“No.” He shakes his head suddenly. His face is still so pale, greenish like he’s about to throw up. He keeps backing away from me, and then he’s at the door of the barn and he turns and runs toward the house.

All I can do is watch him go. I feel disconnected from myself, shaky with the shock of what’s happened. I don’t have a ride home. And Tucker could be in the house getting a shotgun for all I know. So I run. I stumble toward the woods at the back of the ranch, grateful for the cover of the trees. It’s starting to get dark. Once I’m a little ways in, my wings snap out without me even having to summon them. I fly carelessly, getting completely lost before I can sense the way home, instantly soaked by clouds and so cold I’m shivering hard enough to make my teeth chatter, tear-blinded and half panicked.

I cry as I wing my way home. I cry and cry. It feels like the tears will never stop.

Mom discovers me in my room sobbing into my pillow a few hours later. I’m scratched and scraped and tear-streaked, but what she says when she sees me is “What happened to your hair?”

“What?” I’m desperately trying to get it together so I can decide how much I’ll tell her about the whole Tucker thing.

“It’s back to its natural color. The red is completely gone.”

“Oh. I brought the glory. It must have zapped the color right out.”

“You attained glory?” she says, her blue eyes wide.

“Yeah.”

“Oh, my darling. No wonder you’re upset. It’s such an overwhelming experience.”

She doesn’t know the half of it.

“Rest now.” She presses a kiss to my temple. “You can tell me more about it in the morning.”

When she’s gone I send a frantic email to Angela: Emergency, I write, hardly able to make my fingers and brain work well enough together to get out a simple message. Call me ASAP.

There’s no one to talk to. No one to tell. And already I miss him.

I give in to the need to hear his voice and call Tucker on my cell. He answers on the first ring. For a minute neither of us speaks.

“Leave me alone,” he says, and then he hangs up.

Chapter 17

Just Call Me Angel

Three days pass, three agonizing days where I don’t call him again or try to see him, reliving the kiss until I think I’ll go bonkers and tear all my feathers out by the handful. I keep telling myself this is all for the best. Okay, so not the best, since I’ve essentially revealed myself to a human and I don’t even know what the punishment for that will be, if anybody ever finds out. But maybe it’s for the best that Tucker rejected me. So he knows there’s something weird about me, sure. Can he prove it? No. Will anybody believe him? Probably not. It doesn’t seem likely that he’d even tell anyone. If he did, I could deny it all. We could go back to the way things were before, him accusing me of stuff and me pretending like I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about.

Right.

I’m not that good a liar, even when I’m lying to myself. I wish Angela would call me back and I could ask her what to do.

As if the daytime wasn’t bad enough, I dream about him. Every night for three nights in a row. I can’t get out of that moment when I was in his head, feeling what he felt, hearing his thoughts as he kissed me. I can feel him loving me. And it kills me, that moment when I feel his love shift into fear.

The third morning I wake up with tears streaming down my face, and when I stare up at the ceiling, wallowing in my misery, a thought occurs to me.

He loves me. Inside his head, his every thought and reaction was born of love, love inside and out, crazy, irrational (and sure, a bit lustful) love. He loves me, and that’s also what terrified him when he saw me all lit up like a Christmas tree. He doesn’t know what I am, but he loves me.

I sit up. Maybe I should have figured this out a long time ago. I shouldn’t have needed to read his heart in order to see it. But when I felt all that love rising up in him, I didn’t know I was inside his head. I didn’t notice that the feelings weren’t mine. And why is that?

Easy.

It’s all me, the human part, the angel part. I love Tucker Avery.

Talk about revelation.

So that’s why I’m waiting now outside the Crazy River Rafting Company, sitting on the sidewalk outside of his workplace like some creepy stalker ex-girlfriend, waiting for him to come out so I can ambush him with love. Only he doesn’t come out of the building. I wait for more than an hour past when he usually gets off, and nobody comes out but a blond woman who I assume is the secretary.

“Can I help you?” she asks.

“I don’t think so.”

She hesitates, not quite sure how to interpret my answer. “You waiting for someone?”

“Tucker.”

She smiles. She likes Tucker. Everybody in their right mind likes Tucker.

“He’s still on the river,” she says. “His raft overturned, nothing serious, but they’ll all be in a bit late. You want me to walkie him, tell him you’re here?”

“No,” I say quickly. “I’ll wait.”

Every few minutes I check my watch, and every time a truck drives by I hold my breath. A few times I decide that this is all a very bad idea and get up to leave. But I can never make myself get into my car. If anything, I just have to see him.

Finally a big red truck pulls into the parking lot towing an open trailer loaded with rafts. Tucker’s sitting in the passenger seat, talking with the older guy I met before who led the rafting trips. Tucker called him Murphy, although I don’t know if that’s his first or last name. When they announced the rules of the raft that time he took me down the river with him, he’d called them Murphy’s laws.

Tucker doesn’t see me right away. He smiles the way he does when he delivers the punch line for a joke, a wry, knowing little flash of teeth and dimple. I melt seeing that smile, remembering the times when it’s been aimed at me. Murphy laughs, then they both hop out of the truck and circle back to the trailer to start unloading the rafts. I stand up, my heart beating so fast I think it’s going to shoot right out of my chest and hit him.

Murphy rolls open a huge garage door, then turns back toward the truck, which is when he sees me standing there. He stops in his tracks and looks at me. Tucker is busily unfastening the rafts from the trailer.

“Tuck,” says Murphy slowly. “I think this girl’s here for you.”

Tucker goes completely still for a minute, like he’s been hit with a freeze ray. The muscles in his back tighten and he straightens and turns to look at me. A succession of emotions flashes across his face: surprise, panic, anger, pain. Then he settles back on anger. His eyes go cold. A muscle ticks in his jaw.