All the Rules of Heaven (All That Heaven Will Allow #1) - Amy Lane Page 0,88
ghost was going to break into his room. He slept late and spent most of the day eating junk food while Angel shotgunned season four of Buffy.
The next day Margie called them, asking if Tucker could use his truck to haul stock from one of her stores to the next.
Tucker agreed pretty much before he got out of bed, and then she said, “And be sure to bring Angel with you!”
Oh hell. “Margie, I’m not sure what Angel has in mind today. It might just be me.”
He hung up and turned in bed to see Angel leaning her head on her hand and looking at him pensively. She was still a stunning redhead, and Tucker felt a bit of sadness that he hadn’t been able to run so much as a knuckle down the swell of her breast or hip in the past two days.
“I could always change form,” she said regretfully. “I like Margie.” She looked down. “It was… a luxury, to be human for another human.”
“Yeah, but we’re going to be at her stores,” Tucker said. On impulse he feathered his fingers through her ringlets, pretending that he could feel the strands. “It would be cruel to let her speak to you when nobody else could see you.”
Angel reached up and grabbed his hand—for real.
“I am not sure I ever wished I could be seen before,” she mused. She pressed her lips against back of his hand. “But I’m also not sure how ready I am to be….” Her hand slid through his.
“Seen,” Tucker supplied. He could have said “human,” but that bordered on the things that made Angel disappear. As far as Tucker knew, he was supposed to believe Angel was a ghost of a deceased human. But the more they got to know each other, the more Tucker became convinced that wasn’t true.
“Yes.” Angel turned onto her stomach, kicking her feet over her bottom again and staring moodily at the headboard. “Seen.”
Tucker showered and left—but he remembered to pet the cat and wish Angel goodbye. She went to the door to see him off, and he knew she’d be there waiting for him when he returned.
Margie was in fine form about his nose that day. She bought his story about slipping and falling in the shower to avoid the kitten, but pestered him repeatedly about letting Angel take care of him.
“That young man would do anything for you. You know that, right?”
Tucker couldn’t look her in the eyes. “Yeah, Marge. Well, you sure did see through us.”
Her delighted laugh bolstered something inside him. Margie, at least, believed.
When he returned from his errand, he had to concede to an afternoon nap. One more day of rest before he and Angel started their quest again. He left the wallpaper alone, although he double-checked to make sure he had a putty knife and the other things Josh had stressed for the wallpaper removal when he was ready. But mostly he stayed downstairs, putting away his clothes and moving a bookshelf—clean, per Angel—from the living room to his bedroom so he could find places for some of the stuff in his boxes.
When he was done, the room was a little more his—but he thought it could use some color.
“Drapes, a throw rug, the furniture Josh was going to give me….” Tucker turned a full circle and tried to imagine this room with just a little more effort.
“It’s cozy,” Angel decided. “And… and alive.”
Tucker grinned at her as she swung her legs over the bed. “Good. If I could do that here, I can do it in the Chrysanthemum Room. And I can do that for the rest of the house, right?”
Angel lifted an elegant shoulder, but she looked hopeful. Tucker ate his dinner out on the porch, almost defiantly, although he fingered his pendant often.
The only ghosts who showed had the decency to stay ghosts, for which he was grateful, and he and Angel stared at the lowering shadows while Tucker told terrible jokes that he and Damien had shared in high school.
Maybe it was the fact that Conklin, at least, seemed to have left him alone. Maybe it was that he and Angel had resolved some of the sexual tension between them, and that whatever they were doing—whatever Angel was—they had the same mission and were doing it together.
Maybe it was that Tucker felt like he had friends here, in this town, and roots that he’d never been able to set down before.