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

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.”

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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.