by Zoe Chant
“You’re eating it.”
“I’m eating everything. I’m exhausted with trying to look like an aerobics instructor.” She took another vicious bite of cookie. “Gordon didn’t try to help us get to know each other, either. He said Jilly had a mom already and he didn’t want that ‘maternal shit’ all around him. He said he liked me because I was ‘fun.’ He meant dumb.”
“You don’t seem dumb any more than you seem wicked,” Theo said.
It sounded to him like Gordon Marcus had thought his new wife would be a younger, sexier, bouncier version of himself: selfish, devoid of conscience, and intent on moment-to-moment gratification. To Theo that made Marcus the dumb one.
He wished Tiffani would have nodded, at least. That she didn’t showed that her husband had stolen something from her, too. Not her money, maybe, but her confidence.
“Anyway,” Tiffani said, “I didn’t listen to him. But all I knew back then was how to do hair. I’d been a stylist, before Gordon. Jilly has such beautiful hair. I put it up in Princess Leia buns for her, gave her a million little braids, whatever she could think of. That perm just about killed me—living through the eighties once was bad enough—but I still did it. She was such a shy little girl, but if you paid even a moment’s attention to her, you could see how smart she was.”
“I loved those Leia buns. I wore them every Halloween.”
Jillian Marcus breezed into view to Theo’s right, passing him to inspect the cookies.
Theo, who had only just managed to find a tactful moment to drop his in the trash, decided at once that he would take one from her if she offered.
Her long, dark auburn hair was pulled into a casual ponytail. Her clothes were rumpled and dusty from a hard day’s work unearthing nutcrackers. Everything about her radiated a lively, down-to-earth warmth that that made it impossible to look away from her.
Though he had to admit that his delight at having her in the room wasn’t entirely about some high-minded, ethereal notion that, though he’d never met her, she felt like coming home. She was also gorgeous enough to stop his breath in his throat.
Jillian Marcus was all beautiful curves and soft-looking skin sprayed with freckles. Her hips were round and generous, made for hands to cradle them as she danced. He had the strange thought that she would taste of cinnamon, hot and familiar and intoxicating.
He forced himself, with great difficulty, not to stare. Be professional. Be Emily Post.
Who is this Emily Post to us? His dragon lashed his tail from side to side. She is not this lady whose hair is the color of fire. Never mind Emily Post.
Her hair is a much darker red than fire, Theo thought back, feeling like he was somehow playing directly into his dragon’s claws. She’s just—hotter than fire.
He hadn’t yet stopped staring. He was glad her attention was elsewhere. She was looking at the cookies with a curiosity that suggested they were the end result of some decades-long experiment. She picked one up and then put it down.
“I knew it was too good to be true.”
“It’s unbecoming to gloat,” Tiffani said. “Jilly, this is Deputy Marshal St. Vincent—”
“Theo’s fine,” he said immediately.
“It’s nice to meet you, Deputy Marshal Theo,” Jillian said, but she was still mostly looking at Tiffani. “Actually, no matter how rock-hard these turned out, they smell incredible. I vote we reinvent ourselves as bakery perfumers, like whoever makes that artificial bread scent they spray around in all the Subways.”
“Do they really do that?” Theo’s interest was sincere. Dragons didn’t have especially keen senses of smell, but Colby had never been able to stand going near that sandwich shop. He complained that they were just as bad as candle stores and perfume counters for giving him headaches.
“It’s the legend passed around the teenage fast food workers circuit, anyway,” Jillian said. She turned towards him now, but her gaze was still downcast. Long, dark lashes hid her eyes from him, but he could tell that they were just a little red-rimmed. She had been crying. Maybe not just now, but recently.
She should never experience a moment’s unhappiness, his dragon opined.
That seems impractical, Theo thought, though part of him—the dragon part, obviously—agreed.
Instead, he said, “Oh?”
He was really excelling at smooth reactions today.
Luckily, Jillian read more thoughtfulness into the sound than he had really had. “Nothing made my dad more annoyed than knowing I was employee of the month at Burger King. How’s that for a rebellious childhood?”
Theo’s own boundary-pushing years had involved sneaking beyond Riell’s borders into places as ordinary as supermarkets and bowling alleys. He’d gotten in trouble for his breath smelling like root beer or chewing gum. So he could sympathize. He couldn’t tell her the whole truth, obviously, but he could give her a version of it.
“I once decided,” he said, “to do the sort of all-out revolt that makes parents say, ‘I have no son.’”
“I like the commitment,” Jillian said. “Do your bosses know about this? Are they worried that if you get bored, you’re going to go off and join the Mafia?”
“It’s a huge concern,” Theo said. “It shows up in all my performance evaluations.”
She laughed. The sound was husky, inconveniently attractive. To even hear it felt like he’d been given some rare jewel; to have caused it felt worth everything in his hoard. He wished he could get her to look at him. For some reason, he felt like an arrow drawn back and waiting to fire, the full force of the bent bowstring behind it, if he could only...
He had to keep the conversation going, though. He forced himself through his anecdote. The agony of waiting would be worth it if he could make her laugh again.
“I went,” he said, with a dramatic pause, the kind more usually inserted at the climax of a draconian epic, “to a waterpark.”
“A waterpark?” Tiffani said.
He liked her very much and it was very rude to have so thoroughly turned his attention away, he knew that, but he couldn’t make himself turn more towards her. He could only hope that she would excuse his discourtesy and write it off as an attempt to draw Jillian more into the conversation.
“It was called Waveland. It had slides and huge swimming pools filled with inflatable toys. There was a tall hill that you rode down on a small open tram car shaped like a log. It was quite exciting. I rode the Wave Mountain and slid down the Wave Vortex and ate a Waveburger with Wavefries and a Waveshake. And I kept thinking, This will show them.”
“Did it?”
“It did. My parents were—strict. Different.”
“Not just the managers of a competing waterpark?”
The corners of her mouth had turned up, further rounding her cheeks. Botticelli’s Venus had nothing on her. Then, smiling, she finally truly looked at him.
An inferno blazed up inside Theo. It was like nothing he had ever felt before. It bore no relation to his own fire, to its shades of red and gold—this was white-hot, like a lightning strike. His whole body yearned to shift. He wanted to soar, to proclaim what had happened to him.
More importantly, he wanted to take her with him.
It’s her. She’s the one. She’s the one I never thought I would find.
Our mate, his dragon said, spreading his wings out to their fullest span. Our beautiful, kind, perfect mate.
Shifters were in-between creatures in every way but love, where there was this one absolute, unshakable truth. Jillian was his perfect match. All he wanted was to tell her so. And he could tell her, too, that he already understood that he was drawn to more than just her beauty. He needed every bit of her. Her laugh. The love and loyalty that had brought her back home. The way her voice tilted when she was joking. Her good heart.
He would die without her. It was madness for his clan to have ever dismissed this as irrelevant or unnecessary. What if he had spent his whole life within the valley and never met her? His life would have been suc
h a dull, quiet thing, so colorless and lonely. What if she had someday needed him and he hadn’t been there? The thought horrified him.
Almost as much, he realized with a sinking feeling, as being gawked at by a complete stranger was possibly horrifying her.
No, scratch that. Not a complete stranger.
By the man who had come to paw through her father’s hoard and take it away from her. By the man who would strip her home to the bone.
Dammit.
Evidently dragon weather had a sense of humor.
3
Jillian
In its staff break room, the community center where Jillian worked kept a grubby, frequently consulted list that they called the “vocabulary sheet.” Jillian’s first major victory on the job had been taking the initiative to get it laminated.
The vocabulary sheet wasn’t a list of terms the staff needed to know or a cringe-inducing guide to “what the kids are saying these days.” Instead, it was, as someone had scrawled on the laminated copy, SHIT TO AVOID.
The sun will come out tomorrow.
Every cloud has a silver lining.
Turn that frown upside down!
“For starters,” Jillian said when training people on the vocabulary sheet, “that last one is just awful. Never say that to anyone. But with the first two, it’s just that we often don’t know what’s going on in these kids’ lives, not completely. Even if what they’re complaining about seems trivial to us, it could be huge to them. Or it could be a drastically downplayed version of reality. You never know when an argument with a parent really involved fists. You just don’t. When things are serious, or even when they could be serious, what you want to do is sit with them, talk with them, avoid sounding like an inspirational poster, and let them be upset.”
A very dark sense of humor eventually took over everyone at the community center, so when Jillian told her boss that she needed some time off to go sort out this awful mess with her dad, Carol had met her eyes and said, very warmly, “Jillian, the sun will come out tomorrow. Every cloud has a silver lining.”
“I have never, ever liked you,” Jillian said.
Then she had burst into tears and fits of giggles and Carol had hugged her and told her to take all the time she needed.
This situation she was in, she knew, was bad. Her dad had ruined people’s lives. He’d robbed them of the retirement savings and their kids’ college funds. He had gone on the run, leaving Tiffani in the lurch to face all the anger and hatred on his behalf. The asset seizure was a sad, too-little-too-late process of gradually funneling her dad’s ill-gotten gains back to where they had ultimately come from. This vacation, if that was what she wanted to call it, was a grim one.
But, in defiance of all good advice, Jillian was currently thinking, This guy is one hell of a silver lining.
She’d liked Deputy Marshal Theo before she’d even gotten a good look at him, just because he was talking to Tiff but didn’t sound like men usually did when talking to her. He wasn’t condescending or crude. And, despite what he was there to do, despite the fact that he was there to enforce justice, he wasn’t aggressive or self-righteous and he didn’t act like Tiffani was tainted by her association with her husband. He was... gentlemanly.
Then she actually saw him.
He was tall and rangy, lean but hard-muscled. His hands were wide, his fingers long and graceful but appealingly callused: guitarist’s hands, she thought. Chopin cheekbones and Clapton hands. She thought at first that his hair was a dark, mahogany brown, but when he turned his head a little and changed the way the light hit it, she could pick out lighter shades of red and gold. Somehow he looked like autumn—somehow he even smelled like autumn, like hot bonfires and cold night air—and that had always been her favorite season.
She’d never stumbled so quickly into such a hopeless crush. There was no way he would be interested in striking up anything with the daughter of the world’s currently most notorious white collar criminal. She would have to be content with enjoying her unexpected silver lining; she couldn’t expect it to want to enjoy her back.
She bustled around for a while, too nervous to look at him properly because she was afraid he would see pink cartoon hearts in her eyes. She teased Tiffani about the cookies.
Theo must have been used to people being stunned by him, because he didn’t react to the rudeness of her avoiding eye contact with him.
Until, that was, she stopped. Then he seemed thrown off.
He almost looked like—
No, there was no way he wanted anything more than a graceful exit from the small talk. He was too nice to remind them of why he was there, which meant it was her role as through-the-looking-glass hostess to give their guest a tour so he would know what to mark for pickup.
She cleared her throat. “Why don’t I show you around? Then we’ll get out of your hair and let you work.”
“You’re not in my hair,” Theo said. He snapped his mouth shut and hesitated, like he had to translate what he was about to say before he said it. “But yes. Thank you. A tour would be lovely.”
Lovely? She decided she liked that. Maybe the same parents who had banned their son from waterparks had taught him Old World courtesy, too.
She did wonder about his childhood—that was a hazard of her job, trying to see everyone’s younger self in their eyes. He had said his family was strict and her work had taught her how many sins could hide under the cover of that particular word. Some of the worst parents she had ever known, ones who would make her own look like Pa and Ma Ingalls, had been the kind to pride themselves on their “tough love” and their ability to teach their kids “how to have manners and show the proper respect.”
She felt a hot, sharp flash of anger at the thought of anyone mistreating Theo. But he was obviously grown up now and he’d just as obviously done well for himself. Even if he had once needed her outrage, he didn’t need her to come to his defense now. Why did she want to?
She could feel her face heating up, so she turned to walk back out into the foyer. Nothing like a good, brisk real estate tour to hide how much you were blushing.
And nothing like the embarrassment of an entryway filled with the rainbow-colored army of your dad’s unnerving collection to hide why you were blushing. It looked like they were besieged by tiny, angry old men eager to chomp on things.
“These,” she said, “as you can see, are the nutcrackers.”
“Trust me, I noticed. We noticed—I don’t know if you ran into my partner, Gretchen. She went out to check the perimeter.”
She observed with interest that they actually did say things like “check the perimeter.” She also liked the sound of this Gretchen who had ditched the tea party to prowl around the yard with the gun: it wasn’t anything Jillian herself would have done, but it was very much like the detective heroines she’d idolized when she was younger.
“She’ll tell you herself when she comes back,” Theo said, “but I think she almost gave one two shots in the chest. They’re terrifying.”
“To be fair, most of them are carrying swords. Anyone would be nervous facing that many armed men.”
“Marshals never back down in the face of superior numbers,” Theo said gravely. “Even when we have no hope of victory, we go down fighting.” He nudged the nearest nutcracker with the toe of his shoe. “I cannot unleash these on an innocent public without knowing more about them. Are they possessed? Will they come to life?”
“That’s a risk you’ll have to take.”
“Maybe I’ll burn them,” Theo said.
He sounded earnest. She wouldn’t mind seeing the official government torching of her dad’s nutcracker collection, come to think of it. She couldn’t seem to uproot the last bit of love for her dad that she had in her heart, despite everything he’d done, but that didn’t change her anger. She wouldn’t mind seeing his treasured, creepy collection go up in a fiery inferno. Especially if Theo were the one dropping the match.
She tugged her shirt col
lar away from her neck, suddenly aware of every little prickle of sweat on her body. Did she smell? What if she smelled? She’d put perfume on this morning but had then spent hours moving boxes around. She must look like a total mess. She could already feel that this morning’s neat ponytail was a thing of the past.
It didn’t matter. He wouldn’t care. He wasn’t here to flirt with her.
Which is a shame.
She gave that thought the acknowledgment it deserved and then did her best to move on.
“Why nutcrackers?” Theo said.
“They’re my dad’s. Were my dad’s.”
“Tiffani mentioned that. But he was rich enough to collect Rolls-Royces if he wanted to. Why nutcrackers?”
“There are a few Rolls-Royces out in the old stables, actually. No ponies, no matter how much I begged, but he converted the space into a garage. Rolls-Royces, Jaguars, Porsches.” But she knew that wasn’t really what Theo had meant, and it was a question worth answering, even if thinking about it made a lump rise in her throat. It was easier to talk about the luxury cars that he had bought and loved only as status symbols. It was easier to talk about what she didn’t like about him than to talk about what she did.
Except she didn’t like the nutcrackers, either, did she? She never had.
Even the better parts of him aren’t parts I like.
Instead of giving her some distance, that just made her sadder and more frustrated at what little of him she had to hold onto.
She gestured to the only one of the nutcrackers she had ever had any interest in. It was more clumsily made than the others, its jacket slightly bumpy where the paint had been slathered on unevenly and too thickly. That nutcracker wore a sky blue coat with glittery gold trim—though most of the glitter had worn off by now—and he carried not a sword but a bouquet of pink roses.
“See that one? My grandmother made it. She used to make toys for him and his sister. This isn’t part of some heartwarming rags-to-riches story, by the way, my grandparents had yachts, too. She was just good at crafts and she liked the idea of giving her children something they couldn’t get with money alone. She was nice. I’m glad—I’m glad she didn’t live to see what he did.”