A drug-dealing ladies' man and part-time assassin with psychic skills meets the woman he’ll mend most of his ways for. A new-age con artist herself, she’s got her own brand of psychic ability and a troubling history of being on hand for untimely deaths.
When they meet, Jack's on the lam from the Life, and Anna’s married to a gangster wannabe who’s blackmailing her to keep her in line. Cosmic lust comes before trust, but they must learn to work together if they hope to thwart her husband’s plans to sell her and her secrets to settle a deadly debt.
Enter the Will of the Stars personified by two spirits from the next realm, Hope and Sam. Their mission is to see Jack paired up with the woman who will either save his soul, steal it, or maybe both. No one knows for sure which, and why is up for grabs. Hope is out of her league, spirit-wise, and Sam's a rookie.
Jackson Jude Bell, 19, has been kicked out of a short stint in the Navy for being, well, Jack.
If you have something on your mind and Jack is nearby, he knows about it. He knows what you're planning, and he also knows when you are going to die. And if you are the kind of miscreant who deserves it, he’ll wait on you in a dark alley and take care of you. Judge, jury, executioner, weed peddler, and all-round ladies' man, he mostly uses his trick to get by, get over, and get laid – food, air, and water for a guy his age. He’s happy-go-lucky until he runs afoul of the cocaine epidemic in Manhattan and starts to have problems with his supplier and his lifestyle in general and takes an opportunity to relocate to the suburbs.
Annabea Catalano has had a few more spins around the planet than Jack and a lot less joy. She was empty, aching,, and ready to run off the rails the night she met him at a bar ninety miles north of Manhattan. Even if she never saw him again, something in that night that gave her hope and the will to free herself from a loveless marriage.
Hostage to her husband’s blackmail, she doesn't wear Ray’s ring or sleep in his bed and is working her way around to the idea that there’s only one way out of the marriage when Jack pulls her out onto the dance floor and back from the edge of self-destruction.
Anna has her own special knack of the mind, but it’s never caused her anything but unhappiness and isolation. Up close and personal, she knows what you’re thinking and can feel back down your history to the how and why of who you are. She has a modest Tarot reading business and, for a price, she’ll tell you the bitter truth. She’s also a freelance courtroom artist, which is really a cover for using her telepathic skills to vet juries for the highest bidder while keeping her methods secret.
Years ago, she made the mistake of telling Ray about her secret and he’s used her to further his own petty political ambitions and has blackmailed her into a loveless marriage over some deadly indiscretions in her past. Anna finds the world a hostile place for an attractive woman who knows what all the men around her are thinking. She walls herself off with drugs and alcohol but realizes that her life is in jeopardy and has come to the conclusion that Ray has to go.
When Jack and Anna first meet, it’s lust at first sight, but the connection gets derailed by bad timing. Once they are back in each other's orbit, they are shocked to find that they cannot read each other and have to learn the dance of love the hard way, like the rest of the human race, keeping truths from each other until it’s a matter of life or death.
Jack struggles with the idea of the straight life and one woman, and Anna struggles against the idea of Jack, so wrong, but so right. At first, she’s willing to enlist him in her plan to rid her of Ray, but once love steps in and things go sideways, Jack and Anna are caught up in a domino run of desire and danger along their way to not one altar, but three, and a happy ever after that nobody could have anticipated.
