by Zoe Chant
“Jillian, this is Colby,” Theo said. “Colby, this is Jillian Marcus. Gretchen probably told you, but—Jillian is my mate.”
Colby gave Jillian what she thought might be the most wistful smile she’d ever seen, something totally belied by the cheerful openness of his voice as he called out, “Hey, everybody! Theo and his mate are here!”
“Subtle,” Theo said.
“Subtlety’s only necessary when we have strangers around, Your Highness.” He held his hand out to Jillian. “Pleased to meet you. From what Gretchen told us about you, I would have liked you anyway, but anyone who’s perfect for Theo must be pretty close to perfect in general.”
Theo looked startled by that and then laughed as if it had been a joke, though it hadn’t sounded like one. He said to Jillian, “Colby’s a werewolf.”
She liked that she now lived in a world where this information could be delivered as casually as “Colby’s an accountant.”
“Theo said you guys get all the press,” Jillian said.
“Yes,” Colby said, “because no one has ever heard of dragons, obviously. Anyway, silver allergy yes, full moon no, but my kind can sometimes turn humans into shifters with a bite, which his can’t.” He was talking quickly, like he had to outpace the look in his eyes. Before she could even try to think about how to ask if something was wrong, though, Gretchen had joined them.
“Hi, Jillian. I’m glad we all get to openly fawn over you now.”
“It’s not overwhelming at all,” Jillian said.
“Of course not. Who could be overwhelmed by a bunch of shifters pouncing on them all at once?”
“And this,” Colby said breezily, “is Martin, Chief Deputy US Marshal and pegasus shifter.”
Martin was an immensely tall square-jawed man in his early fifties, his hair chestnut and touched with the purest silver at his temples. Jillian knew men’s clothing from futile Christmas shopping for her father and instantly pegged his suit as hand-tailored, but she wasn’t sure if that was his taste or just necessity because of how big he was.
He had a calm and gravelly voice that was made for reassurance. Jillian noticed his wedding ring and could only assume he made his own mate very happy. “It’s nice to meet you, Jillian. I’m sure Theo will be giving us all a recitation of your virtues soon enough.”
“I will,” Theo said, entirely unbothered by this. His hand settled in the small of her back, intimate and just a little possessive, and it made an enticing shiver crawl up Jillian’s spine.
“It’s good to see you happy, you know?” Colby said.
Theo gave another one of those I’m-sure-you-don’t-mean-that laughs that Jillian was starting to think bugged his coworkers as much as they bugged her.
She said brightly, “You’ll have to tell me embarrassing stories about Theo.”
“No shortage of those,” Gretchen said. “He was very adorable when he first got here. He didn’t know how to use a vending machine.”
“I don’t think we have to tell the vending machine story,” Theo said.
“I like the vending machine story,” Martin said. His smile made the corners of his eyes crinkle up. “It makes you more approachable.”
“Theo is the only reason coins are still in circulation,” Colby said. “It physically pains him to give up pocket change. Vending machines haunt him, poor guy. But like Martin says, a flaw or two brings the world’s perfect gentleman a little more down here with the rest of us.”
“I just thought you would tell her the Secret Santa story,” Theo said, shading his face with his hand. Jillian could see the corner of his smile. “Have mercy.”
“None,” Colby said.
8
Theo
Someone finally thawed the ice prince.
That was what Colby had said to Jillian, punching Theo’s arm with a more open friendliness than he’d ever shown before. Theo could see why. All that polished perfection he’d always aimed for—it had kept a distance between him and his team. He knew how they could see through all that gem-cut armor now. Jillian. They could see the best parts of him shining clearly out of her.
He’d gone to show her the closest thing he had to a home, and she’d brought him even closer to it.
Before they could even reach the car, he wrapped his arms around her. She responded instantaneously, stepping further into his embrace and rising up on her toes to kiss him.
“I want to take you to dinner.”
“It’s four in the afternoon.”
“I want to take you to a very late lunch.”
He felt her smile against his mouth. “What if I just want you to take me to bed?”
“I’ve seen television,” Theo said stubbornly. “Courtship involves dinner. I know our relationships is unconventional by human standards, but I want you to have every moment you could ever expect.”
“And some I couldn’t, if this conversation is any indication.” She leaned more fully against him, her soft, warm body flattening against him, her generous hips tantalizingly close to his cock. “Do you know what dating has that we don’t have?”
Theo tried to think, which wasn’t a simple process with Jillian stretched out next to him, her fingers brushing idly through the fine hairs on the back of his neck. Heart-shaped boxes of Valentine’s Day chocolates. Engagement rings in crème brûlée. Dubiously comedic misunderstandings. He thought he could remember hearing something that might be relevant.
“A Facebook status?”
Her body shook, her laughter reverberating against his chest. “Uncertainty.”
“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.”
“Neither have I,” Jillian said, now looking up to meet his eyes. She radiated seriousness: this was the look of a woman who convinced stingy city councils to cough up amenities for the poor in their district. She would not be a dragon’s mate if she could be opposed lightly. “I like that this isn’t exactly normal dating. I like knowing that, unlike my dad, I’m not going to cycle through attraction and flattery and flirtation and then have to start all over again. There’s nothing you have to do to impress me.”
“I’m beginning to believe people really do think that.”
“Your friends?”
He had always thought of them as his coworkers, his colleagues. “Yes,” he said, and then said the word just to try it out. “My friends.” It felt true. “Does this mean you don’t want dinner?”
“No, I’m actually pretty hungry. I just don’t want you to think I have some imaginary checklist where you have to be careful to hit every box.”
Theo mimed crumpling up and tossing a piece of paper. “No checklist.”
“Then you may take me to evening brunch.”
#
*
#
Jillian lit up when she saw the variety of the menu. “I didn’t know it was possible to get all this on the same continent, let alone in the same diner. Can you even really call it a diner if there’s sashimi? What’s good?”
“Everything,” Theo said honestly.
She hadn’t blinked at the teal Formica tables, the laminated menus spattered with apparently permanent barbecue sauce fingerprints, or the funereal hush that hung over the place, but now his tone seemed to catch her attention. She looked up, holding her finger in place over a possible order—a shrimp and rice stew, Theo noted, committing it to memory so he could later learn how to make it for her—and suspicion dawned in her eyes.
“Theo, why are we the only people in this diner that has great food in a thousand different varieties?”
“It is an off hour. You said as much yourself. Although I should warn you—”
But he’d waited too long, because Magda herself had surfaced. Tall, gaunt, and bony, she moved in huge, swift lurches. She would seem halfway across the room and then, in the blink of an eye, be looming over the table, her order pad in hand. Colby swore that whatever Magda wrote on the pad—her cramped, blocky handwriting was unreadable to anyone else—it had nothing to
do with anyone’s order. Theo considered this plausible, since Magda often started writing before anyone even spoke and never looked down at her paper. It was like she was taking dictation from an unseen source.
Still, Theo was fond of her. She had made him his first cheeseburger.
And there was a reason—there was one more than one reason, even—her diner had become the go-to spot for shifters who needed to decompress.
“Hello, Magda,” he said. “This is Jillian Marcus.”
Magda’s gray glass eyes drifted halfway to Jillian before she resumed staring at the ornamental flowers at the opposite end of the table. “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, I guess. I read that in a Hallmark card.”
“I feel that’s in questionable taste for a greeting card,” Theo said.
Magda shrugged. “There’s no emotion they won’t sell for a dollar. She knows.” She continued to write illegible words on her pad of paper. “You’re not the selling kind, though, if the news was right, which it never is. You’re the white sheep daughter, aren’t you?”
She will upset our mate, Theo’s dragon said, sparks flying out from his nostrils. She goes too far. Her darkness shouldn’t encroach on our mate’s light.
But Jillian just said, “I always felt like black sheep got an unfairly bad rap. What’s wrong with black wool? That’s a tasteful coat right there. White gets dirty too easily. Maybe my dad’s the white sheep and I’m the black one.”
“Well, we all get slaughtered in the end,” Magda said. “That’s what happens either way.”
“I should think I’d get shorn before I got slaughtered,” Jillian said. “It’s more useful. And if your point is that we’re all going to die anyway, I’d just as soon give the world a few more winter coats than it had before I came in.”
“That’s one way of looking at it,” Magda said. It was maybe the biggest concession to a half-full glass that Theo had ever heard her make.
That made sense, though. Magda seemed to live every day with a storm cloud of imminent death and disaster following her around, but despite all that, she still learned her recipes, ran her diner, and made the best food Theo had ever tasted. She let the world have the wool.
This metaphor, Theo thought, was going to get loused up by the fact that there was both mutton and lamb on Magda’s menu, and after all these analogies, it felt cannibalistic to even consider it.
“What do you want thrown together?” Magda said. “You’re here at a funny time.”
“It’s evening brunch,” Jillian said.
She ordered the shrimp and rice stew, Theo ordered ropa vieja, and Magda informed them that both dishes would be no good, that the shrimp was off and the ropa tasted like the old clothes that it was named for, and then she brought them a breadbasket and immense tumblers of iced tea before disappearing into the kitchen.
“Why did she wait on us herself?” Jillian said, looking intently at the kitchen doors that were still swinging in their frame.
“That’s your first question?”
“I could ask you about her being strange, but I’ve seen that she’s strange. And she’s giving my teenaged self a run for the award for most existential angst. But none of that explains why she’s doing double-duty as a waitress.”
“Magda is...” How should he put this? “Magda’s a friend of the family, like Gretchen. She’s shifter-adjacent, she comes from a mythic bloodline. She can’t transform—or if she can, she considers it a waste of time—but she can recognize us when we show up.”
“So you get the VIP treatment,” Jillian said, grinning. “It’s like you’re royalty.”
“We try to be loyal to each other,” Theo said. There had been a time when it had sounded strange to him to say “we” and mean all shifters, not just dragons, but those days were gone now. “Shifters can get into some complicated trouble from time to time. If we don’t help each other out where we can, no one else will. It’s a bond.”
“I bet you never get speeding tickets from shifter traffic cops.”
“I have never gotten a speeding ticket at all,” Theo assured her. “You’re perfectly safe with me. But what I’d really like to do is take you flying.”
Jillian sat up straighter. “You can do that?”
“It would be my honor to show you the skies.”
In fact, a part of his mind found it almost impossible to turn away from the thought of bearing her aloft into a night radiant with starlight. He’d never taken a rider. In the valley, where dragons mated only with other dragons, to even offer to do it would have been an insult and an implication that the other dragon was incapable of flying themselves. But his heart responded instantly to the idea of giving Jillian flight. Like the mate-bond, it was something he’d never thought he would have and something he was now finding a biological necessity. He decided to do it as soon as possible. Tonight, even.
Their food came. Theo’s ropa vieja was as delicious as always, the beef falling even further apart at the slightest touch of his fork, the rich sauce soaking into the rice and running over to the fried plantains. He was used to a hush coming over the table when Magda’s food arrived, and Jillian did not disappoint him. She looked—his dragon was a little insulted by this—almost like she had when he’d pleasured her, with her lips widened in exactly the same way. The delight on her face was a fraction less, which helped his ego somewhat.
“This is divine,” Jillian said.
Magda shrugged. “Just slopped something into a bowl. Like I said, the shrimp’s going bad. You’ll probably get sick,” she said with grim confidence, and stomped off back to the kitchen.
“So the food’s great,” Jillian said, sotto voce, “but it’s the charming, hospitable atmosphere that keeps you coming back.”
“She grows on you.”
“With food like this, she’s climbing all over me like ivy. She can be as doom-and-gloom as she wants.” She stirred her stew, her beautiful face now thoughtful. “Do you think it’s true, what she said? The Tennyson quote, I mean, that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. Not if the shrimp has gone bad.”
“I don’t know. I can’t conceive of losing you. Even saying the words burns my tongue.” That was an old draconic expression, meaning that the pain was so great that it burned what could not be burned. “When I didn’t know you, I didn’t pine for you, because I had never expected I would find a mate. But now that I know you, now that I know how honorable and strong you are, now that I know the color of your eyes, I... I suppose I do think it’s better. Knowing you at all is the best good fortune I could ever hope for. Every hour I spend with you is another gift. If that were ever to go, it would destroy me, but it would still have been such a gift to have you, even for a little while.”
She reached across the table and laced her fingers with his. He loved the slight coolness of her touch against his own hotter skin: it made her feel like she was shaped from the softest, most touchable marble.
“I feel the same way. I wouldn’t trade this time away for anything.” Laughter lines appeared on either side of her mouth as she struggled to hold back a smile. “I’m saying ‘this time’ because if I have to think about the fact that I’ve only known you for a day, I’ll go crazy. I’m glad you’re a dragon with magical true love-finding powers, because otherwise I would be coming on so strong and moving so fast that you’d never want to see me again.”
“Only a fool would never want to see you again.”
“Then do you mind if I step on the gas just a little bit more?”
Theo tried to remember the exact car terminology and was proud of himself for succeeding. “I don’t even want a seatbelt.”
“As bad as he was—is—for the rest of the world, I love my dad,” Jillian said. “I don’t wish I’d never loved him and I don’t want to lose him, but I want to put him behind me. When I think about my life, I don’t want to think about him in it. When I think about my family, I want to think about you and Tiffani
. But I’d like to say goodbye.” She shrugged. “Of course, I don’t know where he is, so...”
We would rend him limb from limb if we ever saw him, his dragon said, tongue flicking in and out as if scenting the air for the faintest trace of Gordon Marcus. So it is just as well. We would not hurt our mate, but we would hurt those who have hurt her.
It’s an unsolvable dilemma, Theo said.
His dragon looked at him with his cat-yellow eyes with their slit pupils, unimpressed by him putting a name to what they were both thinking.
“I will do whatever I can to help you make peace with your memories,” Theo said.
“Could we go back to the house? Just for an hour or so.”
“Of course. But... I’m sorry, but a lot will be packed up by now, even what you and Tiffani are keeping—since you’ve already said you’re moving, the procedure is to ship it to you.” And he knew Gretchen was finishing up the last of that now. Martin had discreetly cleared them to use her name on all the paperwork so there wouldn’t be any awkward questions about Theo’s involvement with Jillian. “There won’t be much to look at.”
“I’ll make do. I have a good imagination.”
And with half the furniture shrouded in white sheets, Theo thought, she would have plenty of help in bringing her ghosts back to life. He decided to postpone their flying until tomorrow. Jillian must have known a little of what he was thinking, because she slid her foot against his underneath the table.
“Out with the old life,” she said, “and in with the new. That’s what I meant about pushing down on the gas. I want to say goodbye to the past so I can start building a future with you, if that’s what you want.”
“More than anything I’ve ever wanted before.”
Jillian leaned forward and kissed him. He hated to be juvenile, but he could see directly down her shirt. The exposed, creamy skin of her breasts only deepened his desire. It provoked him to kiss her more and more thoroughly, until suddenly she was on the same side of the table, her thighs half-draped over his lap.
Then a spray of cold mist broke across him. A drenching was alarming at the best of times, but even more so for a dragon. Theo blinked water out of his eyelashes in confusion.