Theo had never, ever told someone who didn’t know about shifters that he was a dragon. No human friends he had made between the all-dragon enclave of Riell and the almost all-shifter workplace of Sterling’s US Marshals Office had ever gotten close enough for him to want to give himself away. He didn’t know how to do this.
Impress her, his dragon suggested.
How am I supposed to impress her?
Dragons are impressive.
Theo eyed the size of the kitchen. He was lucky to be in a house with so much floor space. Most kitchens wouldn’t accommodate the sudden addition of a dragon.
He tallied up what remained of the cooking supplies he’d laid out. Could he risk that second batch, as promised, on further slapstick? He thought he could.
He speared one of the battered slices of bread with a fork. Then, thinking better of it, he instead impaled it on a skewer with a heat-resistant handle.
“I think you might be making French toast wrong,” Jillian said. “Just one woman’s opinion.”
He made sure he was turned well away from the curtains and, for that matter, well away from her. That made it easier as well as safer: he could only see her in his peripheral vision.
He said, “This is what I need to tell you.”
In a way, a shifter would have been more impressed, or at least more specifically impressed, than a human. Not many dragons, after all, could do what Theo did next.
Being able to control how he shifted had never been good for much besides party tricks, but he was grateful for it now. It would have been nice enough to be able to change slowly—just so she wasn’t suddenly confronted with a fifteen foot long dragon in her kitchen—but better still was that he could start the change from the inside out.
He inhaled deeply, feeling his body change imperceptibly below the surface. His breath grew hot inside his chest. He imagined banked coals stacked inside his throat. His body accommodated his imagination. Fire ran through his blood, flickered through his veins, burned in his heart.
He parted his lips and blew out a puff of coppery-green dragon flame.
It made for very unconventional French toast.
Jillian stood perfectly still. Then she said, “You can breathe fire.”
Theo slid back into full humanity. “I know it sounds ridiculous. But I’m a dragon. There are some people who are shifters, who can turn from humans into animals—”
“Werewolves.”
“Werewolves,” Theo said dismissively. “Werewolves get all the press. They don’t have any subtlety. —Please don’t tell Colby I said that. —And please ignore what I’m saying right now, because it’s completely irrelevant.”
“You’re a were-dragon.”
“We just say dragon.”
“So dragons,” Jillian said, “are real.”
She looked dazed, but that didn’t stop her from taking the skewer from his hand. She took a tentative bite of the French toast.
“This isn’t bad, do you know that? Are unicorns real?”
“I’ve never met a unicorn,” Theo said, determining that was the more important question. “Pegasi, though, winged horses, they’re real. My boss is a pegasus shifter. My office tends toward what you might call special hires, so no one has to make any difficult explanations. I mean, that’s why he’s a pegasus shifter and I’m a dragon. Well, no, that’s biology, properly, but... that’s why we’re both in the same office, not just by coincidence. Shifters don’t congregate in this area in unusually high numbers or anything like that. I’m sorry I keep rambling, I’ve never had to tell anyone before.”
“You’ve never had to tell anyone that you’re a dragon,” Jillian said.
“Never. Only you.”
“Can I see you?”
She wasn’t afraid of him?
She wasn’t afraid of him. She was a little stunned and she was certainly surprised, but she wasn’t running away. In fact, she was still eating the French toast, so he had successfully provided both truth and breakfast.