All the Rules of Heaven E-Book

Amy Lane

• Herausgeber: DSP Publications
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 516

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

All That Heaven Will Allow: Book One When Tucker Henderson inherits Daisy Place, he's pretty sure it's not a windfall—everything in his life has come with strings attached. He's prepared to do his bit to satisfy the supernatural forces in the old house, but he refuses to be all sweetness and light about it. Angel was sort of hoping for sweetness and light. Trapped at Daisy Place for over fifty years, Angel hasn't always been kind to the humans who have helped him in his duty of guiding spirits to the beyond. When Tucker shows up, Angel vows to be more accommodating, but Tucker's layers of cynicism and apparent selfishness don't make it easy. Can Tucker work with a gender-bending, shape-shifting irritant, and can Angel retain his divine intentions when his heart proves all too human?

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Blurb

Dedication

Author’s Note

For the Sake of Momentum

Blind Faith

Not-Damie. Also, Not-a-god

Don’t Touch That, Dammit!

Soul Voyeur

The Shape of the Thing

Seen

Ghostbusting a Nut

Gateway

Let the Healing Begin

Once More into the Breach

Spilled Like Wine

Blurred Letters

Blood

Innocent

I Know You

Can’t Find My Way Home

Stay

Broken Glass

Dark Moon

Monsters

The Unsullied Souls of Men

Promises of Recovery

More from Amy Lane

Reviews

About the Author

By Amy Lane

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Copyright

All the Rules of Heaven

By Amy Lane

All That Heaven Will Allow: Book One

When Tucker Henderson inherits Daisy Place, he’s pretty sure it’s not a windfall—everything in his life has come with strings attached. He’s prepared to do his bit to satisfy the supernatural forces in the old house, but he refuses to be all sweetness and light about it.

Angel was sort of hoping for sweetness and light.

Trapped at Daisy Place for over fifty years, Angel hasn’t always been kind to the humans who have helped him in his duty of guiding spirits to the beyond. When Tucker shows up, Angel vows to be more accommodating, but Tucker’s layers of cynicism and apparent selfishness don’t make it easy.

Can Tucker work with a gender-bending, shape-shifting irritant, and can Angel retain his divine intentions when his heart proves all too human?

Mate and the kids—check. And Mary, for being there—but this book wasn’t her favorite. So this book is sort of dedicated to me—it was written to please me, and while nobody else may love it, I know I do.

Author’s Note

For those of you interested in the fairy hill Tucker mentions, by all means check out my Little Goddess stories. In real life, Foresthill is a teeny community. In Amy’s land, there are more things in heaven and earth….

For the Sake of Momentum

THE BED that dominated the center of the room was hand-carved, imported ebony, black as night, and the newel posts had been studded with an ivory inlay, random designs supposedly, dancing around and around in a way that made the unwary stop, lost in the intricacy of runes nobody living could read.

The wallpaper had once been an English garden jungle—cabbage roses, lilacs, mums—riotous around the walls, and the grand window was positioned strategically to catch the early-morning sun overlooking what might once have been a tiny corner of England, transplanted by the cubic foot of earth into the red-clay dirt of the Sierra Foothills.

That same dirt was now the dust that stained the windows, layering every nuance of the old room in hints of bloody deeds.

The tattered curtains no longer blocked out the harsh sun of morning, and the wallpaper curled from the walls in crackled strips. The carpet threads lay bare to the hard soles of the doctor who tended to the dying old woman, but she had no eyes for the living person taking her pulse, giving her surcease from pain, making her last hours bearable.

Her eyes were all for Angel—but nobody else could see him, so he rather regretfully assumed that she appeared crazy to the other people in the room.

“No,” she snapped contentiously. “I won’t tell you. I won’t. It’s not fair.”

Angel gave a frustrated groan and ran fingers through imaginary hair. This was getting tiresome.

“Old woman—”

“Ruth,” she snarled. “You used me up, sucked away my youth, drained me fucking dry. At least get my name right!”

Angel winced. The old wom—Ruth—had a point.

“I’m sorry the task was so difficult,” Angel said gently, containing supreme frustration. She was right. What Angel had asked Ruth Henderson to do with her life had been horrible. Painful. An assault on her senses every day she lived. But Angel needed the name of her successor—he needed to find the person and introduce himself. Angel really couldn’t leave Daisy Place unless he was in company of someone connected to it by blood or spirit.

“You are not sorry,” Ruth sneered. “You could give a shit.” She looked so sweet—like Granny from a Sylvester the Cat cartoon, complete with snowy white braids pinned up to circle her head. She’d asked her nurse to do that for her yesterday, and Angel, as sad and desperate as the situation was, had backed off while the nurse worked and Ruth hummed an Elvis Presley song under her breath. The music had been popular when Ruth was a teenager, and it was almost a smack in Angel’s face.

Yes, Angel had taken up most of her life with a quest nobody else could understand, and now Ruth’s life was ending and Angel was taking the peace that should have held sway.

Her breath was congested and her voice clogged. Her heart was stuttering, and her lungs were filling with fluid, her body failing with every curse she lifted. She’d been a good woman, performing her duty without question at the expense of family, lovers, children of her own.

It was a shock, really, how bitter she’d become as the end neared. A pang of remorse pierced Angel’s heart; the poor woman had been driven beyond endurance, and it was Angel’s fault. It was just that there were so many here, so many voices, and Angel would never be released, would be trapped here in this portal of souls until the very last one was freed. Angel was incorporeal. Ruth was the human needed to give voice to the souls trapped in this house, on these grounds. If she didn’t give a very human catharsis to the dead, they would never rise beyond the soul trap this place had become.

And now that she was dying, she needed to name a successor, or everybody trapped at Daisy Place would be doomed—Angel included.

“I’m sorry,” Angel said, regret weighting every word. “It probably seems as though I didn’t care—I handled everything all wrong. We could have been friends. I could have been your companion and not your tormenter. You deserved a friend, Ruth. I was not that friend. I’m so sorry.”

Ruth blew out a breath. Her words were mumbles now—Angel understood, even if the doctor and nurse at her bedside assumed she was out of her mind.

“You weren’t so bad,” she wheezed. “You were in pain.” A slight smile flickered over the canvas of wrinkles that made up her face. “You made my garden bloom. You couldn’t prune for shit, but you did try.”

“It gave me great joy,” Angel confessed humbly. No more than the truth. Angel had loved that garden, loved the optimism that had laid the fine Kentucky bluegrass sod and ordered the specialty rose grafts from Portland and Vancouver. No, Angel couldn’t prune it—couldn’t hold the shears, couldn’t hold back the tide of entropy that the garden had become—but that hadn’t stopped the place from being Angel’s greatest source of peace, even stuck here in this way station for the damned and the enlightened.

“I know it did.” There was defeat in Ruth’s voice. “Promise me,” she mumbled.

“What?” Angel would take care of the garden until freed from this prison—there was no question.

“Promise me you’ll be kind to him.”

Oh! Oh sweet divinity. She was going to name an heir.

“To him?” Angel asked, all respect.

“I left him the house, but the boy hasn’t had it easy, Angel. He’ll be here soon enough. Be kind.”

“I need his name,” Angel confessed. “If I don’t know his name, I’ll never find his soul.”

“Tucker,” she whispered, her last breaths rattling in her chest. “My brother’s boy. Tucker Henderson. Be kind,” she begged. “He’s a sweet boy…. Be kind.”

Triumph soared in Angel’s chest. Yes! Ruth Henderson’s successor, the empath who could hear the ghosts and help exorcise Daisy Place! Angel wanted to cheer, but now was not the time. With invisible hands but tenderness nonetheless, Ruth Henderson’s ghostly companion stroked her forehead and whispered truths about a glorious garden in the afterlife as the good woman breathed her last.

Blind Faith

TUCKER DIDN’T know how it happened—he never knew how it happened. One minute he’d be walking into a restaurant for dinner, and the next a stranger would stop by his table and strike up a conversation. Twelve hours later, Tucker would have a new friend—and a few used condoms.

It had cost him girlfriends—and boyfriends. He never planned to be unfaithful. He rarely planned to go into the restaurant or bar at all. He’d be strolling down the street, a bag of groceries in his hand and a plan for dinner with—once upon a time—friends, and he’d feel a draw, an irresistible pull, a rope under his breastbone tugging him painfully into another person’s bed.

He’d tried to resist on occasion, back when he’d had plans for a normal life.

When he’d been younger—a green kid freshly grieving the loss of his parents—it had worked out okay of course. Any touch had been okay. He’d been alone in the world, and the empathic powers his aunt Ruth had warned him about had arrived, and suddenly he was seeing a host of people who shouldn’t exist, wandering around in the world like everyday folk.

Sex had been comforting then.

He’d lost his virginity when he’d gone into a McDonald’s for a soda after school and ended up trading blowjobs with the cashier—who happened to be his high school’s quarterback—in the bathroom.

They had both been surprised (to say the least), but then Trace Appleby had broken down into tears and wept on Tucker’s shoulder because he’d never been able to admit he was gay until just that moment. He said he’d been thinking about taking drastic measures, and although he’d never been more explicit than that, Tucker had gotten his first inkling of what was to come.

Given how lost he’d been, how heartsore, it had seemed like a karmic mission of sorts. He was kind of excited to see what came next.

Next had been right after high school graduation, when he’d been working at McDonald’s—he and a friend had ended up doing it in her car in the upper parking lot. Afterward, she had broken down on a bemused Tucker and told him that her boyfriend had been cheating on her but she didn’t have the courage to leave him.

Until right then.

Tucker started to harbor suspicions that next might not be as wonderful as he’d hoped.

Less than a month later, when he stood up a girl he liked because he’d wandered into a bar and slept with a guy who’d been thinking about going to a party so he could get high and woke up thinking about college instead, Tucker began to understand.

And the only comfort sex had offered him then had been the comfort he apparently gave others in bed.

He’d explained it to his friend Damien the next day. First, Damien had needed to get over the “Oh my God, you’re bi?” But after that he’d been pretty copacetic.

“So you’re saying God wants you to get laid,” he’d concluded.

Tucker sort of frowned. “That does not sound like the Sunday school lessons I got growing up,” he said. Of course, his parents had been gone for about two years at this point, and he hadn’t attended a church service in a very long time.

Then he remembered something his father had said.

He’d been born late in his parents’ life—they’d been in their fifties when their car had skidded off the road during their date night—but his father had been a kind man, active, with salt-and-pepper hair that hadn’t even started to thin. He’d had laugh lines and kind brown eyes, and he’d told Tucker to go to church and soak up the feeling—the feeling of being protected.

“Ignore the words, son. Some people need them, but you’re just there to know what it’s like to find shelter from the storm.”

Oh. Apparently Tucker was shelter from the storm. Maybe God really did want him to get laid. Or the gods, really. Tucker had already identified vampires and elves and ghosts and werecreatures among the hosts of not-humans who walked the city streets with him. In an effort to broaden his knowledge, he’d begun taking classes in comparative religion, ancient language, arcane lore, and anything he could find even remotely connected. School was fun at that point—but the broader lessons hadn’t started to set in.

He looked at Damien, wishing that Damie was bi too, because he had a rich red mouth and dark blond hair and green eyes and freckled cheeks, and Tucker had wanted to kiss him for a long time.

But Damien was the kind of guy who always landed on his feet. If he got detention in school, he’d meet a pretty girl who’d want to be taken out Saturday night. Once when he’d been out of work, his car had broken down, and the Starbucks he’d gone into while he waited for the tow truck had been looking for a cashier.

Damien always found a sheltered path through life’s difficulties, simply on instinct. He never needed shelter from the storm.

He’d never need Tucker.

Tucker had always been the guy with pencils when the teacher gave a surprise test, the guy with the extra sandwich when someone forgot their lunch, or the guy with the spare jacket or the shoulder to cry on. Even before the McDonald’s blowjob and the sobbing quarterback, Tucker had a reputation as the guy people could talk to when life threw them a curve ball. He was a sympathetic ear.

Or an empathetic ear.

Talking to Damien, remembering his father’s definition of religion in contrast to his college professors’, it occurred to him that being the sympathetic ear might have become his cosmic mission in life—with the added twist of sex. Suddenly both the sympathy and the sex felt like a chore.

“Never mind,” Tucker had said, his heart breaking for the things he was starting to see he’d never have. “I get it now. I’m an umbrella.”

“And I’m an ice cream cone,” Damien replied, because he thought that was the game.

Tucker hadn’t been able to play, though. He was too busy thinking about how many ways being an umbrella could go wrong.

He’d found them. One night when he was in his twenties, he’d resisted the pull, sobbing from the wrongness in his chest, the displaced time, the pull in his blood and corpuscles to wander into a restaurant and come home with God or Goddess knows who. But he wanted to be faithful—his heart was faithful, dammit, why couldn’t his body be?

He’d gotten home to a message on his phone—the father of the girl he’d fallen in love with had died, and she’d needed to leave town.

Tucker could have written it down to coincidence, but by then he didn’t believe in coincidence. He’d given up on relationships for a while.

Not long enough, but a while.

And that had been many years and one eon of heartbreak ago.

So by the time he arrived at Daisy Place, he was tired, old at thirty-five, exhausted by his karmic mission, and so, so lonely.

But by then his gift, the empathic pull that led him to other people’s beds and their cosmic epiphanies and karmic catharses, had been honed to a science. It had used him often enough that he knew what to expect.

The night the Greyhound dropped him off in the middle of what kind of passed for a town, suitcases in hand like a kid in an old musical, he didn’t set about trying to find a ride to Daisy Place immediately. Sure, the press under his breastbone had started almost directly after he’d gotten the call from his aunt Ruth’s lawyer, and it had been subtly building ever since, but he knew this game well enough to know that Daisy Place wasn’t at critical mass yet. First, he needed a room to sleep in—and he’d felt the other pull, the older, more painful pull, for a mile before the bus had slowed at the depot.

Someone here would give him a place to sleep, and he could see to Aunt Ruth’s inheritance in the cold light of day.

Sure enough, he was in the middle of a ginormous hamburger that had been cooked in an actual ore cart from the gold-rush days, when a tired-looking woman in nice comfy jeans, a skinny-strapped tank top, and flip-flops strode into the converted post office/restaurant and threw herself into a chair at the table next to him.

The restless, painful ache in his chest that had guided him there gave a little pop, and he could breathe again.

“Hey there, pretty lady,” he said, shoving a plate of fries toward her. “Is there anything I can do to help?”

She had blond hair—artfully streaked and ironed straight—adorable chipmunk cheeks, and a full and smiling mouth. The girl took a fry gratefully and tried to put that mouth to happy use. She failed dismally, but Tucker appreciated the attempt. Putting a good face on things for other people was an unnecessary courtesy, but it was still kind. Thin as a rail, with a few subtle curves, she was in her late twenties at the most and seemed to have the weight of the world on her shoulders.

“It’s been sort of a day,” she said fretfully. “You know—a day?”

Tucker thought back to when he and Damien used to have this discussion, and his stomach twisted hard with regret. “I’ve had a few,” he said softly. “What happened with yours?”

“It’s just so stupid.” She sighed and looked yearningly at the untouched half of his two-pound hamburger. Tucker cut off a quarter of it and put it on the fry plate for her, and her smile grew misty.

“Thank you,” she said softly. “I mean, I was going to order my own, but eating alone….”

“Sucks,” he said, nodding. “So, I’m Tucker Henderson—”

“Old Ruth’s nephew?” she said with interest.

“Yes, ma’am.” He hadn’t seen Aunt Ruth in several years. She’d helped administer his parents’ estate, sending him personal checks every month—ostensibly to help him through college, but the estate was more than enough to live on. He’d appreciated the gesture, though, and had called or written with every check, but she’d never asked him up to see her at Daisy Place, and Tucker….

Well, Tucker’s entire life had become the inescapable knowledge, the pull under his breastbone, the pressing weight of being some sort of karmic tool. Quite literally. Leaving downtown Sacramento—where he didn’t even have a car because he never knew when he’d get the call and stopping when walking or riding his bike was so much easier than driving—had been beyond him for a couple of years. Aunt Ruth didn’t ask, and he didn’t insist.

They’d barely spoken about the reasons—but she knew. He was very aware that she knew.

“I’d come to visit, Auntie, but I’ve got… uhm, things. Things I can’t explain.”

A sudden electric silence on the telephone. “Oh, honey. I’m so sorry. I know those… things. I have them living in my house. You be careful. Those things can be difficult on the soul.”

“Folks are going to miss her,” the pretty woman said in the here and now, her smile going melancholy. “Most of us played in her garden at one time or another.”

Tucker remembered his own time there, stalking imaginary lions in the jungle of domesticated flowers that ran riot over what must have been ten acres of property. All of the people wearing strange clothes, walking through the benches and over the lawn. He was pretty sure he was the only one who had those memories, though. He’d eventually figured that seeing ghosts was part and parcel of the whole empathic gig. It had taken having a lot of “imaginary friends” until he’d been about thirteen and figured it out, but whatever. His parents had only visited Ruth a handful of times when he was a kid, but she’d always had cookies—the good kind, with chocolate. None of that persimmon crap either.

Ruth had been sweet—if eccentric. He’d always had the feeling that she had a particular ghost of her own to keep her company, but if so she hadn’t mentioned his name.

“I didn’t know the garden was a whole-town thing,” he said. A town the size of Foresthill probably had a lot of close-knit traditions.

“Well, my grade school class anyway,” the girl said with a shrug.

The skinny high school kid with spots and an outsized nose who was waiting the few tables in the place came up to them. “Hiya, Miz Fisher. Can I get you anything?”

She smiled again, but it didn’t reach her eyes this time. “A diet soda, Jordan.” She gave one of those courtesy smiles to Tucker. “Ruth Henderson’s nephew seems to have taken care of my meal.”

Jordan nodded, gazing at “Miz Fisher” with nothing short of adoration. “I’ll get you the soda for free,” he said, like he was desperate for her approval. “It’s not every day your English teacher just strolls in on your watch in the middle of July.”

Poor Miz Fisher. Her courtesy smile crumbled, and what was left made Tucker’s heart wobble. There was a reason he hadn’t quit on life after his second attempt to ignore his empathic gift had backfired so horribly. This woman was part of it.

“Former English teacher,” she reminded Jordan gently. “Remember? They had to cut the staff this year.”

Jordan’s smile disappeared. “Yeah,” he mumbled. “Sorry, Miz Fisher. I’ll go get your soda.” He wandered away, the dispirited droop of his shoulders telling Tucker everything he needed to know about how much this woman—homegrown by the sound of things—had been appreciated by her community.

“Lost your job?” Tucker prompted. “Miz Fisher?”

“Dakota,” she said, taking another fry. “Dakota Fisher. And yeah.”

Tucker knew that wasn’t all there was to the story. He cut her hamburger into bites and handed her a fork. He might not have known squat about this town, but he was on his own turf now.

BY THE time they left the restaurant, he knew how much Dakota loved teaching. By the time they got to her tiny cottage and got their clothes off, he knew how much she loved her hometown and her parents and the kids she’d grown up with. And helping people.

By the time they fell asleep, sated and naked, she knew what she had to do. It wasn’t what Tucker would have predicted, not at all, but it was right for her.

That’s what Tucker did—what was right for other people. Because the results of doing what was right for him were too awful to face again.

WHEN THE simple white-walled room was still gray with predawn chill, he opened his eyes and blinked.

Damie?

No. It couldn’t be.

But the young man sitting cross-legged on the foot of Dakota Fisher’s bed looked like Damien Columbus. Dark blond hair, freckles, full lips, green eyes—so many superficial details were there that Tucker could be forgiven for the quick gasp of breath.

He blinked hard, then got hold of himself and took in the nuances.

No—this person had a slightly more delicate jaw, a pointier chin, and his eyes were… well, Tucker had never seen eyes the actual shade of bottle glass outside of contacts and anime cartoons.

And whereas Damie had worn skinny jeans and tank tops—looking as twinky as possible for a guy who’d professed to be straight until… don’t go there, Tucker—this guy was wearing basic 501s and a white T-shirt. He looked like a greaser or a Jet, right down to the slicked-back hair.

Although—and this had been the thing that had first terrified Tucker to his marrow—this guy was also dead. Or astral projecting. Or something. Because his body wasn’t depressing the frilly yellow-and-pink coverlet on Dakota’s bed even a little. He just sat/hovered there, tapping the bottom of his red Converse sneakers with his thumbs, scowling at Tucker as if Tucker had somehow disappointed him.

“Can I help you?” Tucker mumbled, squinting at him some more. Oh yeah. The more Tucker looked, the less this guy resembled Damien. Which was good. Because he wasn’t sure how to deal with… Damien. Watching him sleep naked.

Not after all this time.

But then the penetrating gaze of this stranger, this not-Damien, wasn’t doing him any good either.

Tucker hadn’t been with anybody of his choosing in a long time, and he’d assumed the part of him that did choose had been killed off by grief. Imagine his surprise when he felt his stomach flutter.

“You were supposed to be at the house last night,” the young man said. “I waited up.”

“I found something better to do,” Tucker replied, rolling his eyes and keeping the flutter to himself. “I’m sorry. Nobody told me there would be a ghost at the house waiting for me.”

The ghost did not look appeased. “You need to come with me as soon as—”

“Mm… Tucker?” Dakota stretched, her tank top coming up under her breasts and her frilly white drawers dropping right below her neatly trimmed pubic hair. Tucker had been with women—big, small, short, tall, sophisticated, and plain country girls—and he never seemed to get over how the slightest changes in grooming or shopping or a perfume or a hair product could make such a difference from one woman to the next. He didn’t actually have a preference—not anymore—but he sure did have an appreciation for what Dakota did, personally and to herself.

“Hey, hon,” he said softly. “You go ahead and sleep. I’ve got some stuff to take care of at the house this morning.” He bent over and kissed her cheek. “I’m so glad you got that whole career thing sorted out,” he said, stroking her lower lip with his thumb. “You know where I’ll be if you ever want to talk again.”

He saw the familiar emotions pass over her heart-shaped, animated face. Disappointment at first, because he wasn’t going to stay, and for whatever reason, he’d helped this person feel better the night before. Then there was the “Oh my God, what have I done?” recognition—very often, the person he was with was as much a stranger to one-night stands as they were to Tucker himself.

And finally—oh, there it was—relief.

Yes, definitely relief.

She realized that she didn’t know Tucker, didn’t know him at all, and he was leaving her, but he was doing it respectfully, and he was letting her know any future contact would be fine.

But he wasn’t going to be in her bed anymore.

Then Dakota did him one better. “Thank you,” she said, her eyes growing a little sad again. “You really did help me figure some stuff out.”

Tucker smiled slightly. “That’s what I’m here for, darlin’. Can I use your shower?”

NOT-DAMIEN FOLLOWED Tucker into the shower, and Tucker shook his head. It was like this ghost or whatever hadn’t learned the rules of being a ghost yet.

“Hey, do you mind?” he muttered, shedding his boxer shorts quickly and jumping into the water before it had completely heated. California had been in a drought for years—every drop counted.

“I don’t mind at all,” the ghost said, appearing right in front of him as the cold water pounded his neck.

Tucker choked back a yelp. “Man, get out of the goddamned shower or I’m calling the state and donating the house!”

The ghost gave Tucker’s body what was supposed to be a contemptuous look, but somewhere between Tucker’s face and his knees, it paused and grew a little heated. With an effort, not-Damien met Tucker’s eyes. “I am above lust,” he said with the dignity of a desperate lie.

“I don’t care if you lust after me,” Tucker lied back. His attraction to this not-Damien creature was super irritating when he was naked in the shower. He grabbed some flowered body wash from the shelf and sniffed. Not bad—women did know how to smell. He dumped some on a sponge and continued, “I’m not afraid of finding a man in my shower. I’m pissed off. My entire life is a supernatural sexual violation. But I’d rather not have one looking me in the face while I rinse my cracks!”

Not-Damien’s mouth opened slowly while Tucker sponged his pits. “I am not a violation! I am a guide!”

Tucker soaped up his member, which—probably befitting his karmic mission or whatever—was of a gratifying size. “Guide this,” he said crudely. “If you’re not out of here by the time I soap my hair, whatever you want to use me for, I’m not doing it.”

Not-Damien scowled. “I’ll be waiting outside the bathroom,” he muttered.

“I’m not going to try to escape my fate,” Tucker promised bitterly. “Believe me, I’ve learned the hard way. Whoever is in charge doesn’t like us to have too goddamned much free will.”

The ghost’s scowl softened. “What happened to you?” he asked, looking like a wounded choirboy. “Your aunt said you were such a sweet boy.”

“None of your business. And quite frankly, she never mentioned you.” Dammit. He looked so much like Damie, the wound opened again, fresh and bloody and bright. “Just go.”

There was a faint breeze, carrying with it the odor of new sneakers and indigo dye—and the faintest scent of citrus and lavender—and Tucker was alone.

But not for long.

Not-Damien was not actually waiting for him outside the bathroom, as Tucker feared. Tucker had a chance to wash, dry, and even shave using the kit from the suitcase he’d left in the kitchen.

Dakota slept on through it—probably pretending, but Tucker didn’t mind. Sometimes when you woke up with a stranger, faking sleep was just courtesy.

Or that’s what he thought until he walked back to the kitchen to grab his luggage and make his exit out the front door.

She was awake, barely, yawning through coffee and blinking through the morning-after mess of her hair. She’d kept the tank top on and put on cutoffs this time, and she still looked sort of delicious and sexy. Tucker had a moment to regret that he wasn’t a real person to her, because if he’d had a life of his own, he really would have chosen someone exactly like Dakota Fisher.

“Heya, darlin’,” he said, kissing her cheek. “I thought you’d sleep in.”

“I really could have,” she mumbled. “Then I remembered—I live down three miles of dirt road, Tucker, and it’s already eighty-five degrees outside. It would be really frickin’ rude of me to let you walk that hauling your two suitcases.”

Tucker hadn’t thought of that, and the kindness made him blush.

“Thank you,” he said in a small voice. “That’s really nice of you.”

He had a cup of coffee with her, and then she grabbed her keys and the smaller suitcase. She went first, bumping her way across the porch and down the steps of her little house, and he followed. Not-Damien was standing outside the door.

He frowned at Dakota and then turned his glare to Tucker as Tucker maneuvered his big old suitcase over the threshold.

“I thought you said—”

Oh my God. “It’s over ten miles away, asshole,” Tucker hissed. “I’ll meet you there!”

The self-recriminatory look on not-Damien’s face was almost worth the aggravation of knowing the dickweed would be waiting for Tucker once he reached his destination.

“Sorry,” the ghost said and disappeared, leaving Tucker feeling the faintest bit sorry for being such an ass. But not enough to worry about it.

“OH MY God, Tucker, are you sure?”

Tucker looked at Daisy Place and swallowed. “Yeah,” he said weakly. “I’m hunky dory.”

Peeling mint-green paint adorned the window and door frames, but the rest of the house was a collection of rotting shingled siding and rusty tin roofs. Was it Tucker’s imagination or did the entire house slant at odd angles so that the west wing dipped down and the east wing tilted up, and the middle seemed to loom bigger and smaller with each of Tucker’s deep, steadying breaths?

“It looks like a cult of Satanists lives in the basement,” Dakota said frankly. “You could always room with me for a few weeks. I’m going into the sheriff’s department today—my uncle said he could get me a job as a deputy. You know, in a month I might even be able to use a gun.”

Tucker tried not to stare at her. Of all the unexpected outcomes of his magic sexual karma, he had not expected the former English teacher to scream “I’m gonna be a cop!” in the middle of orgasm.

And yet she had. And apparently she also had follow-through.

Tucker thought seriously about her offer and then about what a live-in girlfriend with a gun would do if he asked her to drop him off in town so he could sleep another random stranger into a life epiphany.

“I’m pretty sure the only Satanists in there are the rats,” he said with a toothy grin. “I think a gun would be overkill.”

“Okay,” she said doubtfully. “If you’re sure.”

He kissed her cheek. “Darlin’, I’m good. And I can’t thank you enough.”

With that, he swung out of her little green Ford Ranger and hauled his bags from the back. He took a few steps away and waved so she could leave and then peered through the red dust up the walkway.

Sure enough, the ghost of not-Damie was waiting at the door, arms crossed and a sort of resentful apology on his pouty-mouthed face.

Tucker sighed. Maybe the Satanic rats would eat him alive tonight and he wouldn’t have to live with whatever fresh hell the karma gods had planned.

Not-Damie. Also, Not-a-god

AS ANGEL watched Tucker haul his suitcases up the broken cement pathway, he tried not to bang his head through the support post for the porch.

So much for his resolutions not to push the resident empath again.

He’d promised—he’d promised—Ruth Henderson that he would try to be a friend, a companion, to her nephew, but dammit! He’d been so excited about meeting Tucker Henderson, so prepared to be kind, to welcome him with open arms and gratitude, that finding out the jackass had spent last night catting around had really ticked him off.

Although Tucker hadn’t seen it that way. What had he said? His entire life was a sexual violation?

That hadn’t sounded like a man who’d been happy to wake up in the bed of a beautiful woman. Not at all.

And seeing Tucker sex-sated, sleepy, looking warm and human and mussed…. Angel pushed that thought away. He didn’t feel things like this. He didn’t have human reactions or feel warmth or attraction. He just… he didn’t.

But that didn’t change the fact that Angel had kept pushing Tucker’s buttons.

Damn. When would he ever learn?

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Tucker muttered. “Am I late? Did all the dead people suddenly come alive? Did my shower hasten the zombie apocalypse? Did taking time to shave put all mankind at risk?”

“Did you at least have time to eat before you got laid again?” Angel snapped, and then he really did try to thunk his head on the support post, only it went through it instead.

“Augh!” Tucker dropped both suitcases. “Oh my God. Do you have any idea how weird that looks? Stop that!”

“I’m sorry,” Angel said, a contrite, sincere echo of Tucker’s sarcastic apology. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to be an ass. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I’m sorry. I really was asking if you’d eaten.”

Tucker stood on the porch, holding his hands to his eyes. “Is your head out of the post now?”

Angel double-checked. “Yes. Yes—all body parts accounted for.”

Tucker sighed with relief and took his hands away from his eyes. “Better. Did you say food?”

At that moment, a grocery van pulled up the long, slanted driveway and swung around to the front of the house. A low three-layer brick wall marked the edges of a concrete parking lot that faced what appeared to be overgrown gardens. A decrepit toolshed marked the corner. The space was huge—it had made Dakota’s job easy when she’d backed her truck out—and this guy had no problem, even in the oversized van.

Angel smiled hopefully. “Supplies and sandwiches,” he said, hoping that as offerings of contrition went, this was a good one.

Tucker swallowed and then smiled.

Angel had noticed this when Tucker was naked in bed, but somehow seeing that smile in the sunshine made it so much more apparent—Tucker was really a very handsome man. In his early thirties, with careless dark hair and blue eyes, he had a strong chin in a rectangular face that highlighted some stellar cheekbones. His mouth was full, with a good-humored curve, but Angel hadn’t noticed that until he smiled. Some of the bitter care fell from his face then, on his forehead, in the lines of his mouth. For a moment he looked innocent and, as his aunt had maintained, sweet.

“You?” he mouthed, and Angel nodded, not sure if it was possible to feel heat prickling up and down his skin. He may have had a certain way with electronics and phone messages, but he really didn’t have a corporeal body.

Still, Tucker kept that sweet smile, and Angel fought the temptation to hold his incorporeal hand to his incorporeal face to check.

“Thank you,” Tucker said. The naked gratitude on his face did something fierce and unprecedented to the center of Angel’s being, where humans maintained the heart sat, regulating emotion. The twisting, swelling sensation where Angel’s chest would have been, had he had a corporeal form, was both unpleasant and exhilarating, and it shook him to the marrow of his invisible bones. As he watched Tucker walk down to take the crate of groceries and sandwiches from the delivery boy, he felt the slightest flicker in the projection he’d chosen to show Tucker for their acquaintance, and he thought frantically, trying to figure out what he’d changed.

Tucker was smiling to himself as he walked back up the porch steps, and he looked at Angel to share the smile and stopped abruptly.

“Man, that is some shirt!”

Angel looked down, and in place of the plain white T-shirt—which, it had seemed, every human had been comfortable in for at least the last fifty years—he was wearing a button-front Hawaiian shirt that looked like the victim of a tie-dye grenade.

“Oh my God,” he said, heedless of the blasphemy. “What in the—”

“You got puked on by a rainbow!” Tucker chortled, his good will apparently easy to earn with food and bright colors. “Dang, ghost guy, I don’t know what made that happen, but if you keep doing stuff like that, you might be useful to have around after all.”

“Useful?” Angel sputtered, embarrassed. “Useful? Do you have any idea who I am?”

“No,” Tucker said. He set the groceries down on the porch and reached into his pocket. “Yes! I knew I had the key.” He put his hand on the doorknob to unlock Daisy Place and let out a low moan.

“Oh hells!” Angel muttered. “Tucker, let go—”

“Stop.” Tucker fell to his knees, his hand still locked around the handle. “Oh God, make it stop.”

Dammit! All those spirits, all of that cold energy locked in the house for weeks. Of course the cold iron of the doorknob would be where that energy was stored. Oh Jesus. Poor Tucker. He convulsed, moaning, his hand locked on the doorknob like it contained an electric current.

He couldn’t let go, and his deathlock on the doorknob was hurting him.

Angel needed to make it stop. Oh, Angel hated to do this. Ruth hadn’t talked to him for a week the first time he’d done it to her.

“I’m sorry, Tucker,” he murmured, hoping Tucker would forgive him, and then placed his hands over Tucker’s and pushed until the cold iron of the doorknob burned against his palms. Tucker groaned and crumpled to the porch, sobbing.

“What in the hell?”

Angel sighed and sat cross-legged, running phantom fingers through Tucker’s hair, watching as the strands were disturbed by the breeze of his movements.

“That’s what I was going to tell you,” he said in the silence that followed. “You need me. I’m your contact for the things in this place—sort of a psychic filter, really. There are too many souls here in Daisy Place, their stories locked inside by silence. Once they tell you their stories, they’re free to move on. It’s… well, your aunt called it a catharsis exorcism. You’re an empath, right?”

Tucker grunted, still shaking in pain. “Yes, I’ve been cursed by the fucking karma gods. What do they want now?”

Angel didn’t know how to answer that. “Ghosts speak to you, right?”

“Sometimes. Usually, it’s… something else,” Tucker muttered. “But yeah, I see ghosts all the time. They’re not usually that talkative.” He gave Angel a sour look before closing his eyes again. “With one exception.”

Angel sighed because, while he didn’t remember the details, he assumed this was how he’d come to be trapped here himself. “This entire house is the exception,” he said. “The ghosts here are trapped—they need to talk. This house was built on a foundation of iron.” How did one explain supernatural metallurgical alchemy to a man who was barely conscious? “And there’s an iron track that circles the entire property, with just enough gold, silver, platinum, and lead mixed in. It attracts souls—some who died here, some who just stayed here, and some who….” He thought about all the things he couldn’t remember about himself. “Some who wander in. They get stuck here in the silence of all the metals. They can’t go up or down by themselves. It’s like, all the metal here, it freezes them in place. So they need an empath, someone with abilities, to see their stories, give them just enough humanity to set them free.”

Tucker groaned, rubbing his face. “You need someone to make them human by telling their stories?” he asked, his voice clogging.

“Otherwise they’re trapped,” Angel tried to explain. This was a terrible burden—he knew it. He’d known it when he’d presented it to a teenage Ruth. Explaining it to Tucker, a grown man, should have been easier, but he was assailed by the vulnerability he’d sensed underneath Tucker’s prickly exterior.

The bitterness was apparently hard-earned.

“Isn’t it enough?” Tucker snarled. “Isn’t what I do enough? Do the gods really have to fuck with me this badly?”

“Why?” Angel asked, confused. “What else do you do?”

Tucker struggled to sit up and wiped his face with his palm. “Nothing. Not a damned thing. Don’t mind me. I get tired of fucking my way through life. What’s your job in all of this?”

“I’m a witness, mostly,” Angel said. “It’s like the spirits need someone to live their catharsis moments, and someone to see what hurt them and give them absolution.” Angel’s one clear memory after his arrival at Daisy Place was of Ruth touching an old coin she’d found in an empty room. He’d been there to see her live through the guilt of a businessman not giving the quarter to someone who’d been desperately hungry. She’d been shaken, sobbing with the intensity of the sadness, and Angel had felt the freedom of the soul released. But in the years that followed, they’d realized that wasn’t Angel’s only function.

“I’m also a… filter,” Angel simplified. “I keep… well, if you’d have let me touch the doorknob first, I would have bled some of the worst of that away.” He grimaced. “Ruth actually kept gloves nearby at all times, and I’d sort of give her a priority list of what to look at that wouldn’t hurt her, or when she’d have to use the gloves.”

Tucker nodded, looking numb, like he had nowhere to go with that information. “There’s milk in that box,” he said after a moment. “We should put it in the fridge.”

And Angel really had to admire him then, because the man hauled himself onto unsteady feet and used his T-shirt to grab the doorknob while he unlocked the door. He propped the solid slab of oak open for a moment, and Angel sensed it first.

“Get back!” he ordered, and Tucker must have been far more sensitive than his great aunt because he was already in motion, sidestepping so he was out of the doorway before the massive rush of psychic energy left him a sobbing, quivering mass of pain on the porch again.

“And that was?” he asked through gritted teeth once the last of the energy trickled out.

Angel shrugged, feeling sheepish and defensive. “Well, the entire property is usually their playground. The real estate agent locked up the house, and they were sort of confined inside.”

Tucker rolled his eyes as though bored, then stuck his head in the door. “It is thirty degrees colder in here than it is outside,” he announced as he returned for the crate of groceries. “Please, please tell me that’s a perk.”

Angel brightened. “Actually, yes. It’s hellish in the winter, though, but most of the time, the house is just naturally cold.”

“I shall learn to knit,” Tucker said grandly, and then he swept into his inheritance like it hadn’t just tried to kill him.

Twice.

TUCKER SEEMED to be in a better mood after the sandwiches—both of which he’d eaten in quick succession.

“Have you been lumberjacking?” Angel asked in amazement. “Running? Doing push-ups all morning?”

“Nope, nope, and nope,” Tucker replied, wiping his mouth delicately with a paper napkin and getting rid of the mayo on his upper lip. Then yawning. “It’s been a high-energy day, though. And I metabolize everything faster when I’m working.”

“Working?”

“That little thing I did where I passed out and almost wet my pants—do you think that just happens?”

Angel gaped at him. He seemed to remember Ruth having a healthy appetite, but nothing like this.

Tucker rolled his eyes and kept on eating. “So,” he said at last, delicately licking his fingers and then wiping them on a napkin. “This is the catch, right?”

“The catch?”

“Free room, free board, Aunt Ruth’s inheritance—I just have to live here for the rest of my life and touch shit and faint?”

“You have to tell their stories,” Angel said firmly. “Even if it’s just to me.” He shrugged. “And since you’re an empath, I see them when you touch objects or intercept ghosts, so ‘telling me’ is more a matter of living them yourself.”

Tucker looked at him skeptically. “So given that, it’s always ‘just to you’?”

And this was the awkward part. “Uh, no. Some of the more recent ones, if there’s a living participant or a descendant or—”

“So one touch, one ghost?” Tucker’s glance took in the entirety of the house and grounds. “Because that seems easy enough. I know this place was a hotel for quite some time, but Ruth should have taken care of them all.”

Angel blew out a breath. “Well, it’s more complicated than that. You have to… to read their entire story. Sometimes the thing that got them stuck here wasn’t in just one coin or one brush up against a doorknob, or even one visit. Ruth once had to tell the story of secret lovers who met here at least ten times in the course of their life. It’s detective work, really.”

Tucker groaned for a moment and buried his face in his hands. “You know, there’s a fairy hill about fifteen minutes away. Even the humans have to know it’s there. Wouldn’t they have an empath you could use?”

Angel took a deep breath in spite of his incorporeal form. “We don’t talk about that,” he said with dignity. “Ever.”

Tucker peeked through his fingers. “That’s… uh, absolute.”

But Angel dug in his heels. “Please, don’t mention them. They’re not even supposed to exist.” Angel had no idea where this knowledge came from, but it seemed certain, like something he’d known from the beginning of his existence.

Whenever that had been.

Tucker’s bitter laugh rattled through the kitchen. “Look—from what I’ve seen, those folks don’t give a shit if they’re supposed to exist or not. They’re sort of here. I mean, right here.”

Oh no—Angel was not about to let himself be distracted. “Even if they did exist,” he said, throwing arrogance around his shoulders like a cape, “they can’t come here. This place has cold iron, pure silver, and soft gold in its foundation. That pretty much repels any of the, uh… well, the people we don’t talk about and pretend don’t exist.”

“Oh.” Tucker’s shoulders slumped. “That’s too bad. I saw a lot of them in Sacramento. They were like ghosts—they were everywhere. They were nice people. I liked the werecreatures especially.”

“I told you,” Angel snapped, “they don’t exist!”

“Fine! Fine! They don’t exist.” Tucker huffed and stood up to put the groceries away. “And thank you, by the way, for the groceries, and for keeping the electricity on. Was that you?”

Angel nodded, relieved. Apparently Tucker’s temper didn’t last long. “I’m afraid I couldn’t keep the dust out,” he said apologetically. “But I’m rather good with electronics.” Angel gave his best, most winning smile, because Tucker still seemed irritated about the fairy hill, which absolutely did not exist. “I did have a cleaning service come in and clean up the old—Ruth’s bedroom, and the guest room next to it.”

“And whatever the hell that was didn’t knock them on their asses?” he asked. It was true—he did have a right to be frustrated.

“They came in through the side door. That one there.” Angel gestured. “It was added when Ruth updated the kitchen, so most of the ghosts don’t use it. They prefer the french doors to the back porch or the front door.” Angel shrugged. “That’s one of the rules of ghosts, I guess—”

“They respect thresholds,” Tucker said. “Yes, I know. I got my college education in folklore, religions, and old languages.”

“There’s a degree for that?” Angel asked, eyes wide because that could mean his next hunt for an empath might not be nearly so desperate.

“There is now that I’ve graduated,” Tucker said grimly. “So where do I stay?”

“Well, like I said, I had two rooms cleared out—your aunt Ruth’s and her live-in nurse’s. Do you have a preference?”

Tucker stared at him blankly, closing the refrigerator behind him. “Preferably a place where nobody I know has died.”

An odd sort of shame swept him, and Angel had to fight to keep his expression calm. He was asking this man to sacrifice his future for this house, and he could offer him no suitable place to live. “I’m sorry, Tucker. Like you said, this place started as a hotel—one of the few in this relatively uninhabited place for over one hundred years. It only closed down when your aunt was a very young girl. There’s a lot of history here. Someone has died in pretty much every room of the house.” He gave a sheepish smile. “Usually more than one someone. And sometimes it’s not just dying that keeps spirits here. If something life-changing happened here—heartbreak or falling in love or losing a loved one—that soul will stick around too. But your aunt was the only person who died in her room for a good seventy-five years.”

“Ooookay? So I can face the psychic residue of total strangers or the psychic residue of a poor woman who was lonely and bitter and pissed off that she was locked up in this mausoleum with no company and no help. Which one ever shall I choose?”

Ouch. “How do you know she was lonely and bitter and pissed off?” Angel asked plaintively. He liked to think they’d achieved a certain rapport in the later years, a certain job satisfaction, as it were. He’d certainly missed her when she’d passed. He’d even mourned her passing, although he seemed to exist with the certainty that she was much happier now.

“Because I’m lonely, bitter, and pissed off already,” Tucker snapped. “And I just got here.”

“Well, not too lonely,” Angel sneered, wishing he could get that vision of Tucker, sleepy and sex-sated, out of his mind, but it kept playing back on a loop. There was a certain… touchability to Tucker’s body, although Angel had no memories of ever being able to touch.

Tucker leveled a flat gaze at him. “You go ahead and think that’s what you saw,” he said, no inflection in his voice whatsoever. “In the meantime, show me to my room. I’ll take the one without Aunt Ruth, thank you very much.”

“Of course,” Angel mumbled, feeling shamed for no good reason at all.

Tucker grunted. “Do you have a name?” he asked after a moment.

“Angel,” he said, brightening. “That… that is my name.” Because that’s what Ruth had called him, right?

“You don’t sound too sure,” Tucker said suspiciously, and Angel fought the urge to just disappear.

“Your aunt called me Angel for fifty years,” he said with dignity. “You may call me Angel too.”

Tucker grunted. “Of course,” he muttered, and Angel had to fight the impulse to thunk his head against a wall. For one thing, his head would probably go through the wall again, and Tucker had made it clear he’d had enough of that.

Don’t Touch That, Dammit!

TUCKER WAS exhausted.

Sex for epiphanies usually did that to him—it was one of the reasons he’d been so dependent on his aunt Ruth’s generosity and his parents’ inheritance. Besides never knowing when he’d have to duck out on work, there was the fact that his sex life would literally kill him if he didn’t take a day to rest.

Between that and the damned doorknob, he felt like he’d dragged his ass after his annoyingly obtuse guide through at least three miles of dark, psychically burdened tunnels in a tour of the old hotel. Finally they ended up back near the kitchen in order to find the one room that was not filigreed, curlicued, paisleyed, or cabbage-rosed to goddamned death.

“What?” Tucker asked grumpily, taking in the plain twin bed with a wooden frame, a single blanket, and hospital-white bedsheets. “Are these the maid’s quarters or something?”

“The live-in nurse’s,” Angel said, apparently not getting the irony. “Ruth had cleansed the entire room the year before, so she stripped it down and ordered the furniture. The nurse cleaned out everything before she left, and she seemed like a happy girl….”

Tucker set his suitcases down, ran his fingers over the top of the clothes bureau, and closed his eyes. “She’s off to get married,” he said, smiling because weddings still made him happy. “And she loved Aunt Ruth, even if she thought the old bat was looney tunes.” He grimaced. “Abi the nurse’s words, not mine. But yeah. She was innocuous enough. I’ll be fine here.” Being an empath had its uses sometimes—getting a reading like that was one of them.

The room really was stripped down—the wallpaper had been removed and wood paneling installed, and the floor had been sanded to boards and then stained. Plain wood, spartan and unfettered with tragedy.

“It’s like she made it for me,” Tucker muttered. He toed off his shoes and placed them neatly at the foot of the bed, then pulled off his shirt and his jeans and folded them loosely to put on top of the dresser.

“What are you doing?” Angel sounded scandalized. “You’re not going to… to….” He made vague motions that got really specific just as he—ghostly apparition that he was—blushed.

Tucker squinted at him. He was looking less and less like Damie by the minute, and something about his slightly pointier features was getting more and more appealing.

“No, there is not going to be any sex for one here today,” he said, yawning. “I’m tired, Angel. It’s been a longassed day and it’s barely noon. I’m going to bed for an hour or three, and we can resume this stimulating discussion about how much of a life I won’t have just as soon as I wake up.”

“You’re tired?” Those wide eyes were going to kill him. They were becoming almost waifish, and when Tucker had had a type—male or female—that had been one of his types.

“Yes, my ghostly companion, because that is what happens when you have sex for hours instead of sleeping. Now, you can sit on the dresser or the end of the bed or go do your bills or watch yourself some TV—I’m uninterested in what you do without me as long as I get some shut-eye. So are we good?”

“Yes, that’s fine,” Angel said, looking down like it wasn’t. “I’d assumed you’d want to start seeing the ghosts immediately, but anybody would be tired after the grand tide almost washed them away.”

“Grand tide?” Tucker asked, crawling into the blessedly clean sheets. The blanket was barely enough, and Tucker made a mental note to bring his own stuff—including blankets and camping gear—up to Foresthill.

“It’s the wash of souls that was pent up in the house. There’s an ebb and flow, you see—it’s why you can usually walk in the house and not be assaulted. The cleaning person was last here a couple of weeks ago, and they came in and out from the side entrance, so the ghosts got really backed up. Usually it’s different. They go out, and they go in, and when it’s their time to have their stories told, that’s when fate intervenes with an object for you to read.”

Tucker narrowed his eyes, feeling punchy and coquettish. “Are you fate? Come on… you can tell me. I won’t tell.”

Angel snorted. “You are tired. Go to sleep. Call when you need me. And Tucker!”

“Wha—” Tucker sat up, awake suddenly. “What? What’s wrong?”

“Sorry.” Angel looked almost comically chagrined. “Look. Don’t touch anything without me. This room is safe. Anything beyond this threshold could be dangerous.”

Angel regarded him with those sober green eyes—pretty green eyes—and Tucker groaned. God, no being attracted to the ghosts. “Just be here when I wake up, okay?” Because attractive or not, the ghost he knew was actually more comforting than nothing at all.

“Sure,” Angel said, and then he floated up to the top of the dresser, folded his legs, and rested his chin on his hands.

Tucker rolled up tight in the one blanket and closed his eyes. He was cold, the pillow was flat, and the mattress was as hard as a rock.

“The nurse slept here?” he asked, his eyes closed against the spartan room.

“Yes. She said it was restful.”

“She lied. I hope Aunt Ruth left her a buttload of money.”

Angel grunted. “She did, in fact. How did you know?”

Tucker could hear her thoughts, seeping through the flatiron of the pillow like acid through a table. She’d tried—but even the kindest people could be driven out of patience by someone who demanded the unreasonable. Damned old lady, does she think I trim her toenails for the hell of it? I’d better get some fucking money.