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

  But lately, he had to admit that he had been feeling all the downsides of solitude. Before Lisa, he hadn’t known just how deeply he needed companionship, how much easier it was to sleep with someone’s head on the pillow next to him. It would have been enough—more than enough—to have found a love like that again, the love of deep friendship and slow, tender intimacy.

  The way he loved Tiffani was already different. It wasn’t a greater love—he didn’t know that he could have borne the guilt of all at once loving his mate more than he had loved his wife—but it was a more intrinsically, instantly romantic one. It made him impulsive and fun and lighthearted in a way that he hadn’t been in years. He had gotten used to being the calm, fatherly center of his team, stable and sensible.

  Now, for the first time in his life, he wanted to make mistakes.

  He trusted her to make every one of those mistakes astonishingly worthwhile.

  And so far it had worked. He had ducked away from the office for a lunch break in a hotel, and the world hadn’t ended, the sky hadn’t fallen. What other possibilities were there? How could he sweep her off her feet the way she deserved to be swept?

  And when would this clerk stop making small talk with her and move on?

  Sometimes humans could instinctively sense when shifters were irritated. Maybe this was one of those times, because the clerk broke away at last.

  Tiffani now stood by herself in the middle of the hall, her glossy hair pinned up once more in its sensible bun, and something about the way she stood made her seem so closed-off.

  It was how she had looked when she had buttoned up the long row of buttons on the side of her skirt. Even more than that, it was how she had looked when she had waved off his compliment about her being good in a crisis, saying all she had done was calm down a group of kids.

  It was as if she felt she needed to make excuses for herself. But to whom?

  “Tiffani?”

  She turned to him and her smile was everything he had remembered it being. It wiped away any concern that she might not be as happy as he wanted her to be.

  “Martin. It’s so good to see you.”

  She was so warm and so effortlessly sincere—whatever lies she had told over the years must really have hurt her, because her automatic responses to him were so natural, so enthusiastic.

  “It’s good to see you too.” He meant every word.

  “I thought we were going to miss each other when McMillan didn’t reconvene the trial. And by the way, if you want to know, I can tell you all about McMillan’s reasons for not reconvening the trial today. And all about his reasons why this case belongs on his docket and why he’s the only person in the county who could hope to handle it. And also his opinion on dogs, for some reason.”

  “Pro or anti?”

  “Anti. Very anti-dog.”

  No wonder McMillan didn’t like Colby.

  “How does he think things will go moving forward?”

  “As long as he’s in control, absolutely perfectly. Realistically, if you want my opinion—”

  “I do,” Martin said, and was rewarded with another look at that perfect smile.

  “Some part of him is relieved that a phone call is the only trouble we’ve had. He knows that if too much excitement gets stirred up around here, the trial might be moved somewhere else or they might have to dismiss this current jury and get a new one. Maybe a new judge, too. Presiding over the ‘trial of the century’ is a big feather in his cap and he doesn’t want to lose it. But at the same time...”

  Martin resisted the urge to prompt her. She knew he was listening, and his silence reassured her of that better than any prod to go on would have done. The last thing he wanted was to seem impatient.

  Especially since, he admitted wryly, he could have listened to her talk all day. About anything.

  “At the same time,” Tiffani said, “he likes the attention. The bigger the trial gets, the bigger he seems for being the judge overseeing it. Until the balloon pops. So he’s as excited as he is angry.”

  “Sounds like it might make for a tense place to work.”

  “From what I’ve heard, Judge McMillan’s courtroom is always a tense place to work.” She shrugged. “I can handle it.”

  There was a firm set to her jaw when she said those words, like she was making a promise to herself. He had seen her competence in action and took it for granted that she could do anything she wanted—she had grit enough to get through any number of setbacks. But she was still learning that about herself.

  For a long time, even if Tiffani Marcus had suspected she was something more than a trophy wife, there hadn’t been too many opportunities for life to prove her right. Now there were.

  Martin knew that feeling better than he wanted to admit. He was in the same situation, more or less.

  As long as you didn’t have a mate, you could tell yourself that you would be perfect if only the perfect opportunity presented itself. Presented herself. Maybe an ordinary marriage would do something to reassure you of that even if the circumstances were so different.

  And maybe then you’d suddenly, out of nowhere, have the opportunity to fail spectacularly, in a way that would ruin your life and your own opinion of yourself.

  No wonder he was so desperate to tell himself that Tiffani was as ready for all this as he was. He was terrified of messing up his last, best chance at happiness. He needed to get this—he needed to get her—absolutely right.

  Or else the balloon would burst.

  Chapter Seven: Tiffani

  This still qualifies as slow, Tiffani told herself when Martin took her out for dinner on the same day he had first taken her out for lunch. This still qualifies as an acceptable level of decadence.

  Midway through dinner, she had to admit that with Martin involved, a cup of bailiff coffee in the hall of the courthouse would have been too decadent to be safe or slow.

  And with Martin, she would excuse any level of real self-indulgence as totally adult, responsible, and non-distracting just to have the chance to keep on indulging. She could have been naked and hanging upside-down from a chandelier while Martin hand-fed her chocolate strawberries, and she would have been saying, I’ll be able to box this away and go to work in the morning no problem.

  But, well, there weren’t any chandeliers involved yet. So maybe she could still take the chance.

  Besides, from everything Theo had ever told her, Martin was a responsible, even-keeled kind of guy. He would need to be up bright and early the next day too. He would need to be able to keep his mind on the job.

  It was strange to feel like she was taking a risk at the same time as she was also trusting someone else to catch her. The last time she’d been big into risk-taking, she’d been young enough to be dumb about it. She had been so sure there would be some imaginary net beneath her. Something to stop her from making any truly bad calls.

  She had gone on thinking that right up until Gordon’s first mistress had popped out of the woodwork. And then she had believed his apologies and his promises to change... and then mistress number two had come along. That time he hadn’t even tried to convince her he was sorry.

  And down she had fallen, right off the tightrope she’d walked for so many years.

  Was it ridiculous to think Martin wouldn’t let her fall? Maybe you couldn’t have a safety net in life, but you could have a partner. Life wouldn’t protect you—but a person could still grab your hand and hold you up.

  Or maybe she would have rationalized anything for the sake of a man who made love like he thought it was love and who thought it was totally fine for her to want to eat bread.

  Still, she made a token attempt to be Responsible Tiffani. She capped it at two glasses of wine.

  Like wine was what she was in danger of getting drunk on.

  She found a stray thread on the tablecloth and moved it back and forth with one fingertip. “What made you want to become a Marshal?”

  Martin actually looked embarrassed. “Promi
se you won’t laugh.”

  Tiffani crossed her heart. “I have no sense of humor whatsoever. I’ve never laughed in my entire life.”

  “That smile of yours makes that a little unconvincing.”

  “Smiling isn’t laughing,” she pointed out. “Spill. I want to know even more now. Embarrassing answers are always better than things like ‘it had good benefits’ or ‘my dad did it.’”

  “Well, it does have good benefits, but my dad didn’t do it, for what it’s worth. He was an antiquities dealer.”

  “Antiquities?”

  “Like regular antiques but even older. Things from the Roman Empire, Ancient Egypt, Classical Greece, that kind of thing.”

  “So not my grandmother’s chair or my great-uncle’s coin collection.”

  “Not unless your great-uncle was a Pharaoh.”

  Tiffani grinned. “I’ll have to ask him about that. Okay, so—antiquities.”

  “Right. That was how he met my mother. She taught Latin and Greek at a prep school. She used to help him with translations.”

  Prep schools and antiquities. It would have been harder to get any further from Tiffani’s own background than that.

  Her dad had fixed cars for a living—even now, he still did it for fun, and Tiffani had rarely seen him without grease under his fingernails. Her mom had dabbled in all kinds of jobs. She’d been the hostess at a little whiskey-and-steak roadhouse, the seamstress at an alterations shop, and the saleswoman at a perfume counter. She got impatient once she’d mastered the skills of any one place and then she moved on. Tiffani’s dad, a rock in his interests and his love for his wife and daughter, had never minded being their stable income, even if it wasn’t always much. She’d had a good, happy childhood.

  But it hadn’t involved any prep schools. And the schools she’d attended hadn’t even had Latin or Greek on the menu; she couldn’t have taken them even if she’d wanted to.

  Then something occurred to her. “Roman Empire antiquities and a Latin professor mom and you never went to Italy? They should have taken you.”

  “Trust me, I spent a lot of time saying that. But they liked their trips to Italy to be romantic. I never had a place in that.”

  But Tiffani couldn’t have imagined ever agreeing to multiple trips to Italy without Jillian ever coming along, especially not when Jillian had been a little girl, anxious and idealistic and eager for her dad’s love. It would have been the best thing for their family to have toured ancient ruins together and eaten gelato in the sunlight. Not that it was any of her business what Martin’s family had done or not done, but...

  “That seems like it wasn’t a great deal for you,” she said softly.

  Martin shrugged, but his mouth turned down at the corners. “It was a long time ago.”

  And now she had dragged them into a depressing minefield of childhood sorrows.

  “But,” she said hastily, “you were telling me about how you became a Marshal.”

  “Right. So I grew up surrounded by all these priceless, glorious examples of ancient history—well, high-quality reproductions of priceless, glorious examples of ancient history, anyway. So I decided to become a big fan of the one historical period that felt like the opposite of all those marble statues and crumbling ruins. The Old West.”

  Tiffani could not have resisted the chance to imagine him in a cowboy hat. She didn’t even want to. With his height and his broad shoulders, and that gold badge on his hip, he seemed to have been born for shootouts on the dusty streets of one-horse towns.

  “Now, realistically, I wouldn’t ever want to live back then. The dentistry alone...”

  Hats, yes. Teeth getting pulled without anesthesia? No way.

  She said hastily, “If you go into specific stories about that, I’m going to cover my ears.”

  “I’ll spare you. Anyway, obviously it was far from perfect. But I loved a lot of the stories I found about the US Marshals. The adventure, the danger. The fact that you could make your own path for yourself no matter what the rest of the world thought about you. My favorite was always Bass Reeves. He was the first black Marshal in the West. He was born a slave and he lived as a hero and now there are statues of him out there. I could talk to you a lot about Bass Reeves... but I won’t, I promise. Not on a date.” He smiled at her. “The Marshals seemed like a way for people to have the chance to test themselves to see if they were remarkable.”

  “That’s beautiful,” Tiffani said.

  “And the badge has a nice shine to it.”

  She did laugh at that, but she went right back to the real beauty of it all. Adventure, transformation, acclaim. Most of all, self-respect.

  Martin had wanted to measure himself against the hardest things the world had to offer not to get rich or famous but just so he would know for his own sake what kind of person he was. To Tiffani, even wanting that at all, on those terms, meant he was remarkable enough already.

  Maybe Martin deserved someone who had tried for something similarly grand.

  But he didn’t seem to think so, she had to admit, because he next asked her why she had decided to become a court reporter. There was no derision in his voice at all, no suggestion that her job was in any way lesser than his.

  Although Tiffani had to think it was, in terms of both salary and social importance.

  But she liked her job, even if she couldn’t say she liked all the people it brought her in contact with. Why was she already getting herself ready to apologize for it not being exactly like his?

  She tore savagely into a bread roll. Bread. Martin. Self-respect. All good things.

  She told him about how Theo had described court reporting. How he had made it sound like serving as a scribe in some medieval castle, faithfully recording everything that passed, making sure the history of the realm would be accurate.

  “In the end, of course, it’s a lot more science fiction than fantasy. You’ve seen Felix.”

  “Felix?”

  She flushed. “My steno machine.”

  Martin took that in stride. “I’ve seen him, but I don’t understand him. How do those things work with so few keys?”

  Tiffani explained the process to him, how the keys represented sounds rather than letters. Was this the one and only time she’d ever been able to be the person who had something to teach?

  Martin, adorably, seemed to find this not only interesting but genuinely exciting.

  “I never would have thought of that,” he said. “That means you could probably even take down languages you didn’t understand, at least if the sounds were similar enough.”

  “Well, if the courtroom suddenly breaks into a flood of untranslated Latin, maybe you could help me piece some of it together from the steno rolls afterwards.”

  “Felix—as a name—comes from Latin,” he said. “So Felix might manage some of the translation on his own.”

  “I didn’t know that! What does ‘Felix’ mean in Latin?”

  “Lucky,” Martin said softly. “Which works. Anyone who winds up with you is lucky. Even a steno machine.”

  Their food arrived to distract them both from how bowled over she was by that.

  Tiffani had ordered a pasta dish with fig and prosciutto, thinking she would stay with this Italian fantasy as long as she could. Martin had fluffy, savory gnocchi with chicken, finely-chopped bacon, and something called chicken veloute. So far as Tiffani could tell without actually looking it up, veloute was some kind of fancy gravy.

  She had always loved these kinds of restaurants, ones where the menus rotated with the seasons and you could never anticipate ahead of time exactly how something would taste. She figured she wouldn’t be able to afford too many of them on her new salary. But for one dinner, it probably still fell on the right side of the line of decadence.

  And the pasta was delicious. The key, she discovered, was to make sure each bite was made up of a little bit of everything on the plate: the salt and cured intensity of the prosciutto cut through and enhanced the sweetn
ess of the figs while the smooth, delicately-oiled pasta provided a background for it all to play out. Maybe she should rebuild her life a third time to judge cooking shows. She would probably even get the chance to learn what veloute was.

  “This is incredible,” she said, chasing a stray bit of fig around her plate. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a meal this good. How is yours?”

  “Also incredible... but I think the edge on the finest meal of my life might still go to this little seafood place I went to out in the Florida Keys.”

  “Tell me,” Tiffani said. “I’m very interested in food porn lately.”

  “I’ll save it for another date, if you’ll give me one. You can’t talk about fish while you’re eating chicken, I don’t think. It’s one of those dinner rules.”

  “Like holding red wine glasses by the bowl and white wine glasses by the stem.” She demonstrated, aware as she did so that her charm bracelet—hokey, Gordon had always said dismissively—was sliding down her wrist, drawing attention to itself. She resolutely ignored it. “To good first meetings, even if they come with sirens?”

  Martin met her toast with a quiet clink from his own glass. “I think you would have brought the sirens no matter what.”

  Chapter Eight: Tiffani

  Talk about sirens: Martin asked if he could take her home with him that night. He said it almost shyly, as if he were asking her to dance.

  She hated to inconvenience him when he’d been nothing but a perfect gentleman—the last thing she wanted was to make herself into a hassle—but she had to keep up at least a little routine.

  “Could you come home with me instead? I’ve just been trying to get in half an hour of extra steno practice a night so it all becomes as automatic as I can get it. I know it’s not exactly the most alluring thing in the world to hop out of bed and start recording the lyrics to ‘Hey Jude’ or that night’s episode of Scandal, but...”