by Zoe Chant
But he had the feeling that what she wanted from him was something else. Not things. Her father had given her things.
What she wanted and deserved was the truth. It didn’t matter how much he was afraid of it, he couldn’t go any further with her until he’d cleared things up.
“Jillian, what happened last night... for me, it wasn’t casual. Not at all.”
“No.” Her voice was low, but without the huskiness it had when she was happy. She was holding back. “You’re a smart guy. I don’t think you would go around sleeping with people tied to your cases just for kicks. I’m glad. I’m not good with casual.”
There was some comfort there, enough that in that moment, he would have happily given up all his shifter heritage to just be one ordinary man whose biggest worry was how to tell the woman he had fallen in love with that he already couldn’t imagine living without her.
In a way, though, that was the least of his secrets. He was probably giving that away to her with every look and every word.
“There’s something I have to tell you.”
To his surprise, she covered his hand with hers. Her large, cocoa-brown eyes looked at him, making him think of a puppy waiting to be kicked. She’d been disappointed so many times.
But she was tough, too. She would never settle for a lie or for a relationship without honor. He could see that even now she was running through all the things he could possibly be hiding and deciding, one by one, if they were dealbreakers.
Theo had never, ever told someone who didn’t know about shifters that he was a dragon. No human friends he had made between the all-dragon enclave of Riell and the almost all-shifter workplace of Sterling’s US Marshals Office had ever gotten close enough for him to want to give himself away. He didn’t know how to do this.
Impress her, his dragon suggested.
How am I supposed to impress her?
Dragons are impressive.
Theo eyed the size of the kitchen. He was lucky to be in a house with so much floor space. Most kitchens wouldn’t accommodate the sudden addition of a dragon.
He tallied up what remained of the cooking supplies he’d laid out. Could he risk that second batch, as promised, on further slapstick? He thought he could.
He speared one of the battered slices of bread with a fork. Then, thinking better of it, he instead impaled it on a skewer with a heat-resistant handle.
“I think you might be making French toast wrong,” Jillian said. “Just one woman’s opinion.”
He made sure he was turned well away from the curtains and, for that matter, well away from her. That made it easier as well as safer: he could only see her in his peripheral vision.
He said, “This is what I need to tell you.”
In a way, a shifter would have been more impressed, or at least more specifically impressed, than a human. Not many dragons, after all, could do what Theo did next.
Being able to control how he shifted had never been good for much besides party tricks, but he was grateful for it now. It would have been nice enough to be able to change slowly—just so she wasn’t suddenly confronted with a fifteen foot long dragon in her kitchen—but better still was that he could start the change from the inside out.
He inhaled deeply, feeling his body change imperceptibly below the surface. His breath grew hot inside his chest. He imagined banked coals stacked inside his throat. His body accommodated his imagination. Fire ran through his blood, flickered through his veins, burned in his heart.
He parted his lips and blew out a puff of coppery-green dragon flame.
It made for very unconventional French toast.
Jillian stood perfectly still. Then she said, “You can breathe fire.”
Theo slid back into full humanity. “I know it sounds ridiculous. But I’m a dragon. There are some people who are shifters, who can turn from humans into animals—”
“Werewolves.”
“Werewolves,” Theo said dismissively. “Werewolves get all the press. They don’t have any subtlety. —Please don’t tell Colby I said that. —And please ignore what I’m saying right now, because it’s completely irrelevant.”
“You’re a were-dragon.”
“We just say dragon.”
“So dragons,” Jillian said, “are real.”
She looked dazed, but that didn’t stop her from taking the skewer from his hand. She took a tentative bite of the French toast.
“This isn’t bad, do you know that? Are unicorns real?”
“I’ve never met a unicorn,” Theo said, determining that was the more important question. “Pegasi, though, winged horses, they’re real. My boss is a pegasus shifter. My office tends toward what you might call special hires, so no one has to make any difficult explanations. I mean, that’s why he’s a pegasus shifter and I’m a dragon. Well, no, that’s biology, properly, but... that’s why we’re both in the same office, not just by coincidence. Shifters don’t congregate in this area in unusually high numbers or anything like that. I’m sorry I keep rambling, I’ve never had to tell anyone before.”
“You’ve never had to tell anyone that you’re a dragon,” Jillian said.
“Never. Only you.”
“Can I see you?”
She wasn’t afraid of him?
She wasn’t afraid of him. She was a little stunned and she was certainly surprised, but she wasn’t running away. In fact, she was still eating the French toast, so he had successfully provided both truth and breakfast.
There was a spark of excitement in her eyes.
Theo concentrated. He was very thankful that he, unlike some of his colleagues, could shift without losing his clothes. There was something inherently unglamorous and undignified about undressing in the middle of a kitchen, and a dragon, of course, was never undignified. He let everything on him pass into the in-between world, the twilight place that only dragons knew, the one that had protected them for so long and that acted as everything from a moat around their homes to, effectively, a coatrack.
He could always feel the crimson and gold of his scales inside his soul. He had always been raised to think of himself as a dragon, and his shifting took the form of remembering that. He remembered what he was and came home to it.
His vision of her had changed. When he was shifted, his sight was much sharper, made to spot prey from miles above the ground. He could see Jillian perfectly, down to the last and faintest freckle, and she was so gorgeous.
Treasure.
“Can I touch you?” Jillian whispered.
Theo inclined his head. Then, overcoming a lifetime of etiquette training on how to be gracious even in dragon form, he gave up subtlety and nodded decisively. He didn’t want her to have any doubt that she was welcome to this part of his life.
Jillian put her hand down very gently against his forehead. It had been years since he had felt what she was feeling now: he hadn’t touched another dragon with his human hands since his parents had died. But he could still remember the sensation of it. Dragonskin was cool—cooler than his always three-degrees-above-normal human skin, in fact—and dry. It looked as hard as steel but felt more delicate, like napped velvet. Dragons defended themselves with their fire, flight, and claws, not with any natural armor. To their eternal chagrin, they were as mortal and vulnerable as any other creature.
He didn’t know how much of that she could know or guess. He didn’t know what this meant to her.
“You’re so beautiful,” Jillian said. There was a little catch in her voice. “You look like fireworks. Like fire turned into art.”
He lowered himself until he was lying at her feet. A dragon pledging complete devotion and loyalty to his mate.
Then he wanted to give her the same thing with words. He came back to the other half of himself, to the man who could hold the woman he loved in his arms. Human again, he stood and kissed her.
Jillian suddenly struggled away from him and he let her go with a start. The last thing he wanted was to keep her where she didn’t
want to be, but he’d thought—
“That’s why you’re always so hot!” She looked delighted to have put it together. “All dragons must run just a little hotter than the usual ninety-eight point six, right?”
“One hundred and one,” Theo said. “On average.”
“You’re a dragon. You’re a dragon and—you told me? You just met me! I hope you don’t go around telling your secret to everyone. ‘Hi, I’m Theo and I’m a dragon.’ I hope that isn’t you. Maybe you were raised in a nice little all-dragon community, but out here, people are vicious! People like my dad are vicious! And they’ll hurt you, Theo, they’ll—they’ll try to sell you or exhibit you or experiment on you—”
Her automatic response was to protect him. Maybe he loved knights in shining armor more than he’d thought.
“Hi,” he said, taking her in his arms and pressing a kiss to her forehead. “I’m Theo and I’m a dragon.”
Jillian laughed against his shoulder. The laugh sounded a little frantic.
He ran his fingers through her soft, silky hair. “I don’t go around telling everyone that I’m a dragon. Humans can’t see us when we shift unless we want them to. As I said, you’re the first entirely human person I’ve told.”
She looked up at him through her long, dark eyelashes, suddenly shy again. “Why me?”
He had showed her both his selves. Now all he had to do was show her his heart.
“With shifters, when you find the person who’s right for you, you know. All at once. You’re surer of it than you’ve ever been of anything. It’s like you’re the lock and they’re the key. Jillian, you’re my key.”
7
Jillian
She was his key? Could she trust that? Some swanky, swoonworthy guy walked into her life and her bed and the next morning all but told her he loved her, that she was the one? That didn’t sound like her life, it sounded like the beginning of some kind of elaborate con that would end with her short her life savings.
But she did believe him. And she didn’t think she was stupid for doing it.
She didn’t believe him because he was six feet and five inches of knock-you-down sex appeal, and she didn’t believe him because he’d blown her mind last night when they’d been doing their best to wreck the bed.
She believed him because, as ridiculous as it sounded after not even knowing him a whole day, she knew he wouldn’t lie to her. He was sweet, he was perceptive, he was honorable. He was protective. He made French toast.
There was also the fact that he was a dragon and had told her so. Had turned into one in front of her.
And then there was this, even more undeniable than the evidence of her own two eyes. She loved him too.
Theo said, “I know you might not feel the same way—”
“But I do,” Jillian said, surprising herself with the clarity and definitiveness of that.
A slow, heartstopping smile spread across his face. “You do? Even though you can’t know?”
“Last night, I just kept thinking—you’re the best thing to ever happen to me.” She put her hand on his chest, spreading her fingers out across his heart. “I never thought I’d get swept off my feet. Don’t take it as a character flaw, I’m begging you, I’m usually very level-headed.”
“Noted,” Theo said. His smile had now gone from striking to outright goofy, and she almost liked that better.
He had, she decided, the most kissable mouth in the world.
“It’s like a fairy tale,” she said. “That makes sense, right? With you being a dragon?”
“We’re not actually wild about fairy tales.”
No, they wouldn’t be, would they? Dragons were always the bad guys, the way a Marcus was always the bad guy: paint as many as possible with the same ultra-wide brush. She didn’t know if the dragons in books were ridiculous caricatures or as close as Theo’s ancestors had to recorded history, but at the moment she wasn’t going to ask. Whether it was truth or fiction, it wasn’t Theo.
Except family was inescapable. Her being here to meet him at all proved that much. And he had said “we.”
She guessed no one’s history came in black and white and no one’s life came separate from the people they loved. Like hers wouldn’t be separable from his, in the future.
Thinking that, she looked at him and felt desire uncoil in her belly and warm her between her legs. When she shifted her weight, the cotton of her shorts rode up a little and rubbed at her, and even that sensation felt like it had the potential to overload her circuits.
The smell in the air was syrup-sweet, the temperature warm and sticky.
“Theo,” she said hoarsely, hoping he would see the need in her eyes.
He did. He kissed her, his mouth hot and open, and in another moment, had sat her up on the counter beside the bowl of French toast batter.
“This is not at all sanitary,” Jillian said, and then his long, elegant fingers were against her lower belly under the waistline of her shorts and then they were between her lower lips. Kitchen standards became the last thing on her mind.
She felt like she was dissolving. She opened her legs wider and eased back onto her hands, holding herself up so he could wriggle her shorts down and onto the floor.
“I was promised breakfast,” she whispered.
Theo kissed her shoulder, his teeth a teasing pressure against her skin. “This will be better than breakfast.”
“This is already better than breakfast.”
“Besides—” He went back to stroking her, caressing her on her inner folds and around her entrance, eventually sliding his fingers inside her. She could feel herself gripping him, each bit of penetration simultaneously overwhelming and not nearly enough. “The freckles on your shoulders are like cinnamon. You smell better than any vanilla. You’re all I want to taste. I’m starving for you.”
She would have loved to have had some clever retort to that or even some honest, heartfelt response about how she was starving for him too, but she came then, gratifyingly and almost embarrassingly quickly. She had never gone off like that. It was like he had lit a rocket at the center of her. She tilted her head back, crying out as the wave hit her and she tightened around him. She could feel his fingers inside her and against her clit. She could feel his eyes on her.
For the first time in her life, she understood what made someone wanton. She had needed so little from him. Just having him close felt like it would drive her crazy.
“You could burn me up,” Theo said.
“You breathe fire,” Jillian said, breathless.
“Even so.”
She slid down from the counter, her legs orgasm-weak and unsteady. “I want you.”
“You’ve got me,” Theo said.
Jillian knelt down. It was unfair that he was already dressed, even though his clothes were almost as delectable as the rest of him. She laid her hand against the front of his charcoal gray trousers and heard him suck in a breath.
Doing this for him, she felt powerful. She could undo him just as easily as he could her; could make him fall apart at the seams right then and there.
She unzipped his pants and freed him from his boxers. He was gorgeous—hard for her, all for her. She took him into her mouth without a moment’s hesitation.
Theo tasted incredible: musky and sweet. Jillian felt like she could get drunk off him as her tongue glided up and down the steely length of his shaft, feeling the heat and desire beneath the silky skin. He settled his hands down in her hair and she loved that, too. He didn’t control her movements, he only made her feel like he couldn’t stop touching her and would never want to. She’d never felt so sexy in her life. Was this what she’d been missing out on all those years when she’d fumbled through lackluster relationship after lackluster relationship?
No, she decided. No one else could ever be Theo. It wouldn’t be like this with anyone but him.
“Jillian—”
His hips stuttered forward as she tightened her lips and brought him to his
release. Then he slumped down onto the floor with her.
“Like I said. You, Jillian Marcus, burn me up.”
She laughed and moved over next to him, curling up under his arm. “You know, as much as I wish we were somewhere else, there aren’t many houses where the kitchen floor would be this spotless even up close. Tiff’s always paid the cleaners really well. My apartment, on the other hand, is a mess.”
“Then when we’re there, we can stick to the bed.”
She smiled. “But I was just thinking: it’s a shame that everything you know about me comes from seeing me here. I did the best I could to leave this place behind. I have my own life. My real home, it’s not anything like this. Fewer animal-skin rugs lying around, for one thing.”
She paused to figure out what to say next and then clapped a hand over her mouth, suddenly horrified.
“Oh my God! You don’t know any werebears, do you?”
“Not personally,” he assured her. “And I haven’t heard of any dying in mysterious hunting accidents, either, if that helps.”
“Can I still eat meat? Are there cow shifters and pig shifters and... chicken shifters?” She wanted to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had never eaten a person, which wasn’t a worry she thought she’d wake up to. Life threw you some curveballs, didn’t she try to tell the kids at the center that?
“I shudder to think what my family would have to say about the concept of chicken shifters.”
“That’s a no?”
“Think about the number of pork buns you saw me eat last night and you’ll have your answer.”
“I don’t know,” Jillian said. “Maybe you’re just an unusually cruel and callous person. Maybe pig shifters are the sworn enemies of dragon shifters and you’ve got some Hatfield and McCoy thing going on.”
“Dragons feud with everyone, though it mostly doesn’t come to bloodshed anymore, thankfully. But,” he said, trailing his fingers up and down her bare shoulder like he was tracing something there, drawing a constellation between her freckles, “the folklore in my valley was always that shifters came about because of the spiritual connections people had with particular animals. Their beloveds: horses and dogs and cats. The creatures they thought were strong, impressive: lions, tigers, bears—”