they could all tell themselves it was just a trick of the light, but in that second, every man in the circle knew he’d just seen something impossible. They backed way off him. The ferret dropped his shiv, and Cooper heard it clatter against the asphalt.
He was bleeding from multiple stab wounds, but he’d taken out six other guys, and he was the only one to come out of it smiling. Not too bad. Not too bad at all.
Thank God for books.
He made it halfway to the guards’ station before he collapsed.
2
Gretchen had a lot of nieces and nephews, and that meant her weekends were usually whirlwinds of birthday parties, recitals, and paintball games; anything to make the kids happy and give their harried parents a night off. But she had completely blocked off this Saturday night, and she didn’t feel even a trace of guilt about it.
Theo and Jillian were going to have a baby, and she was going to help them celebrate.
They were going to be spectacular parents. Jillian worked with troubled teens at the community center, and she already had a wealth of experience in dealing with every possible problem a kid could throw at her. And Theo? Theo not only had all the skills of a US Marshal and a dragon, he also had so much sweetness and genuine courtesy that his fugitives usually wound up apologizing to him for having ever run away in the first place. Any kid raised by Theo and Jillian was bound to grow up to be incredible: tough, kind, brilliant, and adorable.
She wondered if their child would be a dragon shifter.
Probably. Almost certainly. If not, though, she knew Theo would make sure the child still felt important and special.
It’ll help that the kid wouldn’t be growing up surrounded by dragons.
Theo had grown up in an all-dragon enclave, a secret, hidden village that few outsiders ever even knew existed. He had a few cousins he kept in touch with, but otherwise, he’d made it clear that he wanted his past to stay his past: a lot of his hometown consisted of snobby, arrogant people who thought that if you weren’t a dragon, you were nothing at all. Theo wouldn’t bring a non-shifter kid within a hundred miles of the village of Riell, not unless a lot of things changed.
Besides, either way, the kid would have a human mom—and a kickass one, at that.
There was no reason to think that this child would grow up feeling the way she had.
Once. A long time ago. I grew out of it, anyway.
She hugged Theo as he came up to her.
“People keep doing that,” Theo said, smiling.
“Any excuse to touch Gucci,” Gretchen said. All of Theo’s clothes were either designer or beautifully tailored, and he always looked like he’d just walked out of a cologne ad; Gretchen could never get over how soft all his jackets felt. “I was just thinking about how you’re going to be a great dad.”
“I hope so. I’ve never been so scared in my life.”
“You’re a dragon, and you’re scared of babies?”
“I’m not scared of them in general,” Theo said, with just a trace of draconian haughtiness. “I want this one, obviously. I just don’t ever want to be a disappointment.”
He was so sincere that it broke her heart a little. Gretchen decided to give his worries plenty of cushioning for right now and not remind him that all kids inevitably found their parents disappointing sometimes—terminally uncool and unbelievably unfair. Even a devoted idealist and a princely dragon shifter US Marshal couldn’t escape that trap.
“You’ll be great,” Gretchen said. “I’ll teach you everything I know about diapers, baby bottles, and crying kids.”
“Jillian’s been pumping Aria for advice for the last half hour,” Theo said. Aria was their teammate Colby’s mate, a vibrant, funny photographer with a nine-year-old daughter whose cuteness challenged Gretchen’s allegiance to her own nieces and nephews.
“Then between me and Aria, you two will have this down. And Tiffani will always be around to help out. She’s the best step-grandmother anybody could hope for.”
Then she noticed Theo had stopped listening to her. A look of barely-controlled horror had taken over his face.
“What is it? I’ve never seen you look like that before. You got the spider infestation out of the filing cabinet without looking like that. It’s not Tiffani, is it?”
“It’s Keith,” Theo said under his breath. “And don’t remind me of that filing cabinet. I saw things there I can never unsee.”