read my mind.”
But Tucker was already napping, and Angel was taking comfort in his snores.
TUCKER DIDN’T wake up until late afternoon, and he was still groggy and tired. Angel watched as he made himself a sandwich and then urged him to eat out on the back porch.
“You can see the garden,” Angel said wistfully. It was the one part of his time with Ruth that he was proud of. He’d cared for the woman, but their relationship had developed into such a fractious push-pull. Angel had babied her gardens as an attempt to say thank you, to show care, to show that he appreciated the life she’d spent in service of the dead.
At the end, he thought she’d understood, but he still wasn’t sure if it had been enough.
He wanted Tucker to see the things he’d done, even though nature was already starting to take over, wreaking entropic destruction over the already riotous flower beds.
Tucker sat in the shade of the porch steps and nibbled on his sandwich, his eyes tracking the figures of Daisy Place’s ghostly residents. Angel settled next to him, feeling that strange weight on his shoulders again.
“Stop looking at the ghosts,” he urged. “Just for a minute. I want you to see the flowers.”
Tucker turned to study him for a moment, and Angel knew his face had probably gone flush by now.
“What?”
“Nothing. I’m just waiting for you to turn into a woman again.”
“Why? Why would you want me to do that?”
Tucker shrugged. “Because if you do it again, I might figure out why you do it.”
Oh, that was embarrassing. Angel did not want to go there. But Tucker had been so honest with him that morning.
“Well, at first I wanted to find someone you trusted!” he blurted.
Tucker grimaced. “Except you found someone whose memory hurt so badly, I hated you on sight.”
Angel shrugged. “That was a failure on my part.”
Tucker snorted. “And then?”
Angel frowned. “Then I was trying to find someone you would trust—so that’s this form. And then….” Damn. “Well, I was confused. I was attracted to you, and you seemed to be attracted to me, and that broke the rules. So I tried to find someone you weren’t attracted to.”
Tucker’s throaty belly laugh was his reward and almost worth the embarrassment. “Epic. Fail!”
“And then… then I just gave in and tried to find forms you would find appealing.”
Tucker’s glance went coy, and Angel’s heart did a little flutter.
“I find most of your forms appealing, Angel. Last night’s form was probably my favorite.”
Their activity the night before flooded Angel’s memory, and he felt honesty was required here too. “I’m not entirely upset about that,” he admitted.
“No,” Tucker said softly. “I’m not either. Not in the least.”
Angel wanted it again. Wanted to feel Tucker’s flesh under his hands, wanted Tucker’s hands on his own skin. The sudden, surprising weight of sexual desire flooded him, and he had to fight to remember what they’d been talking about.
“Would you just look at the daisy bed, please? The nasturtiums? The prairie fire and the asters? There are asters all over the damned yard, Tucker—asters! Five different varieties. And big purple morning glories climbing over the fences. This was not easy to achieve!”
Tucker—gratifyingly—turned his attention back toward the garden, which ran riot in the setting sun. Ruth had hired a gardener to set up an automatic watering system as she’d aged, and Angel—with his gift for phone messages and basic electronic intervention—had kept watering the garden during Tucker’s absence. He’d managed to find a boy to mow the lawn once a month, but that month was almost over, and the grass was more than ankle deep. But it was grass, thick and luxurious bluegrass and not the stingy, deep-rooted Bermuda grass. Angel had worked so hard to keep these things. Ruth had loved them. This garden, in the evenings, in the spring and fall, had provided Ruth’s happiest moments, and Angel wanted Tucker to see that he could be kind.
Tucker had needed kindness. Angel was capable—with some prompting—of providing it. He may not have started out that way—he still couldn’t remember what had brought him here to Daisy Place, but he remembered his single-minded need to leave it. It was what had driven him, had driven Ruth, at the very beginning. He’d been selfish in a way Tucker could never understand, for all his talk of self-indulgence. But those years with Ruth had taught Angel to care about someone else’s needs, no matter how fractious their relationship.
And this week with