for balance, both walking to the bathroom and inside himself. All of the things he’d avoided thinking about the day before, when playing cribbage had been a stretch for his abilities, came flooding back now.
Angel—inside him. A pure, glowing soul, both masculine and feminine, filling him with power and pushing the pain, the guilt, out of his pores, and the poison with it.
“I’ve got to—”
“I know,” Angel said mildly. “You have to go relieve yourself and figure out what’s going on in your head. I’ll be here when you finish.”
Well, since Angel understood, Tucker was going to take his time.
He came back drying his hands and smelling his pits. “I am rank,” he muttered. “I’m so gross, I think I made the bedclothes gross too. I’m going to shower and then start the laundry.” He looked up at Angel, the calm, auburn-haired, green-eyed, broad-shouldered version of him that he’d settled on the day before, and started to sweat a little.
“Do me a favor and let me shower alone this time, okay?”
“Of course,” Angel said, those very specific green eyes guileless and accepting.
But Tucker was midway through the shower, pondering which one of Angel’s forms he was least attracted to—because they all seemed disconcertingly appealing—when a hand materialized through the shower cubicle and knocked on the wall adjacent.
“Augh!” God, that was weird.
“Sorry.” Angel sounded very disgruntled. “I forget when I’m solid and when I’m not. The rules for that keep changing. But the Greenaways are here, and Rae is about to start—”
“Augh!” Tucker cried again. The water had just turned ball-shrinkingly cold.
“Laundry,” Angel finished.
“Okay, fine, Angel. Move!”
Tucker came out of the shower and toweled off, noticing that Angel still hadn’t left the bathroom. Well, he hadn’t had a lot of respect for personal boundaries when they first met either, and the last few days that distance had been dissolving disconcertingly fast. Tucker wouldn’t mind so much, except Angel’s regard—which had seemed fairly sexless at the beginning—was growing more and more… not sexless.
In fact, those little looks from under Angel’s auburn lashes were increasingly sexual.
“Why’s she doing laundry?” Tucker asked suspiciously. He’d brought clothes with him into the bathroom, and he slid his boxers on first and adjusted himself. “And what are you looking at?”
“You have burn scars,” Angel said quietly. “They weren’t there when we met.”
“Oh.” Tucker looked across his stomach, the insides of his arms, his inner thighs—all of the places his body had begun to boil with the fury of the unhappily dead—and saw that his body showed ravages of old, painful burns. He touched the pale part of his bicep in wonder. “It’s smooth,” he murmured. “Just a little mottling—like it happened a long, long time ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Angel said. Tucker didn’t even startle as Angel’s finger skated the diaphanous line between sensation and space. “Your beautiful skin….”
Tucker sighed and tried not to let his vanity show. “It’s old now. People will hardly notice.” He smiled and tried to crack a joke. “People don’t sleep with me for my looks anyway.”
Angel’s finger slipped, and Tucker could actually feel the point of contact.
“Why wouldn’t they?” he asked, and Tucker became aware that, by human standards, he was standing very close to a man… woman… entity he had begged to share his bed.
No, not in that way, but in an intimate way. Angel had perched on the corner of the bed while Tucker had been flirted with by Andy Greenaway and then cozened by Rae. Angel had been there when the kids had come in and watched a movie on his computer, and then, when the voices of the Greenaway family had faded down the hall of his haunted mansion, Angel had been there, quiet and staunch, to help keep him from freaking out when he closed his eyes and saw himself—saw them—surrounded by dozens of hostile spirits who all wanted to jump into Tucker’s body and take the helm.
Tucker vaguely remembered waking up crying in the wee hours of the morning. Angel’s voice had soothed him, and a feeling of well-being had enveloped him, allowing him to go back to sleep.
And Angel was standing—so damned real Tucker could almost feel his breath—close enough for Tucker to see the remains of freckles on his nose.
Those were new.
Tucker licked his lips and yearned for body heat or a smell or something animal and comforting to tell him Angel was, or had ever been, human.
“Angel?” Tucker asked, his heart thundering in his ears. “What are you?”
Angel frowned but did not move backward.