She was his key?  Could she trust that?  Some swanky, swoonworthy guy walked into her life and her bed and the next morning all but told her he loved her, that she was the one?  That didn’t sound like her life, it sounded like the beginning of some kind of elaborate con that would end with her short her life savings.

But she did believe him.  And she didn’t think she was stupid for doing it.

She didn’t believe him because he was six feet and five inches of knock-you-down sex appeal, and she didn’t believe him because he’d blown her mind last night when they’d been doing their best to wreck the bed.

She believed him because, as ridiculous as it sounded after not even knowing him a whole day, she knew he wouldn’t lie to her.  He was sweet, he was perceptive, he was honorable.  He was protective.  He made French toast.

There was also the fact that he was a dragon and had told her so.  Had turned into one in front of her.

And then there was this, even more undeniable than the evidence of her own two eyes.  She loved him too.

Theo said, “I know you might not feel the same way—”

“But I do,” Jillian said, surprising herself with the clarity and definitiveness of that.

A slow, heartstopping smile spread across his face.  “You do?  Even though you can’t know?”

“Last night, I just kept thinking—you’re the best thing to ever happen to me.”  She put her hand on his chest, spreading her fingers out across his heart.  “I never thought I’d get swept off my feet.  Don’t take it as a character flaw, I’m begging you, I’m usually very level-headed.”

“Noted,” Theo said.  His smile had now gone from striking to outright goofy, and she almost liked that better.

He had, she decided, the most kissable mouth in the world.

“It’s like a fairy tale,” she said.  “That makes sense, right?  With you being a dragon?”

“We’re not actually wild about fairy tales.”

No, they wouldn’t be, would they?  Dragons were always the bad guys, the way a Marcus was always the bad guy: paint as many as possible with the same ultra-wide brush.  She didn’t know if the dragons in books were ridiculous caricatures or as close as Theo’s ancestors had to recorded history, but at the moment she wasn’t going to ask.  Whether it was truth or fiction, it wasn’t Theo.

Except family was inescapable.  Her being here to meet him at all proved that much.  And he had said “we.”

She guessed no one’s history came in black and white and no one’s life came separate from the people they loved.  Like hers wouldn’t be separable from his, in the future.

Thinking that, she looked at him and felt desire uncoil in her belly and warm her between her legs.  When she shifted her weight, the cotton of her shorts rode up a little and rubbed at her, and even that sensation felt like it had the potential to overload her circuits.

The smell in the air was syrup-sweet, the temperature warm and sticky.

“Theo,” she said hoarsely, hoping he would see the need in her eyes.

He did.  He kissed her, his mouth hot and open, and in another moment, had sat her up on the counter beside the bowl of French toast batter.

“This is not at all sanitary,” Jillian said, and then his long, elegant fingers were against her lower belly under the waistline of her shorts and then they were between her lower lips.  Kitchen standards became the last thing on her mind.

She felt like she was dissolving.  She opened her legs wider and eased back onto her hands, holding herself up so he could wriggle her shorts down and onto the floor.

“I was promised breakfast,” she whispered.

Theo kissed her shoulder, his teeth a teasing pressure against her skin.  “This will be better than breakfast.”

“This is already better than breakfast.”

“Besides—”  He went back to stroking her, caressing her on her inner folds and around her entrance, eventually sliding his fingers inside her.  She could feel herself gripping him, each bit of penetration simultaneously overwhelming and not nearly enough.  “The freckles on your shoulders are like cinnamon.  You smell better than any vanilla.  You’re all I want to taste.  I’m starving for you.”

She would have loved to have had some clever retort to that or even some honest, heartfelt response about how she was starving for him too, but she came then, gratifyingly and almost embarrassingly quickly.  She had never gone off like that.  It was like he had lit a rocket at the center of her.  She tilted her head back, crying out as the wave hit her and she tightened around him.  She could feel his fingers inside her and against her clit.  She could feel his eyes on her.

For the first time in her life, she understood what made someone wanton.  She had needed so little from him.  Just having him close felt like it would drive her crazy.

“You could burn me up,” Theo said.

“You breathe fire,” Jillian said, breathless.

“Even so.”

She slid down from the counter, her legs orgasm-weak and unsteady.  “I want you.”

“You’ve got me,” Theo said.

Jillian knelt down.  It was unfair that he was already dressed, even though his clothes were almost as delectable as the rest of him.  She laid her hand against the front of his charcoal gray trousers and heard him suck in a breath.

Doing this for him, she felt powerful.  She could undo him just as easily as he could her; could make him fall apart at the seams right then and there.

She unzipped his pants and freed him from his boxers.  He was gorgeous—hard for her, all for her.  She took him into her mouth without a moment’s hesitation.

Theo tasted incredible: musky and sweet.  Jillian felt like she could get drunk off him as her tongue glided up and down the steely length of his shaft, feeling the heat and desire beneath the silky skin.  He settled his hands down in her hair and she loved that, too.  He didn’t control her movements, he only made her feel like he couldn’t stop touching her and would never want to.  She’d never felt so sexy in her life.  Was this what she’d been missing out on all those years when she’d fumbled through lackluster relationship after lackluster relationship?

No, she decided.  No one else could ever be Theo.  It wouldn’t be like this with anyone but him.

“Jillian—”

His hips stuttered forward as she tightened her lips and brought him to his release.  Then he slumped down onto the floor with her.

“Like I said.  You, Jillian Marcus, burn me up.”

She laughed and moved over next to him, curling up under his arm.  “You know, as much as I wish we were somewhere else, there aren’t many houses where the kitchen floor would be this spotless even up close.  Tiff’s always paid the cleaners really well.  My apartment, on the other hand, is a mess.”

“Then when we’re there, we can stick to the bed.”

She smiled.  “But I was just thinking: it’s a shame that everything you know about me comes from seeing me here.  I did the best I could to leave this place behind.  I have my own life.  My real home, it’s not anything like this.  Fewer animal-skin rugs lying around, for one thing.”

She paused to figure out what to say next and then clapped a hand over her mouth, suddenly horrified.

“Oh my God!  You don’t know any werebears, do you?”

“Not personally,” he assured her.  “And I haven’t heard of any dying in mysterious hunting accidents, either, if that helps.”

“Can I still eat meat?  Are there cow shifters and pig shifters and... chicken shifters?”  She wanted to know beyond a shadow of a doubt that she had never eaten a person, which wasn’t a worry she thought she’d wake up to.  Life threw you some curveballs, didn’t she try to tell the kids at the center that?

“I shudder to think what my family would have to say about the concept of chicken shifters.”

“That’s a no?”

“Think about the number of pork buns you saw me eat last night and you’ll have your answer.”

“I don’t know,” Jillian said.  “Maybe you’re just an unusually cruel and callous person.  Maybe pig shifters are the sworn enemies of dragon shifters and you’ve got some Hatfield and McCoy thing going on.”

“Dragons feud with everyone, though it mostly doesn’t come to bloodshed anymore, thankfully.  But,” he said, trailing his fingers up and down her bare shoulder like he was tracing something there, drawing a constellation between her freckles, “the folklore in my valley was always that shifters came about because of the spiritual connections people had with particular animals.  Their beloveds: horses and dogs and cats.  The creatures they thought were strong, impressive: lions, tigers, bears—”

“Oh my,” Jillian said.

Theo looked at her blankly.

“Sorry.  I forgot about the homeschooling.  I’ll explain later.”

“People longed to be what they admired or loved or even what they feared.”  His voice had taken on a storytelling tone, as if he were reciting, and she tried to picture a tiny Theo sitting around some campfire hearing all this.  “The dreaming made the shifting happen, for the people who got the dreams in their blood.  For animal shifters, at least.  Dragons, unicorns, griffins—not to sound snobbish, but my family said our dreams were more aristocratic, more thoughtful.  That we came from people who loved ideas.  Fantasies.”

She unbuttoned the top button on his shirt.  “Do you think of yourself as a particularly cerebral person, Deputy St. Vincent?”

“Not when you’re doing that,” he said wryly.  “But you see what I’m saying.  People don’t generally long to become something they’re about to cook for dinner.  Deer shifters are the closest I can think of, and even now you don’t see that many of them.”  He lifted her head up, his thumb against her chin.  His eyes were warm.  “You aren’t afraid to just dive into it.”

“I like knowing everything I can.”

“And almost everything you go to, right away, is about how to treat other people fairly and not hurt them.  I really do want to see where you call home, by the way.  I’ve told you enough about mine.”

“You’ve told me about the place you used to call home,” she corrected.  “As far as I know, right now you live in a featureless motel room.”

“It’s not quite that bad,” Theo said.  She had the sense he was deflecting, but she wasn’t sure what it was he didn’t want to talk about.

She could tell when he’d decided to say it anyway, though, because he suddenly looked away, his golden-brown lashes down, shading his eyes.

“I like my house.  But it always feels empty.  I brought everything I valued from home that was mine to bring, but—I was so used to having everyone else’s treasure to fill up the space, too.  It feels like I’m just rattling around inside this huge space.  Work is better.”  And his voice did lighten then.  She listened carefully to the relief in his tone.  Relief and... surprise?

“Take me there, then,” she said.  “We have to get out of here anyway, right?  I’ll take you to my apartment, and you can take me to your office.  I’ll show you my real self if you’ll show me yours.”  Why did that feel more intimate than the sex?

Maybe she was a virgin when it came to full disclosure.  Now came the real deflowering.

*

It never stopped amazing her how short the drive was between where she’d grown up and where she’d run away to.  It felt like they should have needed a passport instead of just a half-full tank of gas.

“Are you sure it’s okay for me to be taking you away from work like this?” she asked for maybe the hundredth time.

Theo squeezed her hand.  Even with all her nervousness, his touch sparked something in her.  To feel the heat of his body and the calluses on his fingers was more of a turn-on than most of the actual foreplay she’d had in her life, dutiful though some of it had been.

“I’m sure,” Theo said.  “But you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”

“No, I want to.”  She unbuckled her seatbelt, hoping the momentum of that decision would carry her forward.  She turned to face him head-on.  “I trust you.  I’m just not used to trusting people.”

“With dragons, showing someone your home is something... intimate.  Maybe even sacred.  People have parlors where strangers are allowed to go and it’s considered extremely rude to go any further than that without a relationship.  Your parlor is where you put the parts of your hoard that you’re proud of but less protective of.  The parts of yourself that you want to show the world and the parts of yourself that you can bear to show the world.  I know humans aren’t always the same, and I know I’ve had to invade your other home much more than was proper, but whatever you can show me, I will respect.  I know what it means to be invited in.”

“Does it mean something to you to take me to where you work?”

He nodded.  “It’s not uncommon to have strangers there, of course.  The parlor is more of an idea than a reality.  By telling you that it means more to me than just an office, I’ve let you in—when you see it, you’ll be seeing me and what matters to me.  Which you wouldn’t be doing if you were just the guy delivering the coffee.”

“You’re welcome to bring me coffee,” Jillian said.  She opened the door.  “Always.”

She could look at Theo’s smile all day.  “I’ll remember that.  Gift-giving is culturally important, too.”  The smile turned wry.  “As my colleagues will cheerfully note led to last year’s Secret Santa debacle.  Ask them, they’ll tell it better.  This is a nice building.”

Jillian snorted in a way that made her glad Theo’s attraction to her was set in stone.  “No, it isn’t.”

“No, it really isn’t.”

“I deliberately picked the ugliest apartment complex I could find.  I started off looking for the most run-down, but I chickened out.”

“See?  That’s why you wouldn’t have chicken shifters.”

“I should be helping people who didn’t have money, not being the poor little rich girl living in conditions no one wanted just to piss off her dad.  I settled on ugly and I think I achieved it.”

The Steeplechase was an incongruously huge, sprawling concrete complex that looked like some unholy cross between a skyscraper—itself a blemish enough on the relatively flat skyline—and a prison.

Out of sheer curiosity, Jillian had read up on the history of the building, which had been tossed around in a game of real estate hot potato for several decades now.  Each new owner had decided that they would be the person to whip some beauty into The Steeplechase’s forbidding dourness.  Once, pink curtains had been installed in all the windows, pink being considered a cheery color.  In the nineties, an owner with a Gothic streak had decided a touch of classiness could push the building’s ugly front into real character and had covered the place with gargoyles.  Then someone had come along and painted the gargoyles to look like cherubs without actually changing their shape.  Three years ago, for no reason Jillian could work out, someone had added a huge wrap-around deck out of unstained wood and covered it with potted palm trees.

Currently, the owners were into cheeky irony.  A huge waterproof sign flapped in the wind and announced, THE STEEPLECHASE: AT LEAST IT’S CHEAP!  One around the back proclaimed: THE STEEPLECHASE: A NICE PLACE TO LIVE, BUT YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO VISIT!

Irony, the apartment manager had told Jillian confidentially, was very “in.”

Theo considered the sign.  “Is it cheap?”

“It would have to be, wouldn’t it?”

“You like it,” he said, now evaluating her with the same attention.

“Well, I’ve lived here for years,” Jillian said.  “After a while, it’s like if you have an ugly dog.  It might be hideous to look at, but it’s yours, and you know it’s sweet-tempered.  The cherubgoyles freak me out a little, though.”

She let them into the lobby, where the ugliness continued with a pink marble floor that had the thick, creamy swirls of cherry ice cream.  Someone had graffiti-sprayed LOOK UPON MY WORKS, YE MIGHTY, AND DESPAIR on the wall by the elevators, which had impressed the manager as a compelling example of outsider art and on-point architectural criticism.  A gilt frame now surrounded it.

“Rogue English professor?” Theo said, nodding at it.

“Whoever it was came back after they put the frame up and got halfway through spraying DON’T FRAME THIS, YOU before they must have gotten scared off by the cops.  That’s down by the garden-side door.”

“Did they frame it anyway?”

“Of course not.  We at The Steeplechase are very respectful of the wishes of graffiti artists as long as they express them in a timely fashion.  I’m on the fifth floor.”

The elevators were comparatively mundane, though they did all have glassed-in signs explaining in brief the history of The Steeplechase.  Words like “eccentric” and “quaint” tended to turn up a lot.

She had gotten her place at a discount even for The Steeplechase because it was right off the bank of elevators—she slept with earplugs to keep herself from hearing chimes all night long—so all it took was a single turn before she was unlocking her door.

This really did feel intimate.  But, she reminded herself, she was showing it to the person in her life who would most appreciate and understand what she was showing him.

This is moving so fast.  Like land-speed records fast.

But she had heard so many stories—even stories without dragons!—that had this kind of fairy tale love.  How many times had she heard grandparents at the center reminisce about how they had known right away?  How many times had some elderly man looked lovingly at his wife while telling Jillian how he had proposed to her before the sun had even gone down?  History was full of people who had fallen in love at first sight.

And anyway, she told herself practically, I didn’t fall in love with him right when I saw him.  I fell in love with him on a squeaky attic bed.

Jillian let Theo in.

She tried to remind herself that he came from a family and even a species that appreciated beauty, grandeur, and wealth; that he was a man who knew the worth of things at a glance.  If he didn’t like her apartment, that was only understandable.

It was just that this was the life she had built for herself, not the one that she had been born into; the one that was still good, not the one that had turned out to be rotten at the center all along.  She wanted him to like it because she wanted him to like her.

Her hands were sweating enough that her fingers slipped on the light switch on the first try and she only got it right on the second.  Well, there it all was on display.  There she was.

Theo walked past her into the apartment and said nothing at first, as if he wanted to give her his true opinion and not some immediate, easy reassurance.  Even though she was going crazy with anticipation, that made her feel better.  He knew that she wanted honesty more than anything else.

She looked around.  Demerits popped out at her—a stack of junk mail lazily left on the coffee table even though there was a trash can right there, the weird color mismatch between the couch and the throw pillows, the fridge with its takeout menu magnets proclaiming how little she used the kitchen.

But even on edge, she could also see why she called the place home.  It was a little sanctuary of peace and coziness that she’d made in a stressful, chaotic life.  The throw pillows had been chosen not for their color but for their unbelievable plushness, so she could rest on one of them on the nights when even watching TV sitting up felt like too much to ask.  The books with their tightly stuck-on USED stickers on their spines had been culled from hundreds of visits to thrift shops and secondhand stores.  She could have told him where each one had come from.

Theo turned back to her.  There was nothing but sincerity on his face.  “It’s you.  It’s beautiful.”

She laughed to conceal her relief.  “Oh, come on.”

“I mean it,” he said.  He picked up a coaster off her table, handling it was delicately as if it had been priceless china.  Of course he’d gone unerringly to the small extravagance that she’d allowed herself, to the little touch of beauty she most liked.  The coasters were colored, crackled glass, each one different and flawed-looking, like a segment of geode with more restrained colors.  “These are beautiful and they’re durable, too, you can feel it in the weight.  There are all these little touches, but it’s the overall feeling that matters, not each and every bit of furniture.  This is a lovely, comfortable parlor, much homier than your father’s house.  There’s a lot more soul.”

“It’s the only other place I’ve ever lived,” Jillian said.  “On days where everything has gone wrong, I like coming home and thinking that this is sort of my life’s work, too... making a life for myself.”  She touched her eyes and was relieved that she wasn’t crying.  “I guess you’d know about that.”

“You’ve done a much better job than I have.  Dragons aren’t notorious for liking comfort, but away from them, it didn’t seem like grandeur was what I really wanted.  And I couldn’t figure out what I did want, so I have... nothing.  Very shiny and expensive nothing, in some cases, but still nothing.”

“Hey.”  She reached up and put her hand on his cheek.  “Just remember you in the waterpark.  Dumb rebellion that was tasteless except for how it was exactly what you needed—fun, casual splashing around in a place where no one knew you.  Your judgment is pretty good, I think.  You can figure out how to decorate a living room on a budget.  And if not, we’ll watch some HGTV together.”

“I do like the shows about DIY,” Theo said, with adorable earnestness.  He kissed the top of her head and she felt him breathe in the scent of her hair.  “You make me feel like I could do anything.  Even do my own tiling.”

“Flattery will get you everywhere,” Jillian said.

*

On the way to his office, she could tell it was his turn to get nervous, or at least he thought it was, because he couldn’t stop drumming his fingers against the steering wheel even when the song on the radio—a sweetly sad Patsy Cline ballad—resolutely refused to have any percussion in it.  Jillian wanted to reassure him that she would like whatever was important to him, but she knew exactly how reassuring she would have found that kind of promise and so knew it wouldn’t do any good.  They were learning, step by step, what trusting each other really looked like.

She decided to distract him instead.  Luckily, it wasn’t hard to think up questions she needed him to answer.

“You said shifters know who they’re going to fall in love with right away, right?  Do they always find the other person?”

“No.  And until yesterday morning, I wouldn’t have thought that mattered.  Like I said, dragons keep to themselves, they don’t socialize as much with the rest of the world or even with other shifters—it can get pretty ugly at times.  Trust me, if there’s a stereotype about a kind of shifter, I know it.  So everyone I knew either found their mate where we grew up or they didn’t find them at all, and that meant that most of them didn’t.  It all seemed... fine.  You could see the difference between the ones who had their true mate and the ones who didn’t, though.  I don’t know how to describe it.”

“There’s a lot of room between ‘fine’ and ‘happy,’” Jillian said.

“Yes, that.  But we weren’t raised to be happy, so we didn’t think it mattered.”

She had never been raised to be anything but happy, never raised to do anything but make money and pursue her own pleasure without regard for the world around her.  She didn’t know why their families had run to such extremes.

“It matters to me that you’re happy,” she said.

He leaned over and kissed her.  “It matters to me that you’re happy, too.”

“And I want to meet your friends.”

“I am honored to introduce them to my mate,” Theo said, bowing his head slightly.

Mate, Jillian thought.  It was the second time he had used that word specifically, and she decided now that she liked it.  Girlfriend would have felt both too simple and too weak for what she could already feel between them.  And she liked how primal mate sounded, no matter how decorous his voice was when he said it.  It didn’t hurt that it made her immediately think about the way people always said mate for life.

That kind of reliability—she had never thought she would find it in a partner.

Although it was possible that if his coworkers—all shifters, hadn’t he said?  Or mostly all?—hated her, he might start to rethink that whole destined to be together forever thing.  As they walked into Sterling’s courthouse, far duller and more presentable than The Steeplechase, she tried to remember that she had met and liked Gretchen.

“Wait!”  She grabbed his elbow just as he started to open the frosted glass door that announced the US Marshals Office.  “You said they were all... like you, right?”

“Not exactly like me,” Theo said, lowering his voice as well.  “But most of them all shifters.”  He said the last word so softly it was almost more breath than speech and despite the chilly courthouse hallway and her own nerves, a warm and pleasant tingling spread across Jillian’s body.

“Is Gretchen?”

“No, Gretchen’s human.  She’s from a family of lynx shifters, but every so often, the gene doesn’t present itself.”

“That must be hard.”

And being a lynx would suit Gretchen, she thought: she had that same compact muscularity and ease of movement.

Being a dragon suited Theo too, whether he thought it did or not.  Whether his family thought it did or not, for that matter.  He knew what had worth and he carried the feel of a fairy tale with him wherever he went.  And he didn’t even need to breathe fire to be able to scorch everything within a hundred foot radius.  All he needed for that was that pair of emerald eyes.

Theo said, “Gretchen likes you.  They’ll all like you.”  They’d better, his tone somehow managed to imply.

She nodded.  Time to slay the dragon’s coworkers with her wit and charm.

They stepped into the office.  To Jillian’s great relief, no matter how full it was with people who could turn into animals or mythological creatures, it still looked and felt like every other office she had been in, from the burbling water cooler to the mixed scent of toner and slightly stale coffee.  It was the kind of place she usually visited to give speeches urging people to consider some of her kids as summer interns.  She might associate it with a little bit of disappointment, but at least she no longer felt nervous.

The closest marshal to them was a leanly muscular man in his thirties, with thick black hair and a little bit of stubble.  His eyes were the darkest blue Jillian had ever seen.  In a building full of people in ties and suit jackets, he was wearing a battered olive Army jacket.

“Jillian, this is Colby,” Theo said.  “Colby, this is Jillian Marcus.  Gretchen probably told you, but—Jillian is my mate.”

Colby gave Jillian what she thought might be the most wistful smile she’d ever seen, something totally belied by the cheerful openness of his voice as he called out, “Hey, everybody!  Theo and his mate are here!”

“Subtle,” Theo said.

“Subtlety’s only necessary when we have strangers around, Your Highness.”  He held his hand out to Jillian.  “Pleased to meet you.  From what Gretchen told us about you, I would have liked you anyway, but anyone who’s perfect for Theo must be pretty close to perfect in general.”

Theo looked startled by that and then laughed as if it had been a joke, though it hadn’t sounded like one.  He said to Jillian, “Colby’s a werewolf.”

She liked that she now lived in a world where this information could be delivered as casually as “Colby’s an accountant.”

“Theo said you guys get all the press,” Jillian said.

“Yes,” Colby said, “because no one has ever heard of dragons, obviously.  Anyway, silver allergy yes, full moon no, but my kind can sometimes turn humans into shifters with a bite, which his can’t.”  He was talking quickly, like he had to outpace the look in his eyes.  Before she could even try to think about how to ask if something was wrong, though, Gretchen had joined them.

“Hi, Jillian.  I’m glad we all get to openly fawn over you now.”

“It’s not overwhelming at all,” Jillian said.

“Of course not.  Who could be overwhelmed by a bunch of shifters pouncing on them all at once?”

“And this,” Colby said breezily, “is Martin, Chief Deputy US Marshal and pegasus shifter.”

Martin was an immensely tall square-jawed man in his early fifties, his hair chestnut and touched with the purest silver at his temples.  Jillian knew men’s clothing from futile Christmas shopping for her father and instantly pegged his suit as hand-tailored, but she wasn’t sure if that was his taste or just necessity because of how big he was.

He had a calm and gravelly voice that was made for reassurance.  Jillian noticed his wedding ring and could only assume he made his own mate very happy.  “It’s nice to meet you, Jillian.  I’m sure Theo will be giving us all a recitation of your virtues soon enough.”

“I will,” Theo said, entirely unbothered by this.  His hand settled in the small of her back, intimate and just a little possessive, and it made an enticing shiver crawl up Jillian’s spine.

“It’s good to see you happy, you know?” Colby said.

Theo gave another one of those I’m-sure-you-don’t-mean-that laughs that Jillian was starting to think bugged his coworkers as much as they bugged her.

She said brightly, “You’ll have to tell me embarrassing stories about Theo.”

“No shortage of those,” Gretchen said.  “He was very adorable when he first got here.  He didn’t know how to use a vending machine.”

“I don’t think we have to tell the vending machine story,” Theo said.

“I like the vending machine story,” Martin said.  His smile made the corners of his eyes crinkle up.  “It makes you more approachable.”

“Theo is the only reason coins are still in circulation,” Colby said.  “It physically pains him to give up pocket change.  Vending machines haunt him, poor guy.  But like Martin says, a flaw or two brings the world’s perfect gentleman a little more down here with the rest of us.”

“I just thought you would tell her the Secret Santa story,” Theo said, shading his face with his hand.  Jillian could see the corner of his smile.  “Have mercy.”

“None,” Colby said.