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.”

“You’re not in my hair,” Theo said.  He snapped his mouth shut and hesitated, like he had to translate what he was about to say before he said it.  “But yes.  Thank you.  A tour would be lovely.”

Lovely?  She decided she liked that.  Maybe the same parents who had banned their son from waterparks had taught him Old World courtesy, too.

She did wonder about his childhood—that was a hazard of her job, trying to see everyone’s younger self in their eyes.  He had said his family was strict and her work had taught her how many sins could hide under the cover of that particular word.  Some of the worst parents she had ever known, ones who would make her own look like Pa and Ma Ingalls, had been the kind to pride themselves on their “tough love” and their ability to teach their kids “how to have manners and show the proper respect.”

She felt a hot, sharp flash of anger at the thought of anyone mistreating Theo.  But he was obviously grown up now and he’d just as obviously done well for himself.  Even if he had once needed her outrage, he didn’t need her to come to his defense now.  Why did she want to?

She could feel her face heating up, so she turned to walk back out into the foyer.  Nothing like a good, brisk real estate tour to hide how much you were blushing.

And nothing like the embarrassment of an entryway filled with the rainbow-colored army of your dad’s unnerving collection to hide why you were blushing.  It looked like they were besieged by tiny, angry old men eager to chomp on things.

“These,” she said, “as you can see, are the nutcrackers.”

“Trust me, I noticed.  We noticed—I don’t know if you ran into my partner, Gretchen.  She went out to check the perimeter.”

She observed with interest that they actually did say things like “check the perimeter.”  She also liked the sound of this Gretchen who had ditched the tea party to prowl around the yard with the gun: it wasn’t anything Jillian herself would have done, but it was very much like the detective heroines she’d idolized when she was younger.

“She’ll tell you herself when she comes back,” Theo said, “but I think she almost gave one two shots in the chest.  They’re terrifying.”

“To be fair, most of them are carrying swords.  Anyone would be nervous facing that many armed men.”

“Marshals never back down in the face of superior numbers,” Theo said gravely.  “Even when we have no hope of victory, we go down fighting.”  He nudged the nearest nutcracker with the toe of his shoe.  “I cannot unleash these on an innocent public without knowing more about them.  Are they possessed?  Will they come to life?”

“That’s a risk you’ll have to take.”

“Maybe I’ll burn them,” Theo said.

He sounded earnest.  She wouldn’t mind seeing the official government torching of her dad’s nutcracker collection, come to think of it.  She couldn’t seem to uproot the last bit of love for her dad that she had in her heart, despite everything he’d done, but that didn’t change her anger.  She wouldn’t mind seeing his treasured, creepy collection go up in a fiery inferno.  Especially if Theo were the one dropping the match.

She tugged her shirt collar away from her neck, suddenly aware of every little prickle of sweat on her body.  Did she smell?  What if she smelled?  She’d put perfume on this morning but had then spent hours moving boxes around.  She must look like a total mess.  She could already feel that this morning’s neat ponytail was a thing of the past.

It didn’t matter.  He wouldn’t care.  He wasn’t here to flirt with her.

Which is a shame.

She gave that thought the acknowledgment it deserved and then did her best to move on.

“Why nutcrackers?” Theo said.

“They’re my dad’s.  Were my dad’s.”

“Tiffani mentioned that.  But he was rich enough to collect Rolls-Royces if he wanted to.  Why nutcrackers?”

“There are a few Rolls-Royces out in the old stables, actually.  No ponies, no matter how much I begged, but he converted the space into a garage.  Rolls-Royces, Jaguars, Porsches.”  But she knew that wasn’t really what Theo had meant, and it was a question worth answering, even if thinking about it made a lump rise in her throat.  It was easier to talk about the luxury cars that he had bought and loved only as status symbols.  It was easier to talk about what she didn’t like about him than to talk about what she did.

Except she didn’t like the nutcrackers, either, did she?  She never had.

Even the better parts of him aren’t parts I like.

Instead of giving her some distance, that just made her sadder and more frustrated at what little of him she had to hold onto.

She gestured to the only one of the nutcrackers she had ever had any interest in.  It was more clumsily made than the others, its jacket slightly bumpy where the paint had been slathered on unevenly and too thickly.  That nutcracker wore a sky blue coat with glittery gold trim—though most of the glitter had worn off by now—and he carried not a sword but a bouquet of pink roses.

“See that one?  My grandmother made it.  She used to make toys for him and his sister.  This isn’t part of some heartwarming rags-to-riches story, by the way, my grandparents had yachts, too.  She was just good at crafts and she liked the idea of giving her children something they couldn’t get with money alone.  She was nice.  I’m glad—I’m glad she didn’t live to see what he did.”

Her voice had wobbled there for a moment, but she was, she thought with a little bit of pride, holding it together.

“She made that nutcracker for his sister, my aunt Claudia, but Claudia didn’t like it and my dad did, or at least he liked it enough to keep it and then enough to buy fifty million more of them.  But this one wasn’t even his favorite.  It was always mine, because I liked that he’d taken it even though it was a girl’s toy, I liked that he hadn’t cared about that.  But I don’t think it really meant anything to him that his mother had made it.  He just hit a certain level of success where he realized he was supposed to have some kind of cute, eccentric hobby or collection, and he looked around and landed on nutcrackers.  He only started loving them after he got so many of them.  There’s some technical psychological term for that, when you change your beliefs to suit your actions.  Or maybe he just likes owning things.”

She felt incredibly awkward in the ensuing silence, and she had only herself to blame.  Of course he would have nothing to say to that.  He’d been making conversation and she’d turned it into a therapy session.

“Anyway!” she said brightly.  “I bet that’s more talking about nutcrackers than you expected to do today, right?  Or ever?  Let me show you the less unnerving parts of the house.”

She walked swiftly down the hall and flung open the first door she could find.

“This,” she announced, “is a linen closet.”

To her complete surprise, Theo whistled like she’d just opened up a treasure chest.  He stepped forward and delicately separated some of the blur of stacked white tablecloths and bedsheets like he knew exactly what he was looking for.  In between blinks, she could almost see how he had done it—she could almost pick apart some gradations of cream and ivory and ecru—but then it all melted back together.

He was holding a bundle of lace.

“Look.  This is handmade.  Linen, not cotton.”

No wonder they sent him out for appraisals.

“How can you tell?  That it’s handmade, I mean.”

“The color,” he said simply.  “You can wash machine-made, but you can’t wash old handmade lace without it falling apart.  When it gets this little beige tint in it, it’s the real thing.  It’s more beautiful, too.”

He unfurled a little and laid it on her arm.  It was strange to have something so dainty against her body; strange to have him putting something so obviously valuable on her bare skin.  But it did let her see what he meant.

Through the gentle veil of the lace, her skin looked smooth.  Her complexion was dark enough to show the refinement of the weave.  It was beautiful and it made her beautiful.

She took in the impossibly fine crosshatching and all the patterns.  “It must have taken forever to make.”

“Forever and much squinting and hard labor.”  Now he sounded rueful.  “It’s a shame that so many of the beautiful things in the world are only made through struggle.  But better struggle than ugliness.”

“I’m sure we have plenty of beautiful things around here that only exist because of ugliness.”

Her dad had never wanted to acknowledge, even in passing, that their beautiful house and beautiful life were built on underpaid workers, slashed benefits, broken promises, and grief.  She could understand not wanting to dwell on it, and she had never expected him to change the world.  But he’d had the power to do so much more good than he’d ever done, and her anger that he wouldn’t even try had eventually split them apart.

She had felt a funny relief when the accusations had first come out.

Oh, she’d thought.  We didn’t just see things differently.  There wasn’t a compromise we should have found.  He wanted to be even worse than the world already was.  Okay.

“I try to be on the side of the lacemakers,” she said.

“I know.  Tiffani told me.”

He still hadn’t moved the lace from her arm.  His hand wasn’t directly touching her, but it was close enough that she could feel his warmth.  His heat, really.

Theo went on, “You’re a knight in shining armor taking up quixotic causes.”

He didn’t say it like he was joking.

“I hope they’re not as quixotic as they feel.  Anyway, mostly I just listen and organize flag football games and go around explaining why they should keep sex ed in schools.”  She shouldn’t have said that, but now that the concept was floating there between them, she grew bolder.  After all, there was no way all of this was one hundred percent in the cause of courteous professionalism.  She ran her finger down the fabric, feeling the raised bits of embroidery.  “Did they teach you all about lace in the Victoria’s Secret section of your sex ed?”

He laughed.  “I was more home-schooled than anything else, so no, thankfully.  Lace, yes.  Victoria’s Secret, no.”

“Why lace?”

“My family—”  He hesitated.  “My family appreciates valuable things.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“By their standards, most people.”

Jillian looked up at him.  She loved how tall he was, how much it made her think about reaching up to put her hands on his shoulders.  She would have to come up onto her toes if she wanted to lace her fingers together behind his neck.

“And what would they say you should do with this?”

“It’s yours,” Theo said.  “I couldn’t take it.”

“That’s your job,” Jillian pointed out.

“No.”  He put his hand on hers suddenly.  “Not your things.  Not Tiffani’s, either.  Only your father’s.”

His hand was unbelievably hot.  It was like she was holding her hands out to be warmed by a fire.  It made her extra-aware of every nerve ending, extra-appreciative of the heat racing along her skin.

“I didn’t buy this, and neither did Tiffani.”  She could feel her pulse race against his where their wrists were touching.  “Come on.  What would you do?”

“Keep it.”  He let go of her hand only to trace one of the knitted lines, his finger always following the thread so that he never quite touched her bare skin.  She shivered.  “But not folded up in a closet.  Not mixed in with sheets.”

“Some of these are Egyptian cotton.”

“It’s not the same.  Expensive things aren’t as valuable as rarities, things like this that might all fall apart before the century’s over.”  He sounded as if he thought easily in terms of centuries.  “When it might not last, it’s a waste and a crime to hide it.  But it deserves more than being made into a tablecloth or a curtain.  It should be like you said.  Victoria’s Secret.”

He took his hand away and she felt cold without him touching her.  And all the colder because he’d made her feel so hot, flushed, and attentive there and everywhere else.

“I’m sorry,” he said.  “I didn’t mean to—”

She took a risk.  “Flirt?”

He looked her over with a heartbreaking caution in his eyes, as if she would snatch herself away from him if he dared to say yes.  She didn’t know why on earth she thought that, though.  She doubted any woman had ever looked at those jewel-bright eyes and those strong arms and decided that flirting with him was a total no go.  He couldn’t be used to rejection, so why look like he was worried about getting it from her of all people?

Then he smiled that knee-weakening smile.

“You caught me.  I did mean to flirt.  The lace helped.”

“I don’t think you needed it.”

“What I need is better timing.”  He fitted one fingertip into one of the diamond-shaped spaces in the lace pattern where her arm showed through.  He had a look of complete concentration, like he was trying to find his way through a maze.  “Acknowledging the unprofessionalism and the terrible circumstances, would you consider having dinner with me?”

It was the best thing to happen to her in months, maybe even the only good thing to happen to her since her dad had taken off.  She had no idea why a sexy, charming US Marshal would want to risk a reprimand and a hell of a lot of public scrutiny by attaching himself to someone as compromised as she was, but she wasn’t unselfish enough to say no.  He didn’t look like he was confused about what he wanted, even if she didn’t understand why he wanted it.  Why he wanted her.

“I’d love to,” she said.

Then she immediately felt like an idiot for saying “love” while arranging a first date.  She was out of practice at this.

Theo’s smile was so wide she couldn’t believe he minded it.  “Thank you.”  He lifted her hand and then pressed his lips against it.

Shivers ran up and down Jillian’s body.

Part of the thrill was the sheer unlikeliness of it.  He looked like Prince Charming, he spoke like Masterpiece Theater, and now he kissed her hand?  She had always thought of herself as far more practical than romantic, but this all felt destined to prove her wrong.  She could suddenly understand how people swooned.

But it wasn’t just the romanticism.  She couldn’t pretend it was all that high-minded.  The touch of his mouth to her hand made her want his lips elsewhere, too.  Desire raced over her skin like lightning.  Indecisive lightning striking first here and then there—did she want to kiss him, to taste him?  Did she want to steer him around to the delicate skin on the inside of her wrist and then lead him up her arm and then to her breasts?  Did she want to kiss his hand, too?  Want to feel those calluses against her lips and imagine him leaving his fingerprints on her?

The slightest touch from him led her straight to mental debauchery.

Don’t be ridiculous.  You can’t just mount him here in the hall.  He asked for a date—he might not even be the kind of guy who goes right to the bedroom.  Though I wish he were...

Which was funny, because she had always been slow to warm up that way.  She’d always thought the third date rule made perfect, intuitive sense.  With Theo, she hadn’t even known him three hours and she was already ready to go.

She decided to channel her practical streak.  The sooner they finished up in the house, the sooner she could try to talk him into some really wanton unprofessionalism.

She slid her hand around his and shook it firmly, like they were concluding a business meeting.  To her relief, he laughed.

“First let me finish showing you around.  It’s a big house, and I’d hate for you to give my tour service a bad Yelp review.”

Theo looked completely scandalized by that.  “I would never leave you a bad Yelp review.”

It was such a bizarre thing for him to get so earnest and passionate about that she was oddly touched by it.  How many people would feel that strongly about not saying mean things about someone online?

“I’ve done it once or twice,” she said.  “But mostly when it’s related to work.  If I take the kids on the outing and the store clerks follow them around or the restaurant staff are rude to them, I tend to see red.”

“Any tool can be used justly to defend those who need their champion,” Theo said.  There was nothing in his eyes but approval.  “Sword, Yelp review.  Whatever weapon comes to hand.”

“For my quixotic quest.  I’m Don Quixote trying to slay dragons by tilting at windmills.  It’s hopeless.”

“I hope making people be gracious to children is one of the least quixotic of your goals,” Theo said.  “But I often choose honor over effectiveness myself.  And always over slaying dragons.”

It was uncanny.  Here she had been stuck in her own head turning over antique concepts like family honor and in had walked a man who said the word offhandedly, like he was expressing a preference for Coke over Pepsi.  Even the people she worked with, good people who wanted to change the world for the better, talked about policy and procedure first, ethics and morality second, and honor not at all.  She had always thought her outmoded belief in it was an embarrassing hamper to her purposefulness, but now, looking through his eyes, she could see it instead as her foundation.

“Now you sound like a knight,” she said, smiling at him.

Theo coughed.  “Definitely not a knight.”

“That’s insistent.  What, did knights kill your whole family?”

“Not my whole family,” Theo said.

Hot, smart, honorable, and equipped with a deadpan sense of humor so dry he could toast a bagel with it.  But if she whiled away the whole day flirting with him, she’d never get her date.

She folded the lace back up and gently put it down on top of a stack of linen.

“Ready?”

“You don’t have to do this if it’s too difficult for you,” Theo said.  “Really.  I’ve wandered around houses before.”

She shook her head.  “I want to just say goodbye to the place and get it over with.  Like ripping off a Band-Aid.”

He looked at her and then nodded.  “It’s your Band-Aid.  Your call.”

She liked that.  A lot of men would either coddle you or throw you to the wolves, not offer to protect you and then respect you enough to believe you when you said you didn’t need it.

Luckily or unluckily, most of the house was devoid of attractions that interested Theo as much as the handmade lace had.  He obviously knew a lot about everything—she could tell it by the way he measured the thickness of a marble counter with a little tape measure from his pocket and the way he wrote down the manufacturers of the exercise equipment—but none of this was anything he cared about.  He didn’t talk to her about the furnishings, which he obviously found cheap in taste if not in money, but about everything else.  He asked her about her work, about her interests.  She asked him about what he did as a Marshal and about what his own tastes were, as far as houses went.

This felt like a date, she realized.  A strange date, to take a man through your childhood home so he could strip it for parts, but a date nonetheless.  It would have felt natural enough to hold his hand.

Then she took him into her dad’s office.

“Behold the inner sanctum,” she said.  “This is where the corruption happens.”

“I’ll brace myself,” he said somberly.

But his partner was already there.  She was in constant motion, taking out files and locked safe boxes, but she never seemed to be in a flurry: she had a graceful fluidity that Jillian was only used to seeing in athletes.  Maybe she was the sporty type.

“Hi,” Jillian said, extending her hand.  “Jillian Marcus, unfortunately.”

“Gretchen Rose.  As far as fortunately or unfortunately, it depends on the day.  I’m sorry to have to be pawing around in here.”

She had a warm, natural smile, straightforward enough to put Jillian at ease.  Mostly because she was friendly while still being honest.  She hadn’t said that she was sorry to be prying, only that she was sorry she had to.  It wasn’t rote sympathy but something clearer: I know where the blame lies, and I know it’s not with you.

Then she noticed Theo, in her peripheral vision, was mouthing something to his partner.  Ate?  Was he telling her about the cookies?  No—date, probably.  No wonder he flushed when he realized she was looking at him.  He must have been trying to explain that the boundaries of their relationship had become a little bit fuzzy.

Or he was saying bait, trait, plait, mate, Kate, rate or any of the hundred other words that had that kind of sound.  And if he’d wanted her to know what he was saying, he would have just said it out loud.

Gretchen seemed equally confused by it, until her mouth made an almost perfect O shape.  She reached past Jillian to punch Theo on the arm.

So, Jillian thought, a pleasant, frothy delight spreading through her, he was saying date, then.

She didn’t know that any man had ever singled her out as someone he was proud to have landed as a date; she didn’t know any woman had ever been so openly congratulatory about it.

“I’m just giving him a tour,” Jillian said, feeling like she, at least, had to keep up appearances.  “Do you want to join us?”

“I think I’ll burrow in here, actually,” Gretchen said.  “I like putting together the paperwork trail.”

“But what’s there to look for?  It’s all already proven, right?  I know the FBI already confiscated a lot from here.”

“The FBI are not great at sharing,” Gretchen said.  “And I’m looking for something a little different—any sign, even a small one, that your father might have had accounts or money stashes that we’re not aware of, ones he kept secret from you and your stepmom.  You know what the seizure funds go for, right?”

“To help compensate the victims.”

“Right.  Even if they don’t ever really understand it, the people who were hurt by your dad are getting helped today by you and by Tiffani, just by you letting us in and helping us out, not making it hard for us to do our jobs.  I just wanted to make sure you knew you’re not going through this just so piles of cash can sit in a locker somewhere.  This will matter to people, every little bit will, on your part as well as mine.”

“Thank you,” Jillian said quietly.  “I like thinking of it that way.”

Theo settled his hand on her shoulder.  Protective.  Comforting.

Gretchen said, “Why don’t I leave the two of you alone and go get one of those cookies?”

“That sounds great!” Theo said.

Jillian lightly smacked him on the shoulder the second Gretchen was gone, feeling a slight and welcome thrill at how quickly she had gotten used to teasing him.

“That is low, sending your partner off to suffer through Tiffani’s baking.  What happened to honor?”

“I’ve seen Gretchen eat ice cream that’s been in the back of the freezer so long all anyone can see on it is a layer of frost an inch deep,” Theo said.  “I think she can handle some toothache cookies, if Tiffani isn’t around to stop her from biting into one.  Besides, she’ll like Tiffani.”

“Tiffani will like her.”  She tilted her head.  “You like Tiffani, don’t you?”

“Sure.  Why wouldn’t I?”

“I don’t know.  I’m just not sure you’re real.”  She was only half-joking.  “You’re not what I expected.  I was thinking—grizzled, judgmental, officious.  Heart in the right place, maybe, but with a boatload of moral superiority going along with it.  And instead you’re funny and you’re nice to us.  It’s like you stepped out of a fairy tale.”

His laugh sounded a little stilted that time.  Maybe he was an undercover spy.  Maybe he was raised among the Amish.

Theo said, “Believe me, at least with the people in my office, judgmental and officious and self-righteous... none of that would be anything you would have to worry about.  And none of them are from where I’m from.”

“And, sorry, where’s that?  Your accent’s not local, right?”

“Not so far from here, but it was just a very, very insular community.  I doubt we even sounded like the people a mile away from us.”

More bobbing and weaving.  She told herself to take a step back and give him some privacy.  He didn’t owe her his whole history right now, and it wasn’t like she didn’t understand not wanting to talk about family.

She said, “I’m glad you’re here, that’s all.”

Theo said, “I’m glad you’re here, too.”

As she tilted back her head to look up at him, he leaned down and kissed her.

She rose up on her toes to take his mouth as fiercely as he’d taken hers.  He tasted like Earl Grey tea and his kiss was electric, a shock that took her at her lips and reverberated all the way down to her toes.  She had never been so responsive before.  She opened her mouth further and felt his tongue glide against hers.  She made a small whimpering noise against his lips and he made a fierce one back.  He sounded desperate, like he would always need more of her.

He was hot to the touch, almost feverish.  It was like kissing the sun.

Sun-kissed.  I’m sun-kissed.

She didn’t care about anything except getting as much of him as possible.  Never mind the lack of real privacy, never mind the weird circumstances.  She felt such an incredible, slippery heat between her legs.  She felt her clit throb as he bit her lower lip, a feeling which only intensified as he tugged at her hair.

“Theo,” she whispered.  “Please.  Close the door.”

“Are you sure?”

“I have never been surer of anything in my entire life.”

He looked like she was water and he was dying of thirst.  “Me neither.”

He closed the door.  She hopped up on the desk and spread her legs so he could step between them and continue the kiss.

Then the brick came through the window.

She was so absorbed in him that at first, bizarre as it was, she almost mistook the sound and the sudden flare of glittery brightness in the air for her own climax.  That was the only shattering she had expected.  But: broken glass, everywhere.  The window had shattered like crystal.

Theo had pulled her close and held her against him before she had even really heard the sound.  Held like that, she could hear his heartbeat, which was running rabbit-quick.  When they finally separated, though, he didn’t look scared.  He looked furious.

Then all she saw was his back, because he’d darted for the window.

“Dammit!” he said.  “They’re gone.”

He slammed his hand against the wall and then shook his head rapidly, like he needed to clear it.  He drew the blinds and curtains down over the busted window.

“At least now they can’t see us.  No one’s going to hurt you on my watch.”

Jillian, still shaken, only then noticed the brick on the  floor.  A sheet of paper was wrapped around it.  Someone had typed, “GET OUT NOW!!”  Oh, sure.  To be honest, she had expected the first one of those days ago.  She said as much.

“But it’s the extra exclamation point,” she added, “that I didn’t see coming.  That was a twist.”

Theo wasn’t so cavalier.  “You could have been hurt.  They could have hit you, they could have hurt you—or the glass could have—”

“I’m fine.”  She did a brief twirl, showing off the lack of blood.  “See?  I’m just a little shaken up, but really, this was going to happen sooner or later.  Hopefully they got it out of their system.”

“No.  It isn’t acceptable for people to be unfair.”

“Now who’s being quixotic?”  She spotted streaks of blood on his shirt.  “You’re hurt!  Let me help you, okay?  You’re not going to go running after whoever did it, they probably peeled away the second they threw the damn thing.”

But now that she knew he’d gotten cut by the flying glass, she understood his rage a little more.  As she rolled up his sleeve to examine his arm, her hands were shaking with anger and adrenaline.

“I should have gone after them right away,” Theo said.

“Believe me, I care a lot more about the fact that you wanted to keep me from getting hurt than I care about you wanting to pummel the world’s most incompetent bricklayer.  And,” she reddened a little at saying it, but she wanted to break the tension in his face, “the world’s most obnoxious cockblocker.”

He was leaning against her head and she felt his mouth curve upwards.  Good.  So like most well-spoken people, he liked the occasional bit of vulgarity.

“Come on,” she said.  “Let me get you the first aid kit.”