“Sure.”

“Niiiiice.” The angel straightened. “What’s your poison, TV-wise?”

As he turned around, she let out a squeak.

Because she was staring at his bare ass.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, all concerned.

Covering her eyes, she said, “You told me you had something on!”

“A jockstrap. Duh.”

At that moment, Fritz appeared next to her with a tray laden with so many covered plates that he might as well have been feeding Rhage.

“Ah…” Marissa rubbed her eyebrows, that headache back in full force.

“She’s eating in here,” Lassiter called out. “And yes, Marissa, I’ll put my damn jeans on.”

“Thank you, baby Jesus,” she muttered as she entered the game room.

As Fritz set the tray up on the bar to the left, Lassiter pulled the Levis on and flopped down on one of the sofas that faced the enormous screen mounted over the fireplace. “FYI, if I get chafed, it’s on you.”

She went over and took a seat on one of the padded stools. “FYI, my mate is due in here at any moment. So you just saved yourself a whoop-assing.”

Lassiter pointed the remote at the TV and called up the cable schedule. “Psssh, whatever. I can take him.”

“Doubt it.”

“Actually, I got nothing better to do for the rest of tonight. Think he’ll want to fight? I could use the exercise.”

Marissa laughed at the hopeful tone as she sat back and let Fritz pop the cloches off the plates and describe, with all the precision and elegance of a Nobu waiter, what was being served.

“Thank you so much,” she murmured as she picked up her fork and tried the rice pilaf. “Mmmmm.”

She wasn’t going to eat even half of it all, but that never seemed to bother the butler. Then again, to him, the joy of serving was the very best job satisfaction he had.

“Oh, my God,” Lassiter said, jerking upright. “I can’t believe it.”

“What? And if it’s a Beaches marathon again, you can forget it.” She rubbed the center of her chest with her free hand. “I’m not watching anyone die even in two dimensions.”

There had been more than enough of that. Dearest Virgin Scribe, what if they couldn’t find out anything about—

“It’s Melrose Place. I love this epi—it’s where Kimberly went psycho.”

“Wait, wasn’t she always psycho?”

“Well, yeah, but this is where she takes the wig off and you see the scar. Easily one of the most significant and influential scenes in television history.”

“And to think I assumed that was, like, the human lunar landing or something.”

Lassiter glanced over. “Wait, those rats without tails made it to the moon? You’re kidding me. They can’t even decide what time it is, clocks always flipping back and forth from season to season. And then there’s their health bullshit, eat this, you’ll live longer—no, strike that, it’ll kill you, so you need to do this. Internet trolls. Asshat preachers and politicians. And you know, don’t get me started on potholes. Why don’t they fix the roads?”

Marissa threw her head back and laughed. “You don’t even drive. Or care about any of those things.”

The fallen angel shrugged, his gold piercings and chains gleaming like sunshine with the shift. “Just repeating what they talk about on the evening news.”

Marissa shook her head with a smile. And she was about to ask him what exactly he did aside from sunning himself each noontime if there was no cloud cover, and taking up space on that couch in front of the TV—but then his eyes flicked back to her and they were dead serious. As his gaze returned to the big screen, she realized he’d picked up on her mood and was doing his best to help her out of it.

“You’re okay, Lass,” she said softly. “You know that?”

“I’m more than okay. I’m amaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaazing,” he sang out. “So does this mean I can put you down for a dozen of my calendars?”

With any other person in the house, she might have been tempted to laugh it off as a joke. Him, though? “No, you can’t. I don’t even know what they’re like, but the answer is no.”

“Fine, half a dozen,” he tossed back. “They’re only five bucks. I have to cover printing costs. Good news? There was no photographer expense—I took the pics with my selfie stick.”

She lowered a forkful of chicken back to her plate. “You actually made a calendar of yourself.”

“Why do you think I had my pants off.”

“Lass. Really. You took twelve naked pictures of yourself—”

“Jockstrap. I was in my jockstrap, remember. I just did December’s by the fire. I am so hot, it is flat-out stupid.”

Marissa passed an eye around the room and shuddered at the number of things he’d probably put his naked ass on before settling for the hearth in front of the banked fire. “What gave you this idea?”

He rolled his eyes. “We’ve only got how many nights left in this year? I need to get ’em back from Kinko’s before December thirty-first.”

From out of nowhere, she had an image of some poor human in a FedEx Office branch getting an eyeful and a half of the mostly naked fallen angel.

Without warning, she started to laugh so hard, tears came to her eyes. The good kind of tears, that was.