Nick chuckled. “I told you about the maniac hiding behind your shower curtain,” he pointed out. “Not that she could have killed you with those manicure scissors. I see you sustained a few puncture wounds, but that’s probably as bad as it would have gotten.”

Chester was beginning to fade. It was all I could do not to hold on with a death grip, crush his little body to me in the futile hope that he could stay.

It was all too much.

I sobbed.

Chester turned his head, nuzzled my cheek and blinked out. It was as if someone had flipped a switch. Cat here, cat gone.

Nick’s hand rested lightly on my hair. “I’m a bastard,” he said, “but I wish you’d cry like that for me when I take the last bow.”

I sat up, rubbed my wet cheeks with a swiping motion of both hands. “Is that on the schedule?”

“Don’t be so eager,” Nick scolded, but he was smiling. “I’ll be a long time gone.”

“Listen to me,” I said. “I need to get my life back to normal, and for a start that means no ghosts.”

Nick rocked on his heels, hands caught behind his back. “In that case,” he said, “your life will never get back to normal.”

I stiffened. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

“I’ve told a few people about you. Back at the train station, I mean.”

“You’ve told—”

“They need help, Moje.” Nick actually looked as if he gave a rat’s ass if anybody else was in trouble. Amazing.

“Why me?”

“Why not you?”

“I’m not psychic. I don’t commonly see dead people—”

“Don’t worry,” Nick said. “You’ll only have to deal with murder victims.”

I was speechless.

No, really.

Nick reached out, cupped my chin, and gave it a hoist, ostensibly to close my dangling mouth.

He leaned down, kissed the top of my head lightly.

I finally found my voice again. “What did you do, write ‘For a good time, call Mojo’ on some celestial men’s room wall?”

There was no answer, of course.

I had plenty of reasons to forgive Nick, I realized. I could think of three hundred and fifty thousand good ones, right off the top of my head. But if I forgave him, he would vanish forever, the way Chester had.

So what if he did? I asked myself. I was falling for Tucker Darroch, in a big way. Maybe I was even a little in love with him. He was a flesh-and-blood man. He could hold me, make love to me and, on top of all that, he cooked.

Nick, on the other hand, was a ghost, if not a hallucination. He morphed in at disconcerting times and had a way of getting on my very last twitching nerve.

I wanted him to disappear, once and for all.

Forever.

Didn’t I?

Chapter Fifteen

CHAPTER FIFTEEN