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 saw 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.

Tiffani put down her chopsticks.  “Deputy Theo?”

“Just Theo.  Really.”

Whenever Tiffani smiled, you could see the slight gap between her front teeth.  Jillian’s dad had always wanted her to have Invisaline braces—obviously no trophy wife of his could have visible dental work—to “fix” it.  Now she never would.

Good for her, Jillian thought, to have outlasted him on that particular point, when she knew her dad had a way of wearing people down, burying them under an avalanche of bullshit and charisma until they weakened.  It was a professional sales tactic, but he’d never shied away from bringing it home with him.  Why shouldn’t he use it on his family too?  Why shouldn’t he get everything he wanted, instead of just eighty percent of it?

But she and Tiffani had come out the other side of the Gordon Marcus hard sell, still with their ethics and their gap teeth.

“Theo,” Tiffani repeated.  “I wanted to thank you for staying here.  For caring about what happens to us even after I didn’t take your advice.  Outside of Jilly, you and Gretchen have been nicer to me about all this than anyone else.  I had friends I’d had since Girl Scouts who suddenly won’t return my phone calls.  But you—you have every reason to doubt us and keep away from us, and instead...”  She shrugged.  “And it’s not even just to win over Jilly, because you were sweet before you even saw her.”

“Thanks, Tiff,” Jillian said.  “That’s tactful.”

“On that note!” Tiffani said brightly.  “I’m going to bed.  I’ll leave it to the two of you to figure out... sleeping arrangements.”

Once she was standing up, she kissed the top of Jillian’s head, even though she was such a pixie that she still didn’t have to lean down very far.

“Good night, sweetheart.  Good night, Theo.”

“Good night, ma’am,” Theo said.

Sleeping arrangements, Jillian thought.  She crossed her legs under the table.  The slight pressure kindled something in her.  No, who was she kidding.  Putting Theo and bed together in the same thought had done that.

Theo was drumming his finger on the table.  Jillian didn’t know what she had expected, but she hadn’t imagined this kind of restlessness.

“Her bedroom is on the second floor at the very end of the hall,” Theo said, his finger coming to rest on a spot of woodgrain.  She realized that he was looking at some imagined floor plan.  “Not the master suite anymore, understandably enough.  And you’re—you didn’t say, actually.  In your old bedroom?”  He moved his finger to a different spot.

Jillian lifted his hand up an inch above the table.  His skin still had that banked-coal feeling, just a little hotter than she was used to.

“No.  Too much like being a teenaged ghost.  I’m up in the attic.”

He had, she remembered, liked the attic, though all he’d said about it was, “It’s like an eyrie.”  She’d had to have him explain that that was an eagle’s nest or, he added awkwardly, a high-ranking dragon’s den.

She was tickled by the idea that he was a closeted D&D fan trying to open up to her about his life bit by bit.

Jillian took his left hand, too, and moved it up beside his right, both palms hovering flat above the table.

She said, “And you.  You should come up with me.”

He swallowed.  “You have no idea how badly I want to.”

“I know how much I want you to.”

Theo closed his hands around hers and brought them slowly back down, though he still didn’t let go.  He said, “I have a complicated background.  I want to be honest with you, but it’s the kind of thing that’s hard to explain all at once.”  He looked around.  “And in a kitchen.”

Jillian knew all about complications.  Maybe she could never leave them behind, but she was through worrying about them.  Her life wasn’t simple either.  She wouldn’t jump to the conclusion that his couldn’t be any more tangled-up than hers, but short of him having a Bluebeard’s closet full of dead girlfriends, she didn’t need to know about it before she said she liked him.  Wanted him.

She was halfway to being in love with him.  That she wasn’t ready to admit to.

“Then I have a proposition for you,” Jillian said.  “What if instead of talking about all of that in the kitchen, we don’t talk about any of it in the bedroom?”

“I’m supposed to protect you.”

“You can leave your gun on the nightstand.”

He looked at her for what felt like an eternity.  Then he said, “Proposition accepted.”

They made their way to the attic at what felt like a land-speed record.

The gabled attic had always looked to Jillian like it had been imported from some older, stranger house.  Over the years, it had become the dumping ground for everything her dad wanted to own but not actually look at or deal with, and that made it stranger still.  No nutcrackers, just a lot of expensive original art covered in muslin tarps and a bookcase full of well-maintained, unopened first editions.

All Jillian cared about in that moment was the bed.  It was all gleaming brass and so rickety that she had woken herself up last night from the groaning squeak it had made when she’d rolled onto her side.  There was no way they’d do anything on it without making enough noise to wake the dead, so it was just as well that Tiffani hadn’t had any illusions about what was on their minds.

She nudged the mattress with her knee.  A low, seesawing creak reverberated through the bedframe.

Theo winced.  “We’ll bring the house down.”

“Promises, promises,” Jillian said.

Then his lips were once again on hers.  She couldn’t imagine getting enough of him: she could barely understand how she had managed to ever kiss him and then stop without being completely satisfied.

His hand stole to the front of her shirt and undid button after button.  As soon as the tops of her breasts were exposed, he lowered himself onto the bed and kissed and sucked at her sensitive skin right where she spilled from the cups of her bra.  His mouth drove her to distraction and she moaned before biting down on her hand.  He unclasped her bra and let it fall to the floor and pressed the flat of his tongue against one nipple, smiling up at her throughout.

“Please,” she said.  She’d never thought of herself as a whimpering kind of person, but with him she seemed to do nothing else.  She was fine with that.

He teased her nipple to a tight, furled point and then sucked, stroking her other breast with his hand.  For a throbbing moment, she thought she would come just from that, from the heat and skill of him.

The devotion of him, with him sitting as she stood, with him using his hands and mouth to do nothing but please her!  It made her want to do the same for him.  She couldn’t even understand how she had let this kind of unfairness go on so long, with him still being almost completely dressed while she stood there in nothing but jeans.

“I need to see you.”

“I need to see you too,” he countered, his thumb against the button of her jeans.

“Don’t rush me, Deputy.”

She unbuttoned his shirt slowly, letting her hands explore his hard, muscular chest, now covered only with thinly ribbed white cotton.  The second she no longer had his undershirt pinned between his skin and hers, he tore it off and tossed it aside.

He had tattoos she hadn’t noticed before.  They were red and gold, the colors shifting so subtly that she couldn’t tell where one turned into the other.  They flowed like water down one shoulder and onto his back, just a single band reaching around to the front a little bit above the perfect sharp edge of his hip.  She wanted to press her tongue there.

But instead she traced the border of the gauze on his arm, momentarily coming out of the spell of attraction, but Theo caught her hand in his and kissed his fingers.

“I’m fine, remember.  Just a scratch.”  He unfolded her fingers and drew her nails lightly across his skin, making a series of fine pink lines.  “It’s the same as that, only it wasn’t nearly as pleasurable to get it.”

“I hope not,” Jillian said.  Her voice was low, as if she could barely get the words out around the knot of lust in her throat.  “Well, for the rest of tonight you’re mine to scratch, so the glass will have to stay away.”

“No glass,” he agreed instantly.  “I never liked glass anyway.”

He tugged her down to the bed with him and for an agonizingly, amazingly long time, she enjoyed what it was like to kiss him while lying down, when she could tangle her legs up with his.  The rest of their clothes gradually disappeared, shed item by item.  His erection was hard against her leg, the skin silky and hot when she stroked it.

“Not so fast, if you don’t mind,” Theo said.  “Patience is my virtue.”

He moved to the foot of the bed and nudged Jillian’s legs apart.  She had always been self-conscious about this, convinced that the guy didn’t enjoy it, but now her thighs parted with no hesitation, with active longing.  She wanted him so badly.

And, unbelievably, she knew he wanted her the same way.  She was sure.  He wasn’t doing this as some gesture towards equality or even to impress her.  He wanted to taste her.  He wanted her everywhere in the same way she wanted him everywhere.

Even the heat of his hands on her inner thighs was unbearably arousing.

“You’re always so warm,” she said in wonderment.  “Your skin—you’re always so hot.”

“Does it bother you?”

“No.  Never.  Burn me down.”

“You’re beautiful,” he said.  He stroked her thighs and her lower lips, moving his thumb teasingly around her clit but not yet touching it.  “You’re a pearl.”

“I’m a pearl?” she said, laughing but not laughing, wanting the word too badly to make fun of it.

“Yes,” Theo said, with inarguable authority in his voice.  “You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen in my entire life—you’re all the treasure anyone would ever need.”

You can’t be serious, Jillian almost said.  But he sounded serious.  He sounded as if he had never meant anything more than he meant, right now, that she was beautiful.

There was a hitch in her throat.  She said, “You’re beautiful too.”

He bent down further and pressed his lips to her mound, lingering there, his breath warm.  Then he licked into her—just one solid touch right where she needed him and then nothing but teases, all along her inner folds, feather-light.  She felt like all of her nerve endings were coming unraveled.  Theo’s impossibly hot mouth moved over her sensitive skin and made her melt.  She dug her hands into the sheets and moaned, no longer able to think of the sound of that or of the noise they were making as Theo’s weight shifted or as her shoulders and hips jostled the bed.

They could bring the whole house down around her ears for all she cared.  What had this house ever done for her?

Given her Theo, maybe.

Suddenly her thighs tightened around his head and she bent up, tugging at his hair as he kissed her right at her center.  She came in a seemingly unending wave of pleasure, so long and rolling she almost couldn’t stand it.  She bucked up over and over again.

“Theo, Theo—”

He pressed his hand flat between her legs and she ground helplessly against his palm, riding out the last of the lingering aftershocks.

She closed her eyes and, for a bonus, covered them with her hand.

He pried her fingers gently away.

“Don’t hide.”

“I’m not hiding,” Jillian said.  “I’m dead.”

He circled her navel with his thumb.  “Have I seized your assets?”

Jillian looked at him: this ridiculously perfect man with his body that could have been a Greek sculpture, with his loose lock of hair hanging down against his forehead, with his lips shiny from her, with those gemstone eyes.  She was falling for him.  She couldn’t deny that any longer.  After the orgasm she’d just had, she would have to be crazy to not take all of him she could get.

But never mind all that, she decided, because right now there was one part of him in particular that she wanted but didn’t have.

She traced his lips and he kissed her fingertips.

“My assets have been seized,” Jillian said.  “Your turn to forfeit to me.”

Theo said, “Whatever you want.”

She drew her heel up against his firm, perfectly-shaped ass, and used that to nudge him up towards her.

“Well,” she said.  “I don’t want to be crude or anything.”

Though, really, with her job, she heard every teenaged phrase for sex there was, and no one was better—well, no one was more prolific, anyway—at coming up with sex slang than teenagers.  She could probably make him blush if she really put her mind to it.

“You could be euphemistic,” Theo suggested.

She could feel him against her inner thigh, his cock still hard and immense.  Patience really was his virtue, much more than it was hers.  She wanted him inside her so badly.  Usually after she came, she felt like the desire had all been wrung out of her.  With him, her wanting felt infinite and inexhaustible, as if she could ride him until the bed broke once and for all.

Euphemisms.

“I would like you to pluck my flower.”

“I think that’s only for virgins,” Theo said.  He paused.  “Wait, are you—”

She snorted, probably unbecomingly.  “Not for quite a while now.  And I don’t know that I’d call myself one after what you just did even if I had been.  Okay, try this one: I want you to vanquish my defenses.  Ravish me, Theo.  Rip my bodice.  You know, I come across all the ways of making sex sound dirtier, not usually the ways to clean it up.”

“Should I endeavor to teach you the gentler arts of love?”

To hell with it.

“You should,” Jillian said, “get inside me before I die of wanting you to.  Then you should screw me until I can’t move.”

Theo looked at her.  Fascination was still in his eyes, but the adoration had been temporarily shouldered out of the picture to make room for a fiery lust that almost seemed to make his eyes glitter, greener than ever.  It could have scared her, but instead it made her spread her legs further apart and try to draw him still closer to her.  It was a look that seemed to promise that excellent and bone-melting things were about to happen to her.

“Yes,” Theo said.  “That’s exactly what I should do, now that I think about it.”

She hurried him, not wanting his fingers or even his tongue again, just wanting him to be inside her completely, wanting to feel his whole length against her inner walls.  He took a little persuading to rush, but not much.  He almost fumbled the condom in his excitement.  She was gratified by that, by how eager he was beneath all the chivalry.  Neither one of them was interested in plucking flowers.  Only ravishment.

At last he moved forward and buried his body in hers.  Desire flared up inside her again, making all her skin feel new and attentive to him and his movements.  He made her tremble.  She arched up to meet him as he drove forward again and again.

The attic now sounded like it came with a big brand brass section.  Playing “We Will Rock You.”

“You’re going to break the bed,” Jillian gasped, her hands moving against his sleek, strong back.  She could feel his muscles flexing.  Her own, in her center, seemed to tighten to match that as well as his thrusts.

“We’re going to break the bed,” Theo corrected.  “You can’t leave yourself out.”

“With noise like this, I don’t think we’re leaving out anyone in a hundred mile radius.”

Then her whole body tightened around him, first in what she thought was a laugh and then in what turned out to be an incredible, powerful second climax, just as shattering as the first.

Theo lost himself then too.  His hips surged forward powerfully.  Without meaning to, Jillian grabbed him there.  She loved the powerful, tensed muscles at his thighs and the way they suddenly relaxed, like he was a puppet with cut strings.

She felt that way herself.  No: like she’d had nothing but knots inside her and he’d come along and untied every last one until finally she was loose in a way she never had been before.  This, she thought in wonderment, is what it feels like to not be tense.  To not always be waiting for the other shoe to drop.  To not always be looking for an angle.  Because as surprised as she was that Theo wanted her, liked her, she believed that he really did.

That was not the kind of sex you had when you were pretending.

He caressed her cheek.  “What are you thinking about?”

“You,” she said honestly.

“I’m thinking about you too.”

She cuddled up to him, resisting at the last minute the urge to pull the sheet up over her body to cover herself.  She liked the way he was still looking at her displayed curves.

She said, “What do you think about me?”

“Right now it’s mostly monosyllables,” Theo admitted.  “Wow.  Hey.  Hot.”

“Seriously.”

“Every word of that was serious.  But also—I really admire you.  You’re able to hold onto what’s good and valuable about your family without getting mired down in the bad.  I’ve never known how to do that.”

She ran her hand down his chest, feeling his heartbeat, the slight soft scratchiness of the chestnut-colored hair there.  “Can you tell me about your family?”

He nodded.  With the way they were lying, she felt that more as a jostle of his chin against her head.  That too made the bed quiver and let out a mournful squeak, like it wanted them to know that it didn’t have a family.

“My parents died when I was seventeen.”

That was more tragedy than she’d wanted to bring into pillow talk.  “I’m sorry.  That must have been so hard, coming along right when you’d been pushing their buttons.”

He stroked her shoulder and said nothing to that for a long moment.  Then he said, “Thank you.  And yes, it was.  Even now, I feel like I’m lying if I talk about it without mentioning that I’d been a thorn in their side for their last few years.”

“You were a kid.”

“Not after that.”  He said it calmly, as a cold, hard fact.  “I couldn’t see any reason to stay and be shuttled around between houses of whoever was willing to take me in.  I’d applied to college—that was one of our arguments—so I just left early.  I washed dishes in a campus diner until the semester started.  I haven’t been home since.”

“Your parents didn’t want you to go to college?”

She had other questions, too, like why he thought he would have bounced around among neighbors instead of being placed with the nearest relative or in temporary foster care, but this seemed at least a little touchy.

“Riell is a very small town.  A strange town, by the standards of the rest of the world.  It was unusual for anyone to leave—I only knew one woman who did.  Our doctor.  I liked her.  She taught me how to drive when no one else would, and she’s the one who gave me a broken-down old Chevy to leave the valley when the time came.  I owe her a lot.”

It was hard for Jillian to believe towns that tight-knit and small-minded still existed.  She was just thankful that the doctor had been there to show Theo the possibilities of a wider world.

“Everyone in the valley is... old-fashioned,” Theo went on.  “I know it shows.  I’ve watched a lot of TV to try to get acculturated, but I know sometimes I sound—different.”

“You mean you sound like you would use the word ‘acculturated’ in a sentence?”

Theo laughed.

“I like the way you talk,” Jillian said.  “It’s gentlemanly.  Not in a ‘let’s sit and smoke in the billiards room while the ladies do their chatting in the parlor’ way, but in a real way.  I work around kids all day.  It’s nice to hear someone sound... courteous.”

“Thank you, milady.”  He gave an exceptionally courteous pet between her legs, where all of her twitched longingly but exhaustedly forward.

She groaned.  “You’re such a tease.”

“You’re trying to seduce me while I talk about my childhood,” Theo said primly.

“I wasn’t trying to seduce you!”

He tilted her chin up.  Humor shone from his eyes.

“You mean,” Theo said, “this is you not trying to seduce me?  Where would I be if you were actually putting an effort in?”

“On a circular waterbed, no doubt,” Jillian said, “with a mirror on the ceiling.”

Another warm chuckle.  He returned to his lazy caressing of her shoulders and back.

“You could say that I come from a group of people who have a very particular way of life that they wanted to hold onto,” Theo said.  “The valley where I was born—it was settled generations ago by our ancestors.  It was ours.  And keeping it—keeping what we had there—seemed to everyone like the most important thing.”

“But not to you?”

“I felt trapped.  I wanted to stretch my wings.  Then when I was out, I realized how the rest of the world saw us: stuffy, narrow-minded, secretive.  Snobby, arrogant.  It’s not untrue, but it’s... the valley, in the morning, it’s so beautiful.  You can see the river light up so golden like it’s caught on fire.”

“And the people?”

“In their annoying, claustrophobic way, as beautiful as the river at dawn.  But I don’t know how to learn their good lessons without learning their bad ones.”

“I don’t think anyone ever figures that out,” Jillian said.  “We just spend our whole lives trying.  What are you afraid you’ll learn from them?  A hatred of contractions and water parks?”

“Self-satisfaction.  Arrogance.  A way of looking at the world that makes everything about greed and acquisition, about earning without ever giving.”

He could have been describing her own fears.  Unfortunately, that meant she had no reassurance for him.

All she could say was, “I don’t think you’re the kind of person who wouldn’t give anything back to the world.”

Should she be falling for him as fast as she was?  She didn’t know that she could help it: there was no irritating fault she could grab onto to slow herself down.  Maybe the morning would show her some.  Maybe he would turn out to be obsessed with paint-by-numbers clown paintings.

Or maybe if she got him to talk about his job, he would grow suddenly, compellingly boring.  Jillian had never known a guy who could talk about work without getting at least a little boring.

“I’m sure your parents would be proud of your job, even if they wouldn’t have expected it.”

“Maybe.”  He didn’t sound at all sure.  “But I’m sure they still would have wanted me to ‘get it out of my system’ and come home as soon as possible.”

“My dad always thought I would come back for the money,” Jillian said.  “He figured the nonprofit work would scratch the good person itch but then I would still come around and let him buy me dresses and cars.”

“Do you like dresses and cars?”

“I do.  And I wind up buying vintage on both.”

He smiled, and she looked at it upside-down, her head tilted back.  He had a very bitable lower lip.

“Vintage often gives you better value,” Theo said.  “As with the lace.”  He seemed to be doodling on her bare shoulder with one fingertip and she found it funnily soothing.  “Tell me about your job.”

“I asked you first.”

“You did, didn’t you?  All right, Miss Marcus, I like my job—at the moment, I like it even more than usual.  Thanks to my family, I know a lot about worth and a lot about antiques, so I handle most of our asset forfeiture cases.  None of them have ever gone quite like this.  I’m sorry that’s how we had to meet.”

She shook her head and then nudged herself upwards just enough to kiss him.  “It was always going to be a bad day, Theo, but you made it so much better.”

“I know it’s hard to go through.”

“I just keep telling myself that it’s like Gretchen said.  This will help people, and every little bit will mean something.  If it will make things better for the people Dad hurt, I’ll rip the light fixtures out of this place with my bare hands.”

“You’re a good person,” Theo said softly.

She could feel herself flush, warmed by that down to her toes.  She knew it was silly to go through life hoping to get approval or praise and she was good about not expecting it.  But after a life spent trying to be as good as she could be to make up for what she knew her dad was—she felt a kind of prickle behind her eyes to be described that way.

“And I like protecting you,” Theo said.  “Looking out for you.  I don’t like that I have to, but—I think I’d want to do it anyway, necessary or not.”

Usually she was the one who did the protecting.

You can still protect him, a voice seemed to whisper.  You might not have a gun and washboard abs, but you know how to deal with family history.  He needs that.

And if it was too early for her to care about what Theo St. Vincent needed, she didn’t care.

I’m falling in love with him.  I’m falling—

Asleep.