The Pegasus Marshal's Mate (U.S. Marshal Shifters Book 2) Read online

  The Pegasus Marshal's Mate

  Zoe Chant

  Published by Zoe Chant, 2019.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  THE PEGASUS MARSHAL'S MATE

  First edition. January 6, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 Zoe Chant.

  Written by Zoe Chant.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One: Tiffani

  Chapter Two: Martin

  Chapter Three: Tiffani

  Chapter Four: Martin

  Chapter Five: Tiffani

  Chapter Six: Martin

  Chapter Seven: Tiffani

  Chapter Eight: Tiffani

  Chapter Nine: Martin

  Chapter Ten: Tiffani

  Chapter Eleven: Martin

  Chapter Twelve: Martin

  Chapter Thirteen: Tiffani

  Chapter Fourteen: Tiffani

  Chapter Fifteen: Martin

  Chapter Sixteen: Tiffani

  Chapter Seventeen: Martin

  Chapter Eighteen: Tiffani

  Chapter Nineteen: Martin

  Chapter Twenty: Tiffani

  Epilogue: Tiffani

  A note from Zoe Chant

  More Paranormal Romance by Zoe Chant

  Chapter One: Tiffani

  Tiffani had lived for years with a rigorous and unforgiving beauty routine.

  Exercise: yoga, treadmill, swimming. Bicep curls, but never with enough weight for her to get any real muscle, just enough to keep her “tight,” as her now ex-husband Gordon had always said. Everything about her was always supposed to be tight and tucked in.

  She’d had hand lotion made partly with ground-up pearls. Regular facial peels and mud masks. If her skin didn’t always look flawlessly smooth and tight-pored, some “friend” would make sure to mention it over mimosas. Oh, Tiffani, you look so tired lately, are things okay with you and Gordon?

  Her hair had to be perfect, of course. Its natural light brown wasn’t good enough. She needed a tawny, lion-like gold that would set off the glowing undertones of her skin. And if her skin wasn’t glowing, well, whose fault was that? She should take more vitamin supplements. She should exfoliate. Had she tried a sugar scrub?

  And let’s not forget the makeup and the clothes.

  Her job, according to Gordon, was to make sure every man in the room wanted to get a look up her skirt. Her job was to be his arm candy. She hadn’t understood any of that when she’d married him at twenty-two and he had, with his usual business savvy, banked on her ignorance. She’d been a bubbly hair stylist still trying to pay her way through community college and she’d never met a man who threw away money so casually. When he started throwing it away on her, she fell hard and fast. Who could resist trips to the French Riviera? Candy-colored nights in Vegas hotels? Chanel gowns delivered to her door?

  He had never offered to pay her tuition, not even when they were married. College had vanished in the rearview mirror. He had never wanted her to get to know his daughter, Jillian. She was supposed to be fun. She was supposed to be sexy.

  In all her years of being married to Gordon Marcus, Tiffani had never once felt sexy. Her body had been an exhausting maintenance project kept up to someone else’s specifications. Even sex itself wasn’t sexy: it was just the end result of all those Brazilian waxes and all those exercises that kept her flexible.

  It had taken Gordon going to prison for a laundry list of white collar crimes to give Tiffani a second chance to know herself.

  It scared her shitless.

  What if there’s nothing about me worth knowing?

  But her stepdaughter Jillian had been characteristically firm in her stance that Tiffani had something to offer the world, and she’d been patient while Tiffani had struggled with how to rejoin it. In the end, it had been Jillian’s adorable boyfriend Theo, a US Marshal, who had pointed the way.

  “Court reporters are always in demand,” Theo had said. “And it’s significant, valuable work. Even when trials are dull, there’s always something at stake: someone’s life or safety or dignity. Record-keeping is always worthy of respect.”

  No one else talked like Theo, which was one of the reasons Tiffani was so fond of him. He’d been gentlemanly to her in a time when she’d thought there were no more gentlemen. And he was good for Jillian, who’d had a glow ever since they’d met, a glow that all the ground-up pearls in the world couldn’t have given her.

  “I don’t know how to use one of those machines,” Tiffani had said.

  She’d known from TV that court reporters used stenography machines that looked like the offspring of typewriters and plastic Fisher-Price xylophones: there were two short rows of blank keys. None of the keys seemed to have letters on them.

  Jillian had only shrugged. “If you want to do it, you’ll learn how.” Courage had never been Jillian’s problem.

  Tiffani had wanted to. What Theo had said appealed to her—she wanted to do work that mattered.

  One hastily-earned Associate’s Degree and one license later and here she was. Tiffani Marcus, former trophy wife and current court reporter for the city of Sterling.

  The not-so-funny part was that she had spent just as much time getting ready that morning as she ever had, only now she wasn’t trying to get anyone to look up her skirt. She just wanted to look serious. She had kept the tawny blonde hair—she’d grown to like it—but she had it tied tightly back. She ditched her contact lenses for tortoiseshell glasses. She wore only light makeup, finally wanting to look her age... well, wanting to look almost her age, anyway. She didn’t step on the bathroom scale.

  I’m not a project, Tiffani told herself. I’m a person.

  She walked into the courtroom with her head held high.

  She’d never been so happy to have no one turn to look at her. She made her way to her desk and sat down in front of the stenography machine. At this point it was an old friend. She patted it like it was a faithful dog, superstitiously asking it to be on her side and keep her from making any mistakes.

  She would need the help, too, because her boss, Milo, had saddled her with one of the biggest trials to ever hit the usually-sleepy Sterling. She suspected that he wanted to get rid of her. Theo had probably pulled a few strings at the courthouse to get her the job—she knew that being forty-plus and having hardly any work experience weren’t usually strong sell points even before you had to reveal that you had a white-collar criminal ex-husband—and Milo probably resented having his department interfered with. He had given her something he thought a rookie wouldn’t be able to handle.

  Tiffani was determined to prove that she could handle it just fine. She settled her fingers down lightly on the row of keys and waited for the trial to start.

  Court reporters technically typed out sounds instead of words. The left side of Tiffani’s keyboard was for the first sound in a word and the right side was for the last sound. The vowels lurked down at the bottom.

  The design of the machine was intimidating enough that court reporters had guaranteed job security. Too many people looked at the thing and then ran away. Tiffani was glad she hadn’t.

  She had a tingling feeling in her spine. It took her a moment to realize that, for the first time in years, she was actually excited. Scared, sure, but also happy.

  “All rise!” the bailiff thundered.

  Tiffani stood along with everyone else as the judge entered the courtroom.

  The other court reporters had been nice enough to give her a crash course in the judges she’d be dealing with
. Judge Terrence McMillan was nobody’s favorite. He had a stern face, sour eyes, and a mouth that looked like it had never smiled. Water cooler gossip knew him for his habit of handing out unfairly harsh sentences to juvenile offenders, supposedly out of a staunch and starchy morality.

  More likely, Tiffani thought, he did it because he was a jackass.

  He already looked like he disapproved of everyone in the room, and the man on trial hadn’t even entered yet. That would happen in just a moment, though.

  The crime of the century, the local news said, apparently unconcerned that, only eighteen years into the century, this might be a little premature.

  Two business partners had argued over whether or not to take their profitable tech company public. The quarrel had ended—allegedly—with one of them killing the other. That would have already been enough for a decent scandal, but it was really the poorly-handled body disposal that had attracted all the attention. Anything with dismemberment was always going to get people interested.

  High emotions, media uproar, a courtroom full of camera flashes, a bad-tempered judge, and a lack of experience—all of it spelled disaster for Tiffani if she didn’t keep a cool head. And yet, even knowing all that, she was still thrilled to be there. She was doing something important. She had a handle on her work. She’d already nicknamed her steno machine: she and Felix would do great things together.

  She sat down, the defendant came in, and people started talking.

  Tiffani’s fingers, racing over her keyboard, got every word.

  She loved settling into this kind of groove. She felt like a wire that electricity was flowing through.

  It was only when Judge McMillan called a brief recess that she felt the real world start to come back to her. Her fingers were already a little stiff. Her butt and back wished for a more comfortable chair. Her mouth was dry.

  Still, she was proud of the work she’d done. Or at least she was proud of it until McMillan called her into his chambers. At first, she naively thought he’d want her to take notes on something, so she brought a steno pad along. He put an end to that assumption pretty quickly.

  “Do you realize,” he said in his thin, wheezy voice, “that this may be the most important trial of my career? I’m sure you don’t. Obviously Milo Stanislavski doesn’t, or he wouldn’t have sent you.”

  Tiffani tried to keep the confidence that she’d had in the courtroom. He’s a bastard, she reminded herself. Everybody knows that. Everyone who’s ever worked with him hated him.

  She kept her voice steady. “Your Honor, I’m well-aware of the trial’s significance.”

  “Then you’re well-aware that it needs a court reporter who knows what he—or she—is doing. Not one I’ve never seen before. Not one who will complain about breaking a nail on the steno machine.”

  If she were a different kind of woman, there would be a few things she could say to that. The first was that if he hadn’t seen her before, maybe he was the one who didn’t know what he was talking about, because certainly her picture—in a bikini, no less—had been splattered all over the news during her ex-husband’s trial. The second was that it was pretty hard to break a nail on a steno machine. The third was that she’d specifically trimmed her damn nails so they’d be more convenient for the job and so he clearly hadn’t even looked at them.

  He clearly didn’t see her at all.

  But instead of saying any of that, she just felt a heavy lump in her throat. She wouldn’t get anywhere by making a scene. She knew she shouldn’t care what he thought of her.

  She could just feel the morning’s happiness draining away from her, like McMillan had sucked it out with a straw.

  So much for her fresh new start.

  “You’re welcome to review this morning’s pages for mistakes,” she said. “If my work isn’t up to your standards, you can talk to Milo. But I’m doing a good job, Your Honor.”

  “Well.” He sniffed. “I’ll give you until the end of the day. But I will be looking at those pages.”

  He should be looking at those pages anyway. Reviewing the case was a critical part of his job. It was a lackluster threat from a lackluster person.

  She just wished it didn’t make her feel so small.

  McMillan checked his watch. “You’re dismissed, Ms. Marcus.”

  Like she was a schoolgirl in the principal’s office.

  She was walking back into the courtroom, her head down, when the alarms went off.

  Chapter Two: Martin

  Martin usually had trouble sleeping. Ever since his wife, Lisa, had died, the nights had felt long, and the easiest way to get through them was to work. Since US Marshals always had plenty to do, and his team dealt with shifter-related crime on top of that, he could keep busy enough to stay awake. He was usually the first one into the office on the second floor of Sterling’s courthouse.

  That morning, though, his second-in-command, Gretchen, beat him to it.

  “Coffee is on and donuts are out,” she said. There was a quality in her voice Martin could only describe as tense cheerfulness. “Happy Trial of the Century.”

  He’d forgotten that started today, which said more about his sleep-deprived state than any amount of yawning ever could have.

  You’d sleep better with someone next to you, his pegasus suggested.

  Martin ignored it.

  “Who’s calling it that? Do they know how many years are left in the century?”

  “Seven out of ten news shows, and I don’t think they care much. Do you want someone down there?”

  He considered the donut choices at the same time as he considered the question. Applesauce cake for the donut, he decided, and Colby for security.

  “Colby, I think. Theo has a conflict of interest since Jillian’s stepmother’s down there, and you’re friendly with her, too. I don’t want anyone distracted.”

  Besides, wolves were natural sentinels, used to stealthily monitoring their prey from a distance. When Colby stood in the corner of a room, he had a way of melting into the woodwork—except for his eyes, which were always too uncannily attentive to go unnoticed. That was what they wanted: a little fear might discourage a lot of trouble.

  As soon as he arrived, Colby accepted the assignment with relish, speared two donuts on his fingers, and went downstairs to the courtroom. Everyone would be suitably unnerved by a six-foot-four US Marshal gunslinger with powdered sugar all down his shirt. Gretchen tucked herself up with coffee, cream-filled donuts, and Google Maps to try to pinpoint a fugitive’s possible whereabouts. Theo delved into spreadsheets of financial data to track down missing money, so involved in following the gold that he missed the dab of strawberry jam on his chin.

  Our herd, his pegasus said. For once, the animal sounded content.

  It may have had endless opinions on his romantic life—or lack thereof—but it knew a good team as well as he did.

  Martin settled in for the morning’s work. As Chief Deputy US Marshal, he no longer spent much time in the field. That chafed at him sometimes. He missed the chance to stretch his wings. But the house had felt so empty with Lisa gone that it was good to have a place to go that actually felt like home.

  Even if that home came with an overflowing inbox and the headache of securing a courtroom during a trial destined for some kind of disruption. Martin hoped all they would be faced with was an overeager reporter with no off button.

  Despite the amount of press the case had been getting, it was a straightforward murder being pursued in an honest, straightforward manner. He could imagine an eventual uproar on the day of the verdict—whichever way the verdict went—but not before then. And he trusted Colby to keep an eye on things.

  Then, just as he was pressing send on an email, the fire alarm went off.

  No, he realized immediately, not the fire alarm. The sound was different. The regular fire alarm was a steady blatt-blatt-blatt. This was a low series of whoops. A civilian wouldn’t know the difference, but he and his team did.

 
Code black. Bomb threat.

  A bomb threat meant panicky civilians, increased media attention, and sudden demands for over-the-top security precautions. This had better be the trial of the century, because he certainly didn’t want to have to go through it more than once.

  He ushered his people out. It felt unnervingly like leading some kind of kindergarten fire drill: “No, leave the donuts. Theo, yes, you have to go too, I don’t care what you’re in the middle of. Yes, I know you’re a dragon, you’re still not entirely fire-proof, you still have to go.”

  He found Colby outside easily enough and ignored the little twist of gratitude in his chest about that. Intellectually, he knew the odds were ten to one against there actually being a bomb: it was a hell of a lot easier to make a phone call than it was to put together powerful explosives and get them into a highly-secured courthouse. All the same, he felt better with his herd in plain sight and safely out of the danger zone.

  He had seen worse evacuations. Looking around the crowd, he saw a few of the cuts and bruises that came with any hasty, large-scale movement of frightened people, but there was no one with a broken hand or a boot print on their scalp. A bailiff was giving out Band-Aids. Everything was under control.

  Except, he suddenly noticed, for Theo, who was right next to him.

  Theo had been on the wrong side of an actual bombing before, and not long ago: he had been with his mate, Jillian, and had shifted to his dragon form at lightning speed to shield her from the blast with his wings. Theo knew as well as he did that this was just a warning—and a warning of an event that was unlikely to happen—but that couldn’t stop the bad memories.

  And no matter how calm Theo kept his expression, he couldn’t hide how pale his face had gone. His dragonmarks usually weren’t visible through his shirt, but now they were lit up with stress. Parts of him were glowing like a night-light.

  He needs something to do, his pegasus said.

  Wise words for once.

  Martin said, “Theo, can you start going group-to-group and calming people down as much as you can? They’ll be a little shaken up, so go easy.”