“Take all the time you need,” Martin said.  The signal in Riell was notably patchy, making Martin sound like he was speaking through a thick layer of cotton, and it didn’t help that Theo was distracted by watching Jillian.

They were at the hot springs at the edge of Riell.  Dragons congregated to hot springs—these were why Theo’s ancestors had settled in the valley at all.  Where there was steam, soon enough, there was dragonfire.

And today the springs were deserted except for the two of them.

Theo was still firmly prohibited from taking a soak, even though he could close his eyes and feel exactly what it would be like to sink down until he was sitting on the slate ledge.  He’d rarely been in a shower that was much cooler than scalding, and he couldn’t keep himself from longingly eyeing the billowing white clouds coming up off the pools.  Unfair, he decided, for him to finally be back home and yet not be able to enjoy one of Riell’s signature pleasures.

Except now he had a vantage point on them he had never had before.  He had the sight of his mate, with her auburn hair down around her shoulders and wet to the point that it was almost black, curling at the ends from the steam.  His mate, with drops of water beading on her round hips and her full, bare breasts.  Her nipples were flushed a little darker than usual—closer to rose than carnation-pink.  It wasn’t a sight he could easily see while on the phone with his boss.

He was starting to feel that his own sense of duty was distinctly wobbly when desire intervened.  He was also starting to think he was fine with that.  Did that qualify as a new epiphany?

Still, he brought his mind back to the task at hand.  Martin and the job deserved better from him than a wandering mind.  “Is Gretchen still staying with Tiffani?”

“She is.  Evidently she gave Gretchen a new haircut, but I haven’t seen it yet.  Theo—how is Jillian?”

Naked.

“I can’t imagine it’s much fun to be the only human in a valley full of dragons,” Theo said, watching as Jillian sank back into the water and almost fully submerged herself, letting her hair float and spread on the surface like seaweed.  “But she’s handling it.  She’s already won over my doctor and my little cousin Isabelle.”

He had been trying not to say anything he wouldn’t want her to hear, but he surrendered to worry for a moment and lowered his voice, double-checking to make sure her ears still seemed to be underwater.

“She’s been quiet since we got here.  I think the explosion shook her up and she doesn’t feel like she can talk about it since I’m the one who got hurt.”

There was a thoughtful silence at the other end of the line.  Then Martin’s slightly gravelly voice broke it.  “There may be another reason for her to be clamming up a little.”

A reflexive alarm went off inside him, his dragon bristling at the possibility of something hurting his mate.  “What?”

“No one’s claimed credit yet for bombing Gordon Marcus’s house.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“Maybe not.  But if it’s a vigilante, usually we see at least some anonymous chatter about it, some grandstanding.  Not a peep on this one.  Nothing on the internet, no letter to the editor, nothing.  And if it’s a vigilante, they’re a shortsighted one, blowing up the house after Marcus can’t enjoy it anymore anyway.  The reparations that could go to the victims just decreased significantly.”

“Maybe they didn’t realize that before and that’s why they’re not claiming credit now.”

“Theo,” Martin said.  “You and I both know what you’re not saying.”

Yes.  That Gordon Marcus had torched his own mansion.  Maybe in some complicated and likely misguided attempt to collect on insurance—if he thought Tiffani or Jillian would give it to him, if he even thought they’d get a payout in the first place—or maybe to eliminate some evidence of further wrongdoing.

Or maybe, the dragon in him suggested, he just didn’t want his hoard falling into anyone else’s hands.

Theo hated that he could understand that.  He didn’t consider everything in his possession to be part of his hoard—his apartment, as he’d told Jillian, was full of meaningless gloss and shine, modernized emptiness—but he’d had some of his treasure all his life.  There was a huge, uncut ruby that had been his first birthday gift from his parents (by all accounts, he had promptly tried to chew on it, which showed good instincts).  There were golden chain bracelets he longed to see on Jillian’s wrists.  These things felt as much a part of him as his own bones.  Could he imagine letting someone else have them?  Would he rather destroy them than see them fall into another dragon’s hands?

He thought—he hoped—that he could bear that loss if he deserved it.  If he’d lost his honor, as Gordon Marcus had, what use would he have for treasure?  Better to let it go, let it restore someone else’s life so he could begin the hard work of once again becoming someone worthy of respect.

But from everything Jillian had said and everything the evidence had shown, Gordon Marcus didn’t seem like the kind of man much inclined to hard work.

So—

“Yes,” he said to Martin.  “I know what I’m not saying.”

This time when his gaze went to Jillian, he didn’t have the sweet distraction of losing his focus.  Did she suspect something about her father that she hadn’t been telling him?

“Talk to her,” Martin said gently.

Not for the first time, Theo wondered what Martin’s marriage had been like.  Once, he’d taken Martin’s non-mated marriage as a sign that he was right to think the mate bond didn’t matter.  Now he didn’t know what to think, except he knew that no one could possibly compare to Jillian.  Nothing could compare to the connection he had with her.

But he didn’t have that connection with his teammates, and that didn’t mean he didn’t care about them.  It didn’t mean he wouldn’t be grief-stricken if they were gone.

So what did he know?  If he knew more about being mated, Martin knew more about being married, about the responsibilities of being tied to another person.  Even if you were tied by the purest and most complete love.  If Martin said he should talk to Jillian, he should talk to Jillian.

“I will,” he said.

He hung up and put the phone down on the bench.  Then, in full defiance of Dr. Mendoza’s orders, he stripped down and joined Jillian where she was floating in the spring, her eyes closed.  They shot open when he splashed her.

“You’re getting your bandages wet!”

“I know.”  He groaned as his muscles finally relaxed at the sensation of the heat soaking into them.  “It’s worth it.”

“You could get an infection!”

“Everything is closed up.”  He was ninety-nine perfect sure of that, anyway.  “At this point the bandages are mostly to remind me not to shift yet.  She still has to give me the all-clear for that.”

“I think she’d like to give you the all-clear for hot springs, too,” Jillian said, “but since you’re here...”

She floated over to him and slid onto his lap, her thighs to either side of his hips.  His body responded immediately to her hot center pressing lightly against him.  Then her mouth found his and he forgot any concerns he might have had.  He forgot everything but her and the sweet, almost persimmon-like taste of her lips.  Talk about a little heat to relax the muscles.

She was delicate with him, attentive to everywhere he was still bruised and mending, but no one, not even Dr. Mendoza, knew better than Jillian which parts of him were still completely alive to sensation and pleasure.  She licked a line down his throat and curled her fingers against his shoulders.  She slid up and down his lap, her lower lips parting and easy along his agonizingly hard cock.

Surrounded by gauzy white steam, completely naked, and flushed with desire, she looked like Venus coming out of the sea.  He yearned to bury himself in her softness until all the aches and pains and uncertainties were gone from him.

He kissed her breasts and drew one of her nipples into his mouth, closing his lips around the stiffened peak and then dragging his tongue over it slowly, and then just as slowly around the pebbled circle of delicate, sensitive skin.  She moaned his name, her body riding further up on his.

He reached under the water and ran his fingers over her mound, parting her and stroking her clit.  She shook hard against his hand.

“Please,” Jillian said, her voice low and throaty.  “I need you.  I need you inside me.  I’ve missed you so much, Theo.”

He knew the heat of the hot springs would eliminate any need for birth control; knew she was on it anyway.  He spread her legs still further apart in answer and she whimpered, ecstatic and needy.  He needed her so much too.  Needed this, more than he’d ever needed anything.  They were both scared and worried and alone except for each other.  This felt like a promise they were making, he to her and she to him, to be sufficient to themselves, to be tender, to be there.

He thrust into her slowly but fully.  Her inner walls tightened around him to the point where he had to bite his lip hard to keep his focus.  It was difficult.  When he went so long without shifting, his skin seemed thinner and more sensitive, more attuned to tiny gradations in temperature or pressure.  All his senses were heightened.  He could smell the feminine musk of her even through the water.  There was no way, he thought, to ever get all of what he wanted from her.  He wanted to rub away the barrier between their two bodies until they were one.  But that couldn’t be.

Jillian proved him wrong.

Lacing her hands around the back of his neck, she eased her hips forward and back, rocking him in and out of her.  She was going gently because he was still hurt, but not only because of that.  There was a hesitancy to her movements that it took him a moment to translate.

This was the first time they had made love since they had said that they did love each other.  They were truly mated now.  This was a kind of consummation: now, at last, they both knew everything and believed everything, and they were choosing each other.  Jillian was going slowly because she was savoring the feeling of him inside her.

The only distance between them, the only separation, was being put there by his old habit of hoarding loneliness.  But he knew better now.  It was time to put that knowledge to work.

His dragon roared in agreement.  Yes!  We are worthy of our mate!  We will bring our mate fire and gold!

His blood burned.  He stroked his hands down her silky-smooth back and then down onto her ass, pulling her closer to him, changing the angle so that he could go even deeper inside her.  Jillian moaned, her head falling back.  He kissed her throat, wanting to give her a love-bite there like some overeager teenager, wanting to mark her, claim her in some way.  He bit her earlobe instead and that was when she came.  Her back arched and her whole body tightened around his cock to a point of exquisite, almost unbearable tension.

No, actually unbearable.  He gave up on perfection for good and found his climax with hers.  Some primitive part of him loved the idea of filling her with his seed—there was the mark he’d craved, the scent of his body on hers.

Her face was beautifully flushed, pink from the lovemaking and the steam, and her eyes glittered like jewels.  No—better than any jewels.  Like stars.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you too.  I can live without anything if I have you.”

“Without your wings?”  She traced his shoulder blades with her fingertip.  “I know it’s hard to wait.”

“It is, but—I know I’ll be fine.”  He wryly thought that the best gift he could give her would be to not talk her through the winding maze of his self-doubt, but he wanted her to have a more tangible—and knowable—gesture than that.  Something that would really prove that he was with her now and that he would be fine.

Something that said, I don’t have two halves of my life anymore, a dragon half and a human half.  When I’m with you, I’m whole.  You can have all my life.  I trust you to think it’s worth sharing.

Also something fun.

Make love to her on top of your hoard, his dragon said.

We just made love, Theo pointed out.  And I think you’re forgetting how many sharp angles there are in our hoard.

He grinned suddenly, sure he had thought of exactly the right solution.

“You have such a beautiful smile,” Jillian said.

“There’s a ball tonight,” Theo said.  “Would you like to accompany me?  We can find you a gown.”

“Balls?  Ball gowns?”

“I know.  Fairy tales.”

“Fairy tales,” she said, shaking her head.  “I know you think you’re not interested in them, but I think this whole valley is very into the idea of reclaiming fairy tales.  We have dragon antiheroes instead of villains.  Yes, please, I’d love to go to the ball with you, Prince Charming.”

“I am honored.”  He meant it.

But her smile faltered.  “I need to tell you something.”

Adrenaline spiked through his veins, chilling him even in the midst of the hot spring.  “What is it?”

She started off by looking a little over his shoulder, but before she spoke, she turned firmly back to him and locked her eyes on his.  She was still straddling his lap, her thighs squeezing him just a little, as if she couldn’t give up being close to him.  Like she wanted comfort.

“Sometimes in fairy tales there’s a wicked king,” Jillian said.  “Someone who would burn down his own castle before he’d let anyone else have it.  That’s my dad.”

There was a brief shimmer of tears in her eyes, like clouds threatening rain, but then she blinked and it was gone.  While he’d been healing, she’d been hardening enough to accept this as the truth.  He wondered when she had realized it.

“He broke into the house.  He unpacked the fucking nutcrackers so he could take his favorite one.  He planted the bomb.  He probably didn’t make it, he never knew how to actually do anything, but he put it there.”  She saw something in his face.  “But you already knew that, didn’t you?”

“Only just now,” Theo said.  “Martin thought it was a possibility.  You were way ahead of me.”

“I’ve been on this case for years,” Jillian said.

He couldn’t stand the sadness of her smile and he wanted to kiss it away, but he had the feeling that he would only be hiding it.  She would kiss him back, because she loved him and because more red hot sex would be a distraction from what she was feeling, but it wouldn’t make her pain go away.  It wouldn’t change anything.  This was something she would have to feel until she was done feeling it, and all he could do was be there.  And take her to a ball.  The princess and her dragon.

*

At first, Theo thought the evening was going well.

Dr. Mendoza had rustled up a gown for Jillian.  It was deep azure silk with a plunging neckline that exposed the flawless tops of her breasts and a gold underskirt that would pick up the candlelight and complement the touches of gold in her hair.  Jillian had protested all the way through the dressing process, her back to the mirror, saying she would look ridiculous, but when Theo turned her around to face her own reflection, her breath caught in her throat.

“That’s me?” she said.

He kissed the delicate shell of her ear.  “That’s you.”

“Never mind water parks,” Jillian said.  “We’re going to have to stay here forever so I can wear high fashion.  I don’t even care if I get snubbed by everyone.”

He still bristled reflexively at the thought of anyone being less than courteous to her, but he knew it was happening.  Especially early on, she’d had to spend time alone while he’d been healing, and so he hadn’t been there to glare daggers at anyone who dared to treat her like anything less than the woman she was.  Tonight, he could fix that.  He was hardly Riell’s most eligible bachelor and he was sure that they had all long since marked him as eccentric at best and a traitor at worse for choosing to leave, but he was still a dragon.  No one would dare be rude to his mate in his presence.

Maybe that would force people to actually listen to Jillian.

“One more thing,” he said, and fastened a heavy ruby necklace around Jillian’s throat.  “This doesn’t count as the first gift I’m giving you—I’ll need to think more about that.  But it’s traditional to always wear a little red and a little gold, minimum, unless there are special circumstances—a wedding, a debut, a funeral.”

“It doesn’t go with the blue.”

“It doesn’t have to.  No one will even notice it—it’s like... brushing your teeth.  If you do it, it’s invisible; they’ll only pay attention if you don’t.”

“Minty fresh rubies,” Jillian said, touching the stones with her fingertips.  “These probably cost more than I make in a year.  Are they yours?  Or Dr. Mendoza’s?”

He laughed.  “No dragon with her wits about her would ever be able to let someone else borrow a piece this significant from her hoard.  No, it’s mine.  It came to me from my grandmother’s inheritance.”  He slid one finger between her warm skin and the cold gold chain.  “I know in some ways it’s a waste to have all this wealth that does nothing.  But to us, everything in our hoard has a history: it’s family, legacy, honor.  Beauty.  I only feel like I wasted it by not having it on you—by not already knowing you so I can bedeck you in gold and gemstones that your beauty would put to shame.”

She tilted her head back until her dark brown eyes were looking up at him and her curly auburn mane of hair was against his chest.  She said, “I promise not to think any of it’s wasted as long as I get to bedeck you too.”

It was tradition, in fact, that they seal their mate-bond—their marriage—by combining their hoards, and it was a quieter, more ancient tradition that this be done in bed.  He wanted that: to feel the rings he had put on her hands and the rings she had put on his clink together as they grasped each other.

“It’s a deal,” he said quietly.

So they had certainly entered the ball in the best of moods.

Theo tried to find a balance between the two of them staying in company he knew would be agreeable—people who were at least curious enough about humans to be polite—and risking Jillian’s sense of ease to possibly change some hearts and minds.  As he watched her glow with the high of the dragonfire and listened to her laugh at a slightly risqué joke, he started to think that he didn’t give a damn about hearts and minds.  They could change on their own.  All he wanted was for her to have a little happiness to make up for the last few days and for the trouble that would still be waiting for them when they left Riell.  At the moment, all that seemed to matter was the steps of the waltz.

The laugh stopped in Jillian’s throat.  She had stopped dancing and had a look on her face that made it seem hard to believe she’d ever been dancing, even as her dress was still coming to rest from its twirl: she’d gone pale and somehow adamantine.  If she were a dragon, she would have shifted.

Theo didn’t ask her what was wrong.  She didn’t look like she’d be able to get herself to talk.  He followed her gaze instead.

She was staring at Izzie—Isabelle, he corrected himself—who was making her shy, self-conscious debut in the signature all-white of a newly adult dragon first coming into society.  Her gown was embroidered from bodice to train with diamonds and seed pearls.  Theo knew from awkward first-hand experience that it would be almost impossible for her to move in it, as weighed down as she was: he’d come within an inch of spilling an entire glass of wine on himself when his time had come, given how heavy the sleeve of his doublet had been.  He didn’t intend to ever reveal that to anyone except perhaps Jillian—didn’t even intend to ever reveal that he’d worn a doublet at all, as archaic as he now knew they were in the rest of the world.

He couldn’t see anything that might have alarmed Jillian except—

Oh, of course.  Drowning in white silk and satin and velvet and crystalline jewels, Izzie looked like a princess... but she also looked like a seventeen year-old someone was shoving up to the altar.

“There’s no surprise wedding, don’t worry,” Theo said in a low, reassuring voice.  He didn’t want anyone nearby to overhear and laugh at Jillian’s misconception, especially since he was sure they’d neither know nor care that it was a perfectly reasonable one.  “She’s making her debut.  Everyone here dresses like that the first time they appear at a social event as an adult.  Now everyone will know to pay her special attention.”

But the look on Jillian’s face didn’t change or even fade.  She said, “Her earrings.”

Theo examined them as best as he could at this distance.  They were the only slight touch of color on Izzie because they were the only piece of jewelry she wore with visible settings, but no one would have objected to these: they were pure silver spirals adorned with their own pearls.  They were distinctive and he liked them enough to note that he wouldn’t mind having a pair of them for Jillian.  They would look gorgeous against the soft skin of her throat.

Still, he didn’t think Jillian coveted them badly enough to be this upset by them belonging to someone else.

“What about them?”

“They were my mom’s,” Jillian said.  She swallowed.  She said each word carefully, like she had to make sure she was pronouncing it right.  “My dad gave them to her on their honeymoon, and when they got divorced, she left them behind.  She said her new husband could buy her something better.”

“It’s just a coincidence,” Theo said.  But all the same he was uneasy.

“Theo—they were handcrafted.  Dad paid for them to be made from a sketch my mom drew.  There’s nothing else like them.”

He thought back, walking through the Marcus house again in his memory, trying to remember what he’d seen when he’d opened the antique jewelry box in the safe and seen the jewels laid out against the gray velvet.  Did he remember these?

Yes.  Even then, he’d thought about them swinging gently from Jillian’s ears, little galaxies swirling around, brushing the soft skin of her neck.  He had wanted them for her until he’d seen the dislike cramp her face when she saw them.

They had been in the Marcus house before the explosion... and now they were here in Riell.

All at once, he knew what had happened, and a kind of sick anger churned in his stomach.

“I’ll handle this.”

“He’s here,” Jillian said.  “He came here.  It was him.”

“I know.”  He took her hand and raised it to his lips and pressed a kiss against her knuckles: for once, he was the knight and not the dragon, the knight pledging himself to his lady before plunging into battle.  “I’m sorry.”

“He almost killed me.  He almost killed you.”  Her hand tightened into a fist around his fingers and he was surprised at the strength of her grip.  “All of that... all of that so he could run and hide here?  Pay them to overlook a human?”

That made the music stop.  The harpist held her hands poised above the still-reverberating strings; the violinist let her instrument fall from below her chin.  Everyone was turned towards them, lips curled at the gauche behavior of the intruder in their midst.

Well, Theo felt his own seething contempt for the crowd.  All those childhood stories of the importance of remembering the moral weight of the red-and-gold.  All that talk of honor and nobility.  All those convictions that they were so superior to the brash, unscrupulous humans who gathered up their possessions greedily and violently.  All this decorum, when they were no better at following their laws than anyone else.  They were only better at pretending.

“Isabelle!”  He let the sound carry.  He chose her formal name deliberately.  She was an adult now, and she’d come into his company with stolen property.

Isabelle lowered her eyes to the floor.  Her face was blanched whiter than her dress.  She knew, then, what she had done.  She knew what she was wearing.

“Where did you get them?”

“You know where I got them, cousin,” Isabelle said quietly.  And then she did surprise him by lifting her head and meeting his gaze directly with flinty challenge in her eyes.  “And if you think about it for more than a minute before making a scene, you’ll know why I wore them, too.”

That was optimistic of her.  He didn’t.

But Jillian did.  She said, “It’s your parents?”

Of course.  Dragons valued family loyalty as one of the first and most important parts of honor.  Isabelle wouldn’t have felt she could come to a distant cousin, no matter how well-liked in her childhood, with a story about her parents.  Theo’s closest family had been gone too long for him to remember that.  Jillian, of course, had never been allowed to forget that complicated pull.

Izzie had put on the earrings and worn them where Jillian would see them hoping that Jillian would notice and identify them.  Brave girl.

He could see Izzie’s parents silhouetted against the far wall.  Her mother was crying and her father looked like all he wanted to do was swoop forward and snap Izzie up in his mouth.  No wonder she had been afraid to do anything but sneakily wear the earrings.  These people were his cousins, too—had been his cousins—and what had they done?

Theo knew the crowd was waiting for his response.  He was the center of attention and for once, he didn’t mind.

“Dimitri and Elizabeth Benoit, I formally accuse you of tainting this community and the honor of our kind by giving aid and shelter to a thief in exchange for his money.  For you to have enriched your hoard by injustice is inexcusable.  Do you deny the charges?”

Izzie had started to cry.  Jillian wrapped her arms around her.

“You little brat,” Dimitri said to his daughter, striding forward.  His eyes had flared into an ugly, vicious yellow.  “After all we’ve done for you.”

“Cousin Theo is hurt!” Izzie said, without lifting her head off Jillian’s shoulder.  “He almost died because of what that man did, and his mate might have died too, and you didn’t even care.”

“He is barely a cousin,” Dimitri said dismissively.  He looked at Theo and hissed.  “You call me a traitor to our honor for taking gold from a human who has done no harm to us, but you can mate with one?  His daughter?  If he is dishonorable, so is she.  The same blood runs in her veins.”

“The same blood runs in mine as runs in yours,” Theo said.  “And I sever any connection with you.  Gordon Marcus is a thief and a liar who hurt the poor.  Do we live up to our own standards for honor, or do sell the worth of dragons to whoever brings us gold?”

He looked at Jillian.  She hadn’t let go of Izzie.  Right now, she didn’t care about their ruined evening.  All she cared about was helping a scared, sobbing girl.

All Jillian cared about was someone’s heart.  That was all he cared about as well.  It was what these people had brought him up to care about, even if they didn’t know it.  He hadn’t come out of nowhere.  He had come out of the valley of Riell, and he had to believe that there was good here.  That there was honor.

If they turned from him now, he didn’t know what he would do, and then, with a cool certainty, he did.  He would walk away from them.  He would take Jillian—and Izzie too, if she wanted to go—and he would go back to his world.  His friends.  His home.

Then, slowly, Izzie’s mother raised her hand.  She looked so nervous, like a girl about to volunteer an answer she thought might be wrong.

Elizabeth Benoit said, “I want to bring him here.  You can return him to face justice, can’t you?  You do such things now.”

Jillian spoke before Theo could.  “Yes.  He does that now.”

“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said, and what shocked Theo was that she said it directly to Jillian and Izzie.  “I hurt you, my darling, and I put you in a position where you would have to risk hurting this woman.  You chose not to, because your honor outstrips mine.  If I still had the right to be proud of you, I would proclaim that pride to this whole room.”

All of Isabelle’s teenaged cool deserted her.  “Mother!” she cried out.  She ran across the room and tucked herself into Elizabeth’s arms.

“I’m sorry, Miss Marcus,” Elizabeth said over her daughter’s shoulder.  “No amount of treasure would have been worth this pain.”

“Thank you,” Jillian said quietly.

It seemed that Elizabeth’s speech had tipped the balance of the room, because Dimitri was seized and held while Elizabeth disappeared.  Theo spent the time she was gone wondering if she really would come back.  He wanted to believe that she would.

She did.  He saw that in Jillian’s face before he saw them in the door.  He saw Jillian’s eyes as she saw her father again.