“Jesse and I are engaged,” I said, controlling—with an effort—my impulse to swear at him some more. In the past, anytime Paul was able to evoke any kind of emotion from me at all—even a negative one—it pleased him.

And the last thing I’d ever wanted to do was please Paul Slater.

“Engaged?” Paul crowed. “What is this, the 1950s? People still get engaged? Do people even get married? I mean, straight people?”

I really should have thought before I acted and never called him in the first place, I thought miserably, eyeing a poster Ms. Diaz, the Mission Academy guidance counselor, had stuck on the wall over by the entrance to her office. It was one of those posters ubiquitous to the profession, a blown-up photo of a kitten struggling to hang on to a tree branch emblazoned with the words Aim High!

Too late, I realized I ought to have aimed high and approached Paul with cool dispassion, not let my emotions get in the way. That was the only way to handle him.

But he’d always been good at pushing my buttons.

All my buttons.

“Isn’t an engagement a little old-school for a modern girl like you, Simon?” he went on. “Oh, wait, I forgot . . . Walking Dead Boy likes to do things the old-school way, doesn’t he? Does that mean”—he sounded more pleased with himself than ever—“you two are waiting for marriage?”

I felt another overwhelming urge to lash out and punch something, anything, maybe even the tabby kitten in the poster. But the wall behind it was three feet thick, built in the 1700s, and had withstood many a Northern California earthquake. It would definitely withstand my fist.

“That is none of your business,” I said, so icily that I was surprised the phone in my hand didn’t freeze to my face.

I was trying hard not to clue Paul in to how annoyed I was with my boyfriend’s prehistoric notion that we not only couldn’t marry until he was in a financial position to support me and whatever children we might have (even though I’d assured him I was on the pill and planned to stay on it until I’d finished my MA and had a job with full dental, at least), we couldn’t move in together.

Even worse, Jesse insisted we had to wait until we’d formally exchanged vows—in a church, with him in a suit, and me in a white dress and veil, no less—before we could enjoy conjugal relations. It was the least he could do, he insisted, out of “respect” for all that I had done for him, not only bringing him back to life, but providing him with a life worth living.

I’d let him know many, many times, and in no uncertain terms, that I could live without that kind of respect.

But what else could you expect from a guy who’d been born during the reign of Queen Victoria? Not to mention murdered in—then buried behind, then spent 150 years haunting—the very same house Paul was threatening to tear down?

This had to have something to do with why Paul was tearing it down. I’d always suspected Paul of being jealous that in the end I’d chosen the ghost instead of him.

But how could I not? Even in the days when Jesse hadn’t had a pulse, he’d had more heart than Paul.

“Waiting for marriage,” Paul repeated. He was hooting with laughter that bordered on tears. “Oh, God. That is so sweet. It really is, Simon. I think your stepdad’s TV show is about the wrong person. They should be filming you and that boyfriend of yours, and call it The Last Virgins. I swear it’d be the highest-rated show since Ghost Mediator.”

“Go ahead,” I said, lifting my heels to my desk and crossing my feet at the ankles. “Laugh it up, Paul. You know what Jesse’s doing right now? His medical residency.”

That hit home. Paul abruptly stopped laughing.

“That’s right,” I went on, beginning to enjoy myself. “While you’ve been out being named one of LA’s most eligible bachelors for doing nothing but inheriting your grandfather’s money, Jesse passed the MCATs with one of the highest scores in California state history and got a medical degree at UCSF. Now he’s doing a pediatrics fellowship at St. Francis Medical Center in Monterey. He just has to finish up his residency there, and he’ll be fully licensed to practice medicine. Do you know what that means?”

Paul’s voice lost some of its laughter. “He stole someone else’s identity? Because that’s the only way I can see someone who used to be a walking corpse getting into UCSF. Except as a practice cadaver, of course.”

“Jesse was born in California, you idiot.”

“Yeah, before it became a state.”

“What it means,” I went on, tipping back in my chair, “is that next year, after Jesse’s board-certified, and I’ve gotten my certification, we’ll be getting married.”

At least, if everything went according to schedule, and Jesse won the private grant he’d applied for to open his own practice. I didn’t see the point in mentioning any of these “if’s” to Paul . . . or that I didn’t know how much longer I could go on swimming laps in the dinky pool in the courtyard of my apartment building, trying to work out my frustration about my fiancé and his very nineteenth-century views about love, honor, and sex . . . views I’m determined to respect as much as he (unfortunately) respects my body.

Things have gotten steamy between us enough times for me to know that what’s behind the front of those tight jeans of Jesse’s will be worth the wait, though. Our wedding night is going to be epic.

Unless one of those many “if’s” doesn’t work out, or something happens to get the groom thrown in jail. Of all the obstacles I’d envisioned getting in the way of our very much deserved wedding night, Paul popping around again was the last thing I’d expected.

“But more important, it means someday we’ll be opening our own practice, specializing in helping sick kids,” I went on. “Not that helping other people is a concept I’d expect you to understand.”

“That’s not true,” Paul said. There was no laughter in his voice at all now. “I’ve always wanted to help you, Suze.”

“Is that what you call what you did to me graduation night, when you said you had a present you had to give to me in private, so I followed you outside and you threw me up against the mission wall and shoved your hand up my skirt?” I asked him, acidly. “You consider that helping me?”