by Zoe Chant
His laugh sounded a little stilted that time. Maybe he was an undercover spy. Maybe he was raised among the Amish.
Theo said, “Believe me, at least with the people in my office, judgmental and officious and self-righteous... none of that would be anything you would have to worry about. And none of them are from where I’m from.”
“And, sorry, where’s that? Your accent’s not local, right?”
“Not so far from here, but it was just a very, very insular community. I doubt we even sounded like the people a mile away from us.”
More bobbing and weaving. She told herself to take a step back and give him some privacy. He didn’t owe her his whole history right now, and it wasn’t like she didn’t understand not wanting to talk about family.
She said, “I’m glad you’re here, that’s all.”
Theo said, “I’m glad you’re here, too.”
As she tilted back her head to look up at him, he leaned down and kissed her.
She rose up on her toes to take his mouth as fiercely as he’d taken hers. He tasted like Earl Grey tea and his kiss was electric, a shock that took her at her lips and reverberated all the way down to her toes. She had never been so responsive before. She opened her mouth further and felt his tongue glide against hers. She made a small whimpering noise against his lips and he made a fierce one back. He sounded desperate, like he would always need more of her.
He was hot to the touch, almost feverish. It was like kissing the sun.
Sun-kissed. I’m sun-kissed.
She didn’t care about anything except getting as much of him as possible. Never mind the lack of real privacy, never mind the weird circumstances. She felt such an incredible, slippery heat between her legs. She felt her clit throb as he bit her lower lip, a feeling which only intensified as he tugged at her hair.
“Theo,” she whispered. “Please. Close the door.”
“Are you sure?”
“I have never been surer of anything in my entire life.”
He looked like she was water and he was dying of thirst. “Me neither.”
He closed the door. She hopped up on the desk and spread her legs so he could step between them and continue the kiss.
Then the brick came through the window.
She was so absorbed in him that at first, bizarre as it was, she almost mistook the sound and the sudden flare of glittery brightness in the air for her own climax. That was the only shattering she had expected. But: broken glass, everywhere. The window had shattered like crystal.
Theo had pulled her close and held her against him before she had even really heard the sound. Held like that, she could hear his heartbeat, which was running rabbit-quick. When they finally separated, though, he didn’t look scared. He looked furious.
Then all she saw was his back, because he’d darted for the window.
“Dammit!” he said. “They’re gone.”
He slammed his hand against the wall and then shook his head rapidly, like he needed to clear it. He drew the blinds and curtains down over the busted window.
“At least now they can’t see us. No one’s going to hurt you on my watch.”
Jillian, still shaken, only then noticed the brick on the floor. A sheet of paper was wrapped around it. Someone had typed, “GET OUT NOW!!” Oh, sure. To be honest, she had expected the first one of those days ago. She said as much.
“But it’s the extra exclamation point,” she added, “that I didn’t see coming. That was a twist.”
Theo wasn’t so cavalier. “You could have been hurt. They could have hit you, they could have hurt you—or the glass could have—”
“I’m fine.” She did a brief twirl, showing off the lack of blood. “See? I’m just a little shaken up, but really, this was going to happen sooner or later. Hopefully they got it out of their system.”
“No. It isn’t acceptable for people to be unfair.”
“Now who’s being quixotic?” She spotted streaks of blood on his shirt. “You’re hurt! Let me help you, okay? You’re not going to go running after whoever did it, they probably peeled away the second they threw the damn thing.”
But now that she knew he’d gotten cut by the flying glass, she understood his rage a little more. As she rolled up his sleeve to examine his arm, her hands were shaking with anger and adrenaline.
“I should have gone after them right away,” Theo said.
“Believe me, I care a lot more about the fact that you wanted to keep me from getting hurt than I care about you wanting to pummel the world’s most incompetent bricklayer. And,” she reddened a little at saying it, but she wanted to break the tension in his face, “the world’s most obnoxious cockblocker.”
He was leaning against her head and she felt his mouth curve upwards. Good. So like most well-spoken people, he liked the occasional bit of vulgarity.
“Come on,” she said. “Let me get you the first aid kit.”
4
Theo
Gretchen, with an enterprising spirit Theo admired, had decided to stick it out with the cookies and was holding one half-submerged in a cup of coffee. She dropped it and reached for her sidearm the second he came in with blood on his shirt.
“What happened? Are you all right?”
“Broken window,” Theo said. “A person with a brick, strong feelings, and a good arm. I’m fine. Jillian’s getting the first aid kit for me. Where’s Tiffani?”
“Master bedroom upstairs. I did a quick inventory of it and then let her go in to take a nap. She’s wrung out.”
“Good, thank you.”
He unbuttoned his shirt and laid it down on the granite-topped island, unbloodied side down. The cuts he’d sustained were light and already closing. If Jillian didn’t come back quickly, he would have some improvising to do to explain why he’d healed so quickly. Unless he could tell her now.
No, not like this. She had no reason to trust him to not be either delusional or playing some kind of cruel practical joke. That was right, wasn’t it?
He started to ask Gretchen—her constant diplomacy between humans and shifters must mean that she had explained the existence of one to the other before—but Jillian walked in before he could.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Everything in this house is always three bathrooms over from where you’d think it would be.” She snapped the case open and took out an alcohol-soaked wipe. “Let me just clean the blood off so I can see how bad it is.” Her brow furrowed in cutely, which distracted him from the icy chemical burn of the alcohol against his torn skin. “These are shallower than I would have guessed.”
“There are a lot of blood vessels right at the surface,” Gretchen said quickly.
Jillian’s skepticism showed in her raised eyebrows—of course, Theo thought, if you worked with energetic children and teenagers all day, you probably saw your share of minor injuries—but when she spoke, she sounded playful: “Dammit, Jim, I’m a youth coordinator, not a doctor.” She peeled the adhesive off a gauze patch and applied it to Theo’s arm.
“There. Done.”
“Doctor or not, I’ve never had better care,” Theo said.
Gretchen coughed. “Well, I’m going to go radio in about the brick just to get it on the record. You two kids have fun.”
Theo had rarely seen anyone move that fast.
Jillian said, “You told her about our date, didn’t you?”
“Approximately.” He could no longer stand being so close to her without touching her, so he put his arms around her waist and drew her near him. Her full bosom was against his chest, her plaid button-up against his ribbed undershirt. He thought about their clothes because to think about what was underneath them would drive him mad.
Jillian made a long mm sound of satisfaction and leaned into him, her head burrowing into the indentation below his shoulder. “I have a confession to make.”
“Me too,” he said without thinking. Dammit. “You should go first, though.”
She turned a little so that h
er lips were against him. He could feel her words as well as hear them. “I paid someone to throw the brick. I thought, hey, how could I get Deputy Marshal Theo to take his shirt off?”
“You work quickly.”
“Thank you. I value efficiency.”
“But believe me, you would never have to contrive a situation to get us here.” He raised her chin with his hand and kissed her, lingering on her lips. She did taste like cinnamon: like cinnamon, ginger, and vanilla. Spice and grounding sweetness. He could fall towards her. She was the new center of his gravity.
But he couldn’t afford to get distracted. If he hadn’t been so overwhelmed by her back in the office, he might have seen whatever car had slowed down outside, or whatever person had run by. The brick could have hit her because he couldn’t control himself enough to keep her safe.
He pulled back from the kiss with the greatest reluctance.
He said, “I thought you were hurt.”
“I thought you were hurt. And you were. Sort of. I kind of feel like a hypochondriac-by-proxy now, though.”
Now he was making her doubt her own judgment. This was all going so well.
Believe me, if you’d heard the cursing I did inside my head when the pain sank in, you’d know you couldn’t have overreacted to it as much as I did.
“That’s not your fault,” Theo said. He had to admit that sounded strange—It’s not your fault that I wasn’t more seriously hurt!—but he continued anyway. “Sh—St. Vincents have always been hard to knock down for the count. I tend to heal a little faster than most people.”
“A very gallant try, but I’m pretty sure there’s no constitution good enough to do that. Unless you’re one of the X-Men.”
He frowned.
“Wolverine? Storm? Cyclops? Rogue?”
Wait.
“Are you asking if I can turn into a wolverine?” he said hopefully.
This went in circles for a few increasingly confusing minutes until Theo established that (1) the X-Men were fictional superheroes, not real life shifters and (2) Wolverine could not turn into a wolverine. He stressed again that he was from a very small town.
“This makes me want to show you so many movies,” Jillian said. “You’re my perfect blank slate. Do you even know the twist ending of The Sixth Sense? Do you know who killed Dumbledore?”
Theo brightened. “I know who killed Dumbledore.”
He had always loved to read. As sparsely as his apartment was furnished—dragons tended to be very picky where they made their dens, and the glossy townhouse still didn’t feel like home to him—its wall-to-wall bookshelves were full. It was the one tie he still felt to his parents, who had loved books themselves. Not just their prized first editions or their ancient volumes printed on vellum but their vintage science fiction paperbacks and their complete sets of Miss Marple mysteries. They were the part of his inheritance he most valued.
Then the conversation turned to the two of them recommending books to each other. Unsurprisingly, given her profession, Jillian read many children’s and young adult novels, and her enthusiasm for them was contagious. She started writing titles down for him on a cocktail napkin and he did the same for her, remembering old fantasy novels like Lud-in-the-Mist and boisterous, clever mysteries like The Moving Toyshop.
“Wait,” Jillian said, capping her pen. “I forgot. What did you want to confess to?”
He had only a second to decide if now was his chance or not, and then the second passed. “I wanted to say again that I’m worried. I don’t think you and Tiffani should spend another night here.”
“She was planning on leaving tomorrow morning. I’m just staying in town to help her get settled into her new place.”
“And she has that lined up already?”
“Yeah, but she’s allowed access to the house until the sale goes through, right?”
He nodded. “Some of the furniture and other valuables will go before then, but she doesn’t have to go with it. I just think she should.”
And so should you.
“I just don’t want her life to keep getting jerked around by other people making decisions for her.”
He admired her loyalty all the more because she gave it by her own choice. That streak of principle, hard as steel, was a draconian quality: I will not spend myself on what I do not value. But Jillian, unlike anyone he had grown up with, went further. On what, and whom, she valued, she would give and pay and give and pay. That was human. When he looked at her, he saw the two halves of himself made into a whole more seamless than he ever felt.
Reluctantly, he said, “Then neither one of us will decide for her. It’s her call whether or not to leave tonight, but, Jillian, I want to tell her that I think she should.”
“That’s fair.”
“If she wants to stay, you’re staying too?”
She gave a firm, decisive nod that made her hair bounce around adorably.
“Then I would like to stay here to look after the both of you, if you’ll have me.”
He didn’t know what he would do if she said no. He wouldn’t be able to sleep without knowing that she was safe.
A distracting fantasy suggested that perhaps he wouldn’t be able to sleep at all, not without her by his side, in his bed. He could just see her long auburn hair spread out against the pillow, making her look like she was floating. He could almost feel the smooth, creamy skin of her inner thighs. If the taste of her mouth was beyond compare, what would she taste like between her legs?
Jillian said, “Of course I’ll have you,” and then darkened to a red that almost matched her hair. “Who wouldn’t? Are there people who detest having hot bodyguards around?”
“Maybe. But I’ll do my best to stifle my natural attractiveness.”
“See that you do.”
Despite his best intentions to remain clearheadedly chaste, the better to protect her, he couldn’t bring himself to ask her to do the same.
5
Jillian
Tiffani, rejuvenated by her nap and a budding friendship with Gretchen, who was teaching her how to play mahjong, said that she didn’t want to be chased out ahead of schedule by a brick.
“It’d be rewarding a lack of creativity,” she said. “We already had the cherry bomb in the mailbox, the torched Monopoly money on the porch, the garage graffiti, the all-night-long doorbell-ringing.” Her smile was wan. “I can’t disrespect all that work by caving at something so unoriginal. But, Jilly, you should go, if Deputy Theo doesn’t think it’s safe.”
“If you’re staying, I’m staying,” Jillian said.
“If both of you are staying, I’m staying,” Theo said.
Gretchen began steeping another rock-hard cookie in her coffee cup. Something about her downturned gaze made Jillian think she looked wistful. “It doesn’t have the same dramatic ring to it, but Theo, if you want backup, I can ask a neighbor to look after the dogs tonight.”
“No need to disrupt the dogs’ routine. I think I’ll be enough.”
A glimmer of humor came into Gretchen’s eyes. “Yeah, I bet you will.” She winked at Jillian.
Tiffani lit up at this and practically resorted to semaphore to get Jillian to verify that something had happened between her and Theo.
She’d mind the loss of privacy more if she didn’t feel like she could write some painfully earnest bubblegum pop ballad about her cute new date and sing it from the rooftops. She had gone through enough seriousness and severity. She liked that there was this uncertain fizzy excitement in her and that other people could see it.
And they could see it in Theo, too. Even she could. No amount of wobbly self-esteem could make her blind to how he looked at her.
Though he seemed to have taken a vow of chastity for the evening, at least. She could understand the logic of that—she certainly hoped he would find sex with her distracting enough to knock him off his bodyguard game—but she couldn’t condone it. If the brick wasn’t going to interrupt Tiffani’s moving plans, Jillian sa
w no reason it should keep them from resuming their own interrupted activities.
But with Tiffani awake and up and Gretchen also moving around the house taking notes, Jillian bottled up her sexual frustration and finished giving Theo the tour.
She would have thought that showing him the bedrooms would be the hardest part, but the first one they came to was her childhood room, and the punch of that knocked the dreaminess out of her.
She’d just spent so many years here. She had never liked the rest of the house, where her dad’s questionable and gaudy tastes had trumpeted loudly across everything, but this room had been her sanctuary. These were the walls she had decorated with a collage of movie and concert tickets; the floors where she had spilled nail polish and pink lemonade and peppermint schnapps. She had written some awful confessional poetry and hidden it in the bottom of that nightstand. Some of her books—no old favorites, now, she had moved all those—were still on the shelves.
She wondered if Tiffani had kept this room the same out of sentiment or if her dad had kept it the same out of laziness and unoriginality.
She took Theo through it as quickly as she could, which wasn’t hard. She’d had some rings and necklaces too lavish for a kid her age, but they had migrated to the house’s general jewelry safe years ago, along with her mother’s old custom-designed earrings and some gifts her dad had thought better of giving to his mistresses. Nothing else she’d left here was worth much, unless you had a passion for vintage Heath Ledger posters and dusty Far Side calendars inexplicably saved in the back of a closet. Whatever. It shouldn’t mean anything to her, so it didn’t. There. Done.
She shooed him out again.
He was quiet enough for the rest of the tour that she figured he had either noticed that she was a little more rattled by all this than she would like or that he had determined that, given his natural sexiness and charm, any word out of his mouth would count as more flirting. Or both.
Or...
Or he had been open to having fun with her but now that things were more complicated, he’d like to take a permanent step back. Maybe he really liked her only because he was the kind of guy who really liked most women: a good-hearted Casanova who got laid through sweetness as much as sexiness. Maybe him making an on-the-job pickup wasn’t as much of a professional risk as she’d thought, so it didn’t mean anything that he’d done it. After all, Gretchen acted like it was totally natural for him to be making plans with her. Maybe he seized all the assets he could, all the time.