“Still, you deserve better.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m the best judge of that. And I decided I deserve the honor of being the wife of Dr. Jesse de Silva a long time ago. There’s no greater honor, in my opinion.”
The crooked smile he shot me hadn’t the slightest bit of humor in it. “Thank you for the kind words, but what have I got to offer a wife? No family, no money, nothing but debt—over $200,000 of it. You know that as a resident, my salary averages out to about twelve dollars an hour, and that’s for an eighty-hour workweek. That’s less than what the orderlies earn.”
I reached out to smooth some dark hair from his forehead. “I know what you’re going to say, because you’ve said it so many times before, but I’d like to remind you once again that the income from my investments is enough to pay off your monthly student loans. If you’d just—”
He seized my hand so abruptly that for a moment I caught a glimpse of the darkness Paul had mentioned, and that Jesse usually kept so well controlled. A second later, however, it was gone, and he was pressing my fingers gently to his lips.
“Thank you again, but you and your family have given me quite enough.”
“You’re forgetting how much you’ve given me. Like tonight, for instance.”
His dark eyebrows knit in confusion. “Tonight?”
“My life, Jesse. You gave me my life tonight. Like you’ve done a million times before, remember? A million and one, if you count this evening.”
His eyebrows relaxed, and this time when he smiled there was both warmth and humor in it. “Oh, that. Well, it was the least I could do. You’ve returned the favor, occasionally.”
“Occasionally. So you might want to cut the self-pitying bullshit about how you have nothing but debt to offer a wife. You’ve got plenty to offer. Not in the way of material things yet, maybe, but you’re pretty good looking, in my opinion, and you’ve got the lifesaving thing down pat. And then of course there’s what’s in your pants. That’s pretty impressive, too.”
The smile turned self-deprecating. “How charming, Susannah. It’s a pity my mother is dead, she’d be so proud.”
“She should be.” I reached out to straighten his tie—he was required to wear one to work, and looked extremely dashing in it—and ended up fingering the collar of his shirt. “Uh-oh. You really are soaked, aren’t you? You can’t go back to your shift in wet clothes. You’ll catch a cold. You should probably take your shirt off and come upstairs with me and let me dry it for you.”
“You don’t have a drying machine in your apartment,” he pointed out. “Are you trying to get me naked, Miss Simon?”
“It’s called a dryer, not a drying machine, and yes, Dr. de Silva, I am.”
“Are we ever going to talk about what happened here tonight, Susannah?”
“Well,” I said. “When a man and a woman like each other very much, they start kissing, and then they get a funny feeling in their tummies. And in a normal relationship the man goes with the woman to her apartment, and they get naked and relieve each other of the funny feeling. Unless the man insists on waiting until we’re married, and then the woman has a nervous breakdown—”
“Not that,” he interrupted. “Though that was a very comical speech, and I quite enjoyed it. I meant the devil child.”
“Oh, her. She’s the very protective ghost of that girl at the mission I was telling you about—who happens to be Kelly Prescott’s stepdaughter, by the way. I didn’t think she’d follow me all the way out here from school. It was my fault, really. I should have been more watchful.”
“Your fault? None of this was your fault.” Jesse’s normally warm brown eyes no longer looked particularly warm, and it was easy to tell there might be a gap in his résumé where Spent a century and a half haunting a home as a spectral presence ought to have been. “Why is it that whenever Kelly Prescott’s name comes up, trouble seems to follow?”
“Because she’s a total bitch?”
The corner of Jesse’s lips twitched upward. The darkness was gone as quickly as it had appeared. He stood, then held out a hand to me.
“I can see you’re feeling better. Which is just as well, since I need to go back. I told them I was running out to buy cigarettes, and I’ve been gone way too long.”
“Cigarettes?” I slipped my hand into his and allowed him to pull me to my feet. “Jesse, you don’t smoke.”
“No, but a lot of the nurses do. I needed them to cover for me, so my plan was to bribe them with cigarettes. But now I’m going to be even longer if I need to wait for you to get your things together, then follow you out to Snail Crossing.”