Someone finally thawed the ice prince.

That was what Colby had said to Jillian, punching Theo’s arm with a more open friendliness than he’d ever shown before.  Theo could see why.  All that polished perfection he’d always aimed for—it had kept a distance between him and his team.  He knew how they could see through all that gem-cut armor now.  Jillian.  They could see the best parts of him shining clearly out of her.

He’d gone to show her the closest thing he had to a home, and she’d brought him even closer to it.

Before they could even reach the car, he wrapped his arms around her.  She responded instantaneously, stepping further into his embrace and rising up on her toes to kiss him.

“I want to take you to dinner.”

“It’s four in the afternoon.”

“I want to take you to a very late lunch.”

He felt her smile against his mouth.  “What if I just want you to take me to bed?”

“I’ve seen television,” Theo said stubbornly.  “Courtship involves dinner.  I know our relationships is unconventional  by human standards, but I want you to have every moment you could ever expect.”

“And some I couldn’t, if this conversation is any indication.”  She leaned more fully against him, her soft, warm body flattening against him, her generous hips tantalizingly close to his cock.  “Do you know what dating has that we don’t have?”

Theo tried to think, which wasn’t a simple process with Jillian stretched out next to him, her fingers brushing idly through the fine hairs on the back of his neck.  Heart-shaped boxes of Valentine’s Day chocolates.  Engagement rings in crème brûlée.  Dubiously comedic misunderstandings.  He thought he could remember hearing something that might be relevant.

“A Facebook status?”

Her body shook, her laughter reverberating against his chest.  “Uncertainty.”

“I’ve never been surer of anything in my life.”

“Neither have I,” Jillian said, now looking up to meet his eyes.  She radiated seriousness: this was the look of a woman who convinced stingy city councils to cough up amenities for the poor in their district.  She would not be a dragon’s mate if she could be opposed lightly.  “I like that this isn’t exactly normal dating.  I like knowing that, unlike my dad, I’m not going to cycle through attraction and flattery and flirtation and then have to start all over again.  There’s nothing you have to do to impress me.”

“I’m beginning to believe people really do think that.”

“Your friends?”

He had always thought of them as his coworkers, his colleagues.  “Yes,” he said, and then said the word just to try it out.  “My friends.”  It felt true.  “Does this mean you don’t want dinner?”

“No, I’m actually pretty hungry.  I just don’t want you to think I have some imaginary checklist where you have to be careful to hit every box.”

Theo mimed crumpling up and tossing a piece of paper.  “No checklist.”

“Then you may take me to evening brunch.”

#

*

#

Jillian lit up when she saw the variety of the menu.  “I didn’t know it was possible to get all this on the same continent, let alone in the same diner.  Can you even really call it a diner if there’s sashimi?  What’s good?”

“Everything,” Theo said honestly.

She hadn’t blinked at the teal Formica tables, the laminated menus spattered with apparently permanent barbecue sauce fingerprints, or the funereal hush that hung over the place, but now his tone seemed to catch her attention.  She looked up, holding her finger in place over a possible order—a shrimp and rice stew, Theo noted, committing it to memory so he could later learn how to make it for her—and suspicion dawned in her eyes.

“Theo, why are we the only people in this diner that has great food in a thousand different varieties?”

“It is an off hour.  You said as much yourself.  Although I should warn you—”

But he’d waited too long, because Magda herself had surfaced.  Tall, gaunt, and bony, she moved in huge, swift lurches.  She would seem halfway across the room and then, in the blink of an eye, be looming over the table, her order pad in hand.  Colby swore that whatever Magda wrote on the pad—her cramped, blocky handwriting was unreadable to anyone else—it had nothing to do with anyone’s order.  Theo considered this plausible, since Magda often started writing before anyone even spoke and never looked down at her paper.  It was like she was taking dictation from an unseen source.

Still, Theo was fond of her.  She had made him his first cheeseburger.

And there was a reason—there was one more than one reason, even—her diner had become the go-to spot for shifters who needed to decompress.

“Hello, Magda,” he said.  “This is Jillian Marcus.”

Magda’s gray glass eyes drifted halfway to Jillian before she resumed staring at the ornamental flowers at the opposite end of the table.  “Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, I guess.  I read that in a Hallmark card.”

“I feel that’s in questionable taste for a greeting card,” Theo said.

Magda shrugged.  “There’s no emotion they won’t sell for a dollar.  She knows.”  She continued to write illegible words on her pad of paper.  “You’re not the selling kind, though, if the news was right, which it never is.  You’re the white sheep daughter, aren’t you?”

She will upset our mate, Theo’s dragon said, sparks flying out from his nostrils.  She goes too far.  Her darkness shouldn’t encroach on our mate’s light.

But Jillian just said, “I always felt like black sheep got an unfairly bad rap.  What’s wrong with black wool?  That’s a tasteful coat right there.  White gets dirty too easily.  Maybe my dad’s the white sheep and I’m the black one.”

“Well, we all get slaughtered in the end,” Magda said.  “That’s what happens either way.”

“I should think I’d get shorn before I got slaughtered,” Jillian said.  “It’s more useful.  And if your point is that we’re all going to die anyway, I’d just as soon give the world a few more winter coats than it had before I came in.”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” Magda said.  It was maybe the biggest concession to a half-full glass that Theo had ever heard her make.

That made sense, though.  Magda seemed to live every day with a storm cloud of imminent death and disaster following her around, but despite all that, she still learned her recipes, ran her diner, and made the best food Theo had ever tasted.  She let the world have the wool.

This metaphor, Theo thought, was going to get loused up by the fact that there was both mutton and lamb on Magda’s menu, and after all these analogies, it felt cannibalistic to even consider it.

“What do you want thrown together?” Magda said.  “You’re here at a funny time.”

“It’s evening brunch,” Jillian said.

She ordered the shrimp and rice stew, Theo ordered ropa vieja, and Magda informed them that both dishes would be no good, that the shrimp was off and the ropa tasted like the old clothes that it was named for, and then she brought them a breadbasket and immense tumblers of iced tea before disappearing into the kitchen.

“Why did she wait on us herself?” Jillian said, looking intently at the kitchen doors that were still swinging in their frame.

“That’s your first question?”

“I could ask you about her being strange, but I’ve seen that she’s strange.  And she’s giving my teenaged self a run for the award for most existential angst.  But none of that explains why she’s doing double-duty as a waitress.”

“Magda is...”  How should he put this?  “Magda’s a friend of the family, like Gretchen.  She’s shifter-adjacent, she comes from a mythic bloodline.  She can’t transform—or if she can, she considers it a waste of time—but she can recognize us when we show up.”

“So you get the VIP treatment,” Jillian said, grinning.  “It’s like you’re royalty.”

“We try to be loyal to each other,” Theo said.  There had been a time when it had sounded strange to him to say “we” and mean all shifters, not just dragons, but those days were gone now.  “Shifters can get into some complicated trouble from time to time.  If we don’t help each other out where we can, no one else will.  It’s a bond.”

“I bet you never get speeding tickets from shifter traffic cops.”

“I have never gotten a speeding ticket at all,” Theo assured her.  “You’re perfectly safe with me.  But what I’d really like to do is take you flying.”

Jillian sat up straighter.  “You can do that?”

“It would be my honor to show you the skies.”

In fact, a part of his mind found it almost impossible to turn away from the thought of bearing her aloft into a night radiant with starlight.  He’d never taken a rider.  In the valley, where dragons mated only with other dragons, to even offer to do it would have been an insult and an implication that the other dragon was incapable of flying themselves.  But his heart responded instantly to the idea of giving Jillian flight.  Like the mate-bond, it was something he’d never thought he would have and something he was now finding a biological necessity.  He decided to do it as soon as possible.  Tonight, even.

Their food came.  Theo’s ropa vieja was as delicious as always, the beef falling even further apart at the slightest touch of his fork, the rich sauce soaking into the rice and running over to the fried plantains.  He was used to a hush coming over the table when Magda’s food arrived, and Jillian did not disappoint him.  She looked—his dragon was a little insulted by this—almost like she had when he’d pleasured her, with her lips widened in exactly the same way.  The delight on her face was a fraction less, which helped his ego somewhat.

“This is divine,” Jillian said.

Magda shrugged.  “Just slopped something into a bowl.  Like I said, the shrimp’s going bad.  You’ll probably get sick,” she said with grim confidence, and stomped off back to the kitchen.

“So the food’s great,” Jillian said, sotto voce, “but it’s the charming, hospitable atmosphere that keeps you coming back.”

“She grows on you.”

“With food like this, she’s climbing all over me like ivy.  She can be as doom-and-gloom as she wants.”  She stirred her stew, her beautiful face now thoughtful.  “Do you think it’s true, what she said?  The Tennyson quote, I mean, that it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.  Not if the shrimp has gone bad.”

“I don’t know.  I can’t conceive of losing you.  Even saying the words burns my tongue.”  That was an old draconic expression, meaning that the pain was so great that it burned what could not be burned.  “When I didn’t know you, I didn’t pine for you, because I had never expected I would find a mate.  But now that I know you, now that I know how honorable and strong you are, now that I know the color of your eyes, I... I suppose I do think it’s better.  Knowing you at all is the best good fortune I could ever hope for.  Every hour I spend with you is another gift.  If that were ever to go, it would destroy me, but it would still have been such a gift to have you, even for a little while.”

She reached across the table and laced her fingers with his.  He loved the slight coolness of her touch against his own hotter skin: it made her feel like she was shaped from the softest, most touchable marble.

“I feel the same way.  I wouldn’t trade this time away for anything.”  Laughter lines appeared on either side of her mouth as she struggled to hold back a smile.  “I’m saying ‘this time’ because if I have to think about the fact that I’ve only known you for a day, I’ll go crazy.  I’m glad you’re a dragon with magical true love-finding powers, because otherwise I would be coming on so strong and moving so fast that you’d never want to see me again.”

“Only a fool would never want to see you again.”

“Then do you mind if I step on the gas just a little bit more?”

Theo tried to remember the exact car terminology and was proud of himself for succeeding.  “I don’t even want a seatbelt.”

“As bad as he was—is—for the rest of the world, I love my dad,” Jillian said.  “I don’t wish I’d never loved him and I don’t want to lose him, but I want to put him behind me.  When I think about my life, I don’t want to think about him in it.  When I think about my family, I want to think about you and Tiffani.  But I’d like to say goodbye.”  She shrugged.  “Of course, I don’t know where he is, so...”

We would rend him limb from limb if we ever saw him, his dragon said, tongue flicking in and out as if scenting the air for the faintest trace of Gordon Marcus.  So it is just as well.  We would not hurt our mate, but we would hurt those who have hurt her.

It’s an unsolvable dilemma, Theo said.

His dragon looked at him with his cat-yellow eyes with their slit pupils, unimpressed by him putting a name to what they were both thinking.

“I will do whatever I can to help you make peace with your memories,” Theo said.

“Could we go back to the house?  Just for an hour or so.”

“Of course.  But... I’m sorry, but a lot will be packed up by now, even what you and Tiffani are keeping—since you’ve already said you’re moving, the procedure is to ship it to you.”  And he knew Gretchen was finishing up the last of that now.  Martin had discreetly cleared them to use her name on all the paperwork so there wouldn’t be any awkward questions about Theo’s involvement with Jillian.  “There won’t be much to look at.”

“I’ll make do.  I have a good imagination.”

And with half the furniture shrouded in white sheets, Theo thought, she would have plenty of help in bringing her ghosts back to life.  He decided to postpone their flying until tomorrow.  Jillian must have known a little of what he was thinking, because she slid her foot against his underneath the table.

“Out with the old life,” she said, “and in with the new.  That’s what I meant about pushing down on the gas.  I want to say goodbye to the past so I can start building a future with you, if that’s what you want.”

“More than anything I’ve ever wanted before.”

Jillian leaned forward and kissed him.  He hated to be juvenile, but he could see directly down her shirt.  The exposed, creamy skin of her breasts only deepened his desire.  It provoked him to kiss her more and more thoroughly, until suddenly she was on the same side of the table, her thighs half-draped over his lap.

Then a spray of cold mist broke across him.  A drenching was alarming at the best of times, but even more so for a dragon.  Theo blinked water out of his eyelashes in confusion.

“New mates,” Magda said, putting down the plant-sprayer and shaking her head.  “Incorrigible.  No respect for public decency.”

He supposed she had a point.  Judging by the dark pink Jillian had flushed, he thought she thought so too.

“Your pardon, Magda,” Theo said.  “We were carried away.”

“Go carry yourselves away somewhere else,” Magda said.  “Why I got into this business I’m sure I don’t know.  Shifters here, shifters there, shedding all over the floor, leaving claw-marks, defiling the booths.  This is a family restaurant.”

“We really are sorry,” Jillian said.

“I guess it’s nice to see he has blood in his veins,” Magda said.

Theo blinked again, but not because of the water.  “Are you congratulating me?”

“Get out of here,” Magda said.  “Or I’ll congratulate my foot all the way up your ass, Theo St. Vincent.”  But her mouth was curved in what might, on another person, have been a smile.

Jillian wasn’t the only one who needed to embrace her present.  Theo thought he was only just now realizing that he had one at all.  His life was woven through with people who cared about him, people who hadn’t been able to show that as long as his perfectly-maintained walls of ice were up.  Unnatural for a dragon to hide himself from warmth.  He would do his best not to make that same mistake again.

He took Magda’s hand in his and lowered his lips to it, giving her the traditional hand-kiss dragons bestowed upon a respected female relative.

She recognized the gesture, of course.  There was nothing in shifter lore Magda didn’t know, no matter how obscure or insular the shifter type.  She cleared her throat and, to his surprise, said in Old Draconic, “You have given me a jewel, and I thank you.”

“A gift to you is a gift to myself,” Theo said.

Magda snorted.  “Listen to that hick accent of yours,” she said.  “You’ll never get anywhere sounding like that.”

*

“Will you teach me that language?” Jillian said.

It was the first time she had spoken without being spoken to since they had gotten back to the car, and Theo was overwhelmingly glad that she was talking freely again.  And looking at him now, too, whereas before her gaze had been out the window as the mansions ticked by, gradually growing grander and grander as they approached her childhood home.

“What Magda spoke in?  Old Draconic?”

She nodded.  “Is there New Draconic?”

“It’s Old Draconic, then Latin, and then the usual split—English, Spanish, Mandarin...  If I had to guess, I wouldn’t think you wanted to talk about linguistics.”  He pulled into the long, curved driveway that led up to the Marcus house.  It was a slide going down to the inevitable.  He parked, but it didn’t feel like it stopped whatever was happening.  His dragon was coiled and watchful, muscles tensed, eyes watchful.

Our mate is troubled.

We’ll resolve this and then move on, Theo said.  Out with the old and in with the new.

Out loud, he said, “We don’t have to do this, you know.”

“I already made you drive here.”

“You didn’t make me drive you anywhere.  I would—”

“What if I’m like my dad?”

It had gotten darker on their drive, the evening ushering in a gray and lavender twilight heavy with clouds, not dragon weather at all.  The sky and the dome light of the car turned Jillian’s face into a succession of shadows.

He could say that she was nothing like her father.  He believed that to be the truth.  Gordon Marcus, dazzled by easily-obtained wealth, greedy for more, had never known what real treasure was; his hoard was massive but accumulated by price tag and not by taste.  The finest, most impressive piece he’d owned had been the handmade lace, and from where it had wound up, Theo was sure he had gotten it by accident and hadn’t known its value.  Jillian saw the real worth of things.  Dragons collected what was good and fine, but it was people like his mate who made and protected that finery, people like his mate who kept the world a place where beauty could occur.  He believed in her goodness absolutely.

But that same goodness was what brought her to worry about whether or not it was there, so there was no arguing with it.  And Jillian was practical.  She would prefer a solution to reassurance.

Theo said, “Do you remember the color of my scales?”

“No,” Jillian said.  “I’ve completely forgotten what the only dragon I’ve ever seen looked like.”

“I don’t know.  Maybe your mind was still fogged with lust.”

“Around you, that’s a given.”

His dragon preened—dammit, he preened too.  He wasn’t adverse to pride.  But there was more serious business at hand.

“Everyone in my valley has the same colors.  Different patterns, different markings, but always red and gold, over and over again throughout the generations.  The story is that it’s because all our wealth, all our gold, once came from blood, in one way or another, from theft or murder or war.  In our shame, we were marked for it.  Now we try as hard as we can to live honorably, with our colors as living reminders of what happens when you prize your hoard above your heart.”

“I can’t ever see you doing that.”

“I hope I wouldn’t.  But, because I think of it sometimes, I may try harder to live well.”  He cleared his throat.  “I do know that people, and dragons more than other people, do terrible things for gold.  And I know that I love gold.”  He traced her collarbone with one finger and watched her shiver.  Her skin was like warm silk.  “So I remember that that could get me into trouble.  Do you want something to help you remember?  I don’t think you need it.”

Her smile made her face more visible, the starlight reflecting off her teeth.  He even thought her teeth were cute.  It was no surprise that Magda had sprayed them.  “What if I want you to paint me red and gold?”

A spring seemed to tighten inside him.  Yes, please.  He imagined drawing his finger, the pad of it wet and the color of raspberries, of rubies, across her breasts.  Imagined circling her nipples, teasing her with the warmth of his hand close but never quite touching where her flesh pebbled up.  He would put gold dust in her navel.  He couldn’t wait to adorn her with the best of his hoard, to gild her wrists with heavy golden bracelets and her throat with emeralds that would sparkle darkly near her lush hair.

“I’ve distracted you,” Jillian said.  She didn’t sound upset about it all.

He could not take her to bed in his car in the driveway of her father’s house, and all the beds inside would have been dismantled by now.  But he felt that he had to have something—and that, moreover, he had to give her something.

But she was far ahead of him.  She unbuckled her seatbelt and slipped out into the cool night, whispering to him, “Inside.”

Who cared about dismantled beds?  They had floors.  They had walls.  Any flat surface would do when they were in this kind of mood.  He hurried out to join her.

Jillian gave a short, cut off scream, and Theo darted in front of her, his gun already drawn.  Seeing what had made her cry out was not as reassuring as it could have been.

The nutcrackers were once again lined up in battalions, their maniacal chompy grins frozen in their knowing little laughs.  Theo hated them almost as much as his dragon did.

“Gretchen,” he growled.  “I’m sorry.  It’s her idea of a joke.  I know these were all marked to be packed up—and maybe burned.”

“I think they packed and unpacked them,” Jillian said.  She nudged a torn-open cardboard box with her foot.  “So I’ll say this for her, she really committed.  A lot of people would have given up once they encountered that much packing tape.”

“It scared you.”  And me.  He pulled out of his phone.  “I’ll text her.  This isn’t acceptable.  What if you’d been alone?  What if you’d jumped back and tripped and hurt yourself?”

“I’m not in a Three Stooges sketch,” Jillian protested.

“What if Tiffani had come in and had a heart attack?”

“Tiffani’s only forty-three, for one thing, and she’s in better shape than I am... and you’ve already texted.  I like Gretchen, please don’t make her hate me.”

He obediently sent a follow-up text that said, Jillian thinks it was funny, though.

Jillian relieved him of his phone and slid it back into his pocket, using the same gesture to push herself up on her toes and kiss him.  Her mouth tasted as sweet as honey.

“Upstairs,” she said.  “I’ll pick something out from my old bedroom.  I’m sure there’ll be some embarrassing Backstreet Boys jpeg print-out in a treasure box or something equally nineties that will work as a token, something nobody has packed yet.  I’ll take that and then you can seize my assets again.  If the combined impact of my teenaged possessions hasn’t driven you away.”

“Remember,” Theo said, “I was home-schooled in a family commune with a superiority complex.  There is nothing you could turn up that would be more embarrassing than that.”

“You say that now.”

She opened the bedroom door.  To Theo’s relief, there actually were still a few lingering items that had yet to be packed: a beribboned bulletin board on the wall, a couple of stacked picture frames painted in streaky colors, some kind of vase filled with colored sand.

Whatever it was Jillian saw first seemed to dismay her, because she groaned and said, “Just stand in the middle of the room with your eyes closed and try not to form any unfavorable judgments.  Remember, I’m your mate and you’re stuck with me.”

He did close his eyes, because he liked the feeling of her moving around him in the dark like a firefly, liked listening to her pick things up and put them down.  Sometimes she would drift by him and her hair would tickle his nose.  Sometimes she would skim her hand across his back, making him shiver.

His phone buzzed.

He slid it out of his pocket.  “Can I look at the text or do you want to read it to me?”

Jillian pressed her lips against his again.  “I’ll tell you who it is and then you can tell me if it’s confidential,” she said.  She turned the phone over in his hand.  “Gretchen.”

Theo snorted.  “Here, I’ll unlock it.”  He pressed his thumb against the screen.  “Okay, read.  I can’t want to hear her rationale for the great nutcracker caper.”

Jillian read: “‘I didn’t unpack any of the nutcrackers, so I can’t take credit for that.  The guys must have just not gotten around to it.’  They didn’t get around to that but they got around to everything else?  They must have been tripping over them the whole time—no, but they were unpacked, remember?  Is she still kidding?”

Theo opened his eyes.  In his mind, his dragon’s wings rustled.

“No,” he said slowly.  “She wouldn’t do that, she knows when to stop.  And it wouldn’t make any sense as a joke from anyone else.  I think we need to get out of—”

Then the room around them erupted into sound and fire.