I like it. Did you get a glimpse of the man who used the snuff box?”
Tucker shuddered. “Yes. I’d recognize him again if he wandered into someone else’s vision.”
Angel hmmd. “Okay, yes.” He began to point so Tucker could sort. “These objects are neutral—I see so many people doing so many things with them that they’re useless. This one”—Angel pointed to a mother-of-pearl-handled brush—“is strong both ways. It has conflict, good moments, and bad moments. This one has a story.”
Tucker took hold of the brush and then sat on the bed, closing his eyes and getting ready. The kitten licked his thigh through his jeans briefly and then trotted toward the pillow to curl up on the cushion like she belonged there.
Angel came to sit by him, apprehension clear in those wide green eyes.
“Ready?”
“Sure.” Very carefully, Tucker pulled off one cotton glove and took the brush in his hand.
BRIDGET STOOD behind Sophie in a richly decorated room in Baltimore, this one with cream-colored wallpaper and mauve brocaded curtains. With clean, methodical strokes, she mastered the thick blond mass of Sophie’s hair, and Sophie gazed at her in the mirror with worship.
“You’re so good with it, Bridget,” she said breathlessly. “I’ve grown so tired of my head being jerked on, and you’re just so tender.”
And still the brush slid through the coarse and silken strands with a lulling precision.
Bridget’s hands were shaking. Her sex was swollen and aching with desire, but she must not, must not reveal these things to the innocent Sophie, who trusted Bridget as the only human being to talk to her in this strange and vast mansion that Sophie had recently arrived at.
“Ye must not’ve had much of a ladies’ maid if they tugged on yer hair so,” Bridget reprimanded. She’d seen how the people of this house treated Sophie—the master was cold to her, his wife worse. Their son, Sophie’s husband, paid attention in obsessive, uncomfortable flurries and then left for extravagant amounts of time, playing with his mates. Bridget would resent him for that neglect if she hadn’t seen the relief in Sophie’s eyes whenever the man left.
“Oh, Bridget, I’ve never had a maid. My father’s a pastor in Wilmington. He’s a good man, but poor. Pastors are. Thomas’s horseless lost a wheel as he was driving by my father’s place one