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

  It was something more than pleasure. It was pure ecstasy.

  What would it have been like if they had come here during this place’s heyday, back when it was a real drive-in and not just a teenage make out spot?

  More cars would have been around. People would have been able to see their windows steam up. The rolling, flickering colors of the movie would have made shadows and rainbows on her back and on Martin’s face as she looked down at him.

  She touched his lips. He was so... hers. In every possible way, he was hers.

  He was what she had imagined a man should be long before she had grown realistic, let alone disillusioned. But he wasn’t too good to be true, not with how real and solid he was underneath her and inside of her.

  She moved too suddenly and her hip knocked against the seatbelt clasp.

  “Ow!”

  Martin shot up, inadvertently pushing the steering wheel into the small of her back yet again.

  “What is it? Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.” She rubbed her hip. “I just hit part of the seatbelt.” She decided to skip the also ouch-worthy collision he’d caused himself. “There’s just not a lot of room.”

  “If I’d known I was going to meet you, I would have shelled out for a personal limousine,” Martin said with breathtaking, ridiculous sincerity. “Just for a sprawling backseat. Should we move into the backseat, is that how this works?”

  “This was the position I’d been thinking about,” Tiffani said doubtfully. “But I’ve never done this before either.”

  “Movies had me convinced this would be more practical.”

  She laughed and then had an idea. “Here, I know what we could do.”

  She climbed back into the passenger seat—which of course meant that she had to lift herself up off of him.

  “I don’t like this plan,” Martin said.

  She grinned. “You’ll like it soon enough. Promise.”

  She scooped her panties up and slipped them back on.

  “Now I really don’t like this plan.”

  “Give it time,” Tiffani said. “And I’m leaving the skirt off, at least.”

  She turned sideways and bent down, her mouth just an inch from his cock. She removed the condom and let out a warm breath against his sensitive skin before she took him in her mouth.

  She’d been expecting some kind of follow-up about him starting to come around on the plan, but she got nothing but groans of pleasure. She had made him inarticulate.

  She was probably entitled to a little smugness about that.

  Tiffani had always been neutral on blowjobs, neither enjoying them nor resenting them. They were just something you did, usually while keeping your fingers crossed the guy would want to do you the same favor. But this? She couldn’t get enough of it.

  It had been incredible to lose herself right along with Martin, both of them abandoned to the same pleasure, but she loved this just as much. She loved knowing with hot, passionate certainty that she was making him come apart at the seams. She could tease. She could fulfill every fantasy. Take away every worry he had.

  Not bad. Not bad at all.

  And Martin did reciprocate, of course—he was nothing if not a perfect gentleman—which let them make use of the backseat after all.

  Tiffani lay back, her legs over his shoulders, and bit down on the back of her hand to try to keep herself from getting too loud as her perfect match’s perfect mouth made her unravel completely.

  Chapter Seventeen: Martin

  Shifters had superhuman stamina. Pegasi, Martin could brag, had even more than most: the strength and determination that it took to keep a fully-grown horse up in the air was no joke.

  So he understood why he continued to function after two days of avid, enthusiastic sex, lots of stress, and very little sleep.

  He had no idea what Tiffani’s secret was.

  “Coffee,” she replied.

  The toaster chimed and she pulled the frozen waffles out of it and dumped them on a plate.

  She continued, “Coffee to wake me up, ice water and a cold shower to shock the system, and sugar to make life bearable. Witness the truly appalling amount of maple syrup I’m going to put on these.”

  “I could have made you waffles.”

  “Only if I’d had the ingredients for batter around here, which I unfortunately don’t.” She leaned across the kitchen bar and kissed the top of his head.

  After last night’s upheavals and intimacy, Martin had tried to guard his heart against the strong possibility that another night sleeping in his arms might bring Tiffani some panicky second thoughts.

  After all, she had originally wanted them to take their time. He already felt like he’d known her forever, but if he forced himself to be technical, not that many hours had passed.

  But now a kind of surety radiated from Tiffani’s every move. And that kiss had a coziness and familiarity that he loved just as much as all their whirlwind passion.

  “I can make you breakfast, though,” she said, interrupting his reverie. “You’re not the only one who can be romantic, you know.”

  “I never thought that,” he protested. “I just wanted to court you.”

  “Consider me officially courted. Now I want to dazzle you.”

  She had done that from the start.

  “I’ll just have to find a way to dazzle you with the very limited supplies in my kitchen and my very limited cooking talents. Let’s see—I pour a mean bowl of cereal and I can stick frozen waffles in a toaster like nobody’s business. As you saw. I’m also very good at handing people bananas.”

  “A triple-threat.”

  “In fact, if so moved, I’ve even been known to summon the skills necessary to slice one of those bananas into a bowl of cereal.”

  “That sounds incredible.”

  She took a bowl of cereal down from the cupboard. “Please hold your applause until the end.”

  Maybe it was just being in love, but he thought that the crunch of the cereal and the soft sweetness of the banana really did come together into something special. It made him feel like he was in a commercial for a balanced breakfast.

  A very romantic balanced breakfast.

  Tiffani sat down next to him and cut into her waffles. “So did you decide what to do about McMillan? I seem to recall distracting you.”

  “There was nothing I’d rather think about.”

  He kissed her, his lips still cold from the milk in the cereal against hers still hot from the heated syrup. Everything tasted sugary and perfect.

  “Besides,” he went on, “I don’t know that any amount of thinking would have gotten me anywhere. We don’t have anything solid. There’s just that niggling little suspicion that something isn’t quite right.”

  “I doubt he’ll be willing to listen to that,” Tiffani said with regret. “Not when he’s so eager to keep this all moving forward.”

  She speared another bite of waffle with her fork but stopped with it only halfway to her mouth.

  “Wait, he really is desperate to keep it all moving forward. What if all of this is about him?”

  “To sabotage his career?”

  “Or even just to mess with him, like you said last night. He’s not the most likable guy in the world.”

  “You’ve got that right. He’s the kind of man who makes enemies wherever he goes.”

  If that was all this was, he would almost have been tempted to let it go.

  Almost.

  Martin could have respected a one-on-one battle, aggrieved party against known asshole. He would have tried to keep things from getting to handcuffs and arrests. There had been days when he would have happily torpedoed Terrence McMillan’s career himself.

  But whoever was targeting McMillan had no problem roping innocent bystanders into their plan.

  They had scared the daylights out of the jury and all the courtroom attendees with that bomb threat. They’d set up the Historical Society as pawns in a bigger game. They’d crossed a line
. He couldn’t let that go.

  Worst of all, as far as he was concerned, whoever had done this had threatened Tiffani. Maybe it had all been a joke, sure. But it was the kind of joke he was going to make very sure no one ever tried to play on them again.

  Focus.

  He brought his mind back to the problem at hand. Not revenge. Prevention.

  “Spite is a powerful motivator. Is that all we’re thinking someone would gain from this? Or do they get an actual benefit from McMillan losing control of the trial?”

  Tiffani smiled. “You do remember I’m not a Marshal, right? I’m not even a bailiff. I’m not even a mall cop. I don’t know the first thing about investigations.”

  “I don’t buy that. You’ve been part of a trial before—a high-profile one, too, with almost this much of a media circus. You know how all this works, and you know the people involved as well as I do. And besides, you’re smart.”

  He remembered her backing down first McMillan and then Florence, playing exactly the tune each of them had wanted to hear.

  “You know how people think. What they want.”

  Tiffani studied him for a moment as if trying to determine whether or not she could take him seriously. It only took a few seconds this time.

  Two days ago, Martin thought, it would have taken her much longer to trust him. Now she was just unlearning an old, sad reflex to think that whoever complimented her on anything but her looks was secretly making fun of her.

  Once again he vowed to someday tell Tiffani’s ex-husband exactly what he thought of him. Preferably while punching his teeth in.

  “Well,” Tiffani said slowly, “another judge might want the trial. It’s prestigious. But no judge here would try that kind of trick, because if the trial got moved, it wouldn’t just get moved down the hall, it would get moved all the way to a different city. And there’d be no way to know for sure where it would go. It would be insane for someone to think that just because it wasn’t with McMillan, it would fall right into their lap.”

  As a Marshal, Martin had always either worked alone or with a team, never with a partner. For the first time, he understood how electrifying it could be to have one person working through the same thought process you were. The two of you could ratchet each other along.

  It was like going from the hard work of pulling a rowboat to the joy of paddling a canoe. Everything suddenly became so much easier when you were two.

  “So it’s not a rival,” he said. “McMillan has two ex-wives, I think, but this doesn’t feel like the kind of plan a vengeful ex would cook up.”

  “No,” Tiffani said blithely. “It doesn’t hurt enough for that. If I’d been married to McMillan, I could hit him a lot harder than this.”

  “The mates of pegasi are always to be feared,” Martin said.

  Tiffani blinked. “Mates? That’s what you call them?”

  He’d forgotten that Gretchen had said that humans didn’t use that word for themselves. Shifters used almost nothing else. If you introduced someone as your wife or husband, your girlfriend or boyfriend, all it meant was that they were not, in fact, your mate.

  “It is.” He decided not to apologize for how animal-like it sounded.

  “I like it,” Tiffani said, nodding. “It sounds ferocious.”

  Martin kissed her again. He couldn’t resist.

  “Please,” she said with fake decorum. “We’re working.”

  “Spoilsport.”

  “So no one gains professionally from McMillan losing the trial,” Tiffani said, her cheeks prettily colored still from how she’d blushed when he’d kissed her. “So it’s personal, but probably not so personal that it’s about love. If it’s about him—and it might not be—it’s about hate. It really is just because he’s a jerk.”

  “Someone must be pretty bothered by that to risk this much just to hurt his pride. The protesters could have been an innocent joke, but calling in the bomb threat is a crime. No one’s going to take that lightly unless it really is a kid who did it.”

  He paused, thinking it through.

  “And of course some people, like McMillan, would hammer them into the ground even if they are a kid. Juvenile sentences are no joke. This could cost someone a lot if they got found out, no matter how old they are.”

  “No one ever thinks they’ll get found out, though,” Tiffani said.

  He wondered if she was thinking of her ex-husband. Gordon Marcus had indeed gotten by without getting caught for a long time. He’d had time to work his way through a whole laundry list of financial crimes. But Gordon had at least had a reason to make the gamble he had. He’d bet against the law, but he’d done it because winning would let him rake in millions.

  What did their mystery caller get?

  He couldn’t think of anything.

  Besides, obviously, the satisfaction of ruining Terrence McMillan’s day.

  Either they were very dumb or they were very, very angry.

  “Did McMillan have a regular court reporter that he worked with before you came along?”

  Tiffani shook her head. “No, I asked around about that when I heard about his reputation. Everyone did the best they could to keep from getting assigned to him a second time—which of course didn’t work, but they at least tried to space out their stays in hell.”

  She suddenly frowned.

  “What is it?”

  “Hell—that was what Bruce called it. Bruce Tompoulidis, McMillan’s law clerk. McMillan was lecturing me in his chambers and just completely ignoring the fact that Bruce was there, and when we were finally able to leave, Bruce congratulated me on escaping from hell.”

  Martin remembered that, more or less. Bruce must have been the clerk who had kept Tiffani talking so long in the hall.

  “It didn’t feel like anything more than the usual complaining about work—he was getting ready to ask me out on kind of a date—”

  Martin resisted the urge to instantly decide that this Bruce was his primary suspect.

  “—but I just remembered it. You said whoever did this must be pretty bothered by McMillan being a jerk, right? Bruce has worked with him for years now.”

  He could sense that she was holding something back, not sure yet how to phrase it. He waited.

  “And when I turned him down,” Tiffani said slowly, “he shut off the charm right away. It was like someone turning off a faucet. And we’d barely spoken to each other—there’s no way he was that disappointed that I wasn’t going out for a drink with him. Not really. But the second I wasn’t someone he wanted to impress, he turned ice-cold.”

  She might have been underrating exactly how saddened any man would be by her politely saying no thanks to a date, but any good man would have done his best not to show it.

  If Bruce Tompoulidis could keep his cool around McMillan but had let Tiffani see that she’d made him angry, that meant he’d done it on purpose. He’d liked lashing out, so long as he could lash out safely.

  “Tompoulidis,” he said.

  “Yeah. Bruce Tompoulidis.”

  Florence had remembered that the young man who had given them the bright idea of the flash mob protest at the trial had given his name as something that had started with a T.

  Of course, that would have matched the name he’d put in the guestbook—but that couldn’t have been what he had told her.

  He had written down Terrence, but he had said something else.

  Tompoulidis.

  “Suppose for a second that that’s my last name. If I needed to think of an alias on the fly, I might come up with Tom. So he really could be our flash mob guy, if nothing else.”

  That Tiffani didn’t immediately protest that Bruce had been nice was almost enough to confirm his suspicions. Bruce had unnerved her, and Tiffani wasn’t a woman who was easily spooked.

  “Well,” she said, “if it’s Bruce, then he’s given his boss two bad days in a row. Maybe he’ll be content with that.”

  “Or maybe he won’t.” He checked his watch. �
��Either way, we both have to get to work.”

  *

  “Are we going to tell McMillan our suspicions about Bruce?” Tiffani said.

  He loved how quickly she had gotten into saying “we” and “our.” Maybe she liked the feel of that smooth canoe paddling as much as he did.

  “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I’d like to have him on his guard, but he’s not really subtle. If he thinks Bruce is trying to sabotage his precious trial of the century, he’ll go nuclear on him—”

  “And Bruce might not have anything to do with it.”

  “Right. Though he still sounds like just as much of a creep as his boss. Anyway, even if McMillan doesn’t blow up, I definitely don’t trust him to not give the game away. If Bruce is our mystery caller, we want to catch him, not just have him scurry for cover.”

  “On the other hand, we’re going to have a courtroom full of innocent, completely unprepared people.”

  “Maybe if we get lucky, we’ll just get another flash mob.” He thought about it. “Maybe a mariachi band this time.”

  She laughed. “Now, mate or no mate, if Bruce had asked me to dinner and drinks after sneaking a mariachi band into McMillan’s courtroom, I really might have said yes.”

  “Then I’ll have to knock out the competition early.”

  “Or hire a mariachi band yourself.”

  “I’ll start looking for accordions.”

  He drummed his fingers restlessly against the steering wheel. He wished the drive to the courthouse was longer so they would have more time to talk about all this.

  His team would be invaluable in dissecting everything, of course, but he’d have to get them caught up first. And his mind felt like it was working a million miles an hour right now. The last thing he wanted to do was backtrack and slow down.

  “I’ll tell McMillan that I have security concerns,” he said finally, turning into the courthouse parking lot. “That I don’t like the pattern this trial has already had of disruption and disturbance.”

  “Disruption and disturbance are basically the same thing,” Tiffani pointed out.

  “They are, but I’m hoping if I say them both, at least one of them will sink in a little.”