The Dragon Marshal's Treasure (U.S. Marshal Shifters 1)

“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.