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

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.”