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

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.

Did she mind that?

Fair or not, she did. She wanted him to feel the same stupid, headlong way about her that she did about him, even if that felt like a lot to ask.

That was the other thing about him. He looked at her like he thought she had the right to ask a lot.

She kept that in mind not only through the rest of the tour but all through dinner, too. Since the cupboards were still mostly bare, they ordered in a buffet’s worth of takeout Chinese and then sat around the table sampling each other’s dumplings and lo mein and steamed pork buns. The conversation was fun and light. She couldn’t get tired of hearing Theo’s occasional antique courtesies: “Would you be kind enough to pass me the crab rangoon?”

They all seemed determined to ignore that the only reason they were all in the same room right now was massive fraud and minor vandalism. Deliberate ignorance really was bliss. She didn’t know that she’d ever had a better night.

Her eyes met Theo’s across the table and she held his gaze.

He held hers back.

She’d never seen eyes so emerald green. Between those and the dark, perfectly disheveled hair, he looked like he could have been some fantasy prince.