“Don’t come near me,” I ordered. Pure bravado, of course. I’d read The Damn Fool’s Guide to Self-Defense for Women and practiced all the moves on Bert, who was a genuine bad-ass, but if there was a chapter on phosphorescent assailants, I must have missed it.

Nick tilted his dark head to one side and looked pathetic, though still damnably handsome. Apparently, being deceased was neither messy nor strenuous; his suit was wrinkle-free, if slightly out of fashion, his hair sleek, and there was no sign of his hallmark five o’clock shadow. No tire marks, either, thank God, and no blood, guts or jutting bone fragments.

He must have read my mind. With a sad grin, he looked down at himself, before meeting my gaze again. “Hell of a patch job, though. You should have seen me before the mortician did his thing.” He shuddered. “You haven’t lived—so to speak—until you’ve seen yourself lying in pieces on a slab. Definitely not a pretty sight.”

I winced. “Thanks for sharing,” I said. At least we were on the same page with the dead-thing. I had a lot of questions, naturally, but I couldn’t seem to articulate any of them. Shock does that to a person.

Another fetching grin. “You cried at my funeral,” he reminded me, with pleased modesty.

I stiffened. My heartbeat had slowed somewhat, and I was managing a full breath every few seconds, but my knees felt about as substantial as foam on a mug of draft beer. When the last few bubbles popped, I’d be on the floor in a quivering heap.

“So what?” I asked. “We were married once. You were only thirty-two, and you didn’t deserve to die like that, even if you were an asshole. Too bad about Tiffany, too. Did you know her boobs popped and she had to have three surgeries just to look human?”

He ignored the reference to girlfriend #62. At least she was post-divorce; the first thirty-seven could probably be slotted neatly between “I do” and “Go-to-hell-you-bastard-I’m-taking-back-my-maiden-name.”

“Black isn’t your color,” he observed gently, starting around the end of the bed, heading in my general direction.

I backpedaled. “Stay away from me.”

He stopped, and once again that slight, familiar grin hitched up one corner of his mouth. “You looked for all the world like the classic grieving widow that day,” he reiterated. “Divorce or no divorce, you weren’t over me.”

“The hell I wasn’t,” I shot back, and shoved a hand through my shoulder-length tangle of curly red hair. I did a quick mental review of The Damn Fool’s Guide to Lucid Dreaming and wondered if I was experiencing some random version of the phenomenon. I pinched myself, blinked a couple of times and sighed.

Nick remained still there, which meant I was awake. The jury was still out on whether or not I was lucid.