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

  “Of course we can go to your place,” Martin said. “We can go anywhere you want.”

  Tiffani wanted dessert, but not nearly as much as she wanted to get between the sheets with him right then. His eyes were as rich and sweet as anything the restaurant could have offered her anyway.

  She led him to her place in their little procession of two cars. Being alone suddenly felt both strange and exciting—there was a real electric charge to being by herself when she knew she would soon be with someone else, someone who would give her his full attention.

  She felt sensitive to everything around her: the smooth cool leather of the car interior, the scent of the little floral air freshener she had plugged into one of the A/C vents, the homey mess of the cupholder where she tended to deposit all her spare change.

  Best of all, she actually felt confident that her little apartment was in good shape for receiving guests. Her first day of work had meant a fresh start spring cleaning of it the night before. It might not be one of the nicest places in the world, but she had at least made it one of the tidiest places.

  Of course, there was no guarantee it would make it to the end of the week in the same condition, but for right now, she was safe.

  She parked and got out, rejoining him in the balmy night air.

  The sky had decided they deserved this strange, intense little fling and given them nothing but stars in a black velvet background. Tiffani tilted her head and looked up at them. Martin put his arm around her shoulders and did the same.

  He was so warm and so solid. She wanted to stay in his arms all night long.

  She hadn’t known a whirlwind romance could feel this—safe.

  She tilted her head back against his chest. “Beautiful night.”

  “It is,” he said quietly. “Makes me want to go flying.”

  He flew? Cowboy and pilot and US Marshal—had he been going for some sort of seductive jobs bingo?

  She started to ask what he flew. Did he kept a little plane somewhere?

  But she could sense he was in his own world even as his arm tightened around her, holding her so securely that she leaned even further into him, cuddling up against his chest. She felt like a high school girl sheltering under her boyfriend’s letterman’s jacket.

  “I could take you up,” Martin said in the same wistful way. “You’d love it.”

  “I’m sure I would.”

  She wasn’t, actually—or she shouldn’t have been. For some reason planes had always made her a little nervous, as though one of them might throw a bolt at any moment and send her plunging out of the air.

  No matter how afraid she was, though, she knew Martin wouldn’t let her fall.

  Her priorities right now were a little different, however.

  “But Martin, for tonight, I’m thinking... please don’t make me come up with some kind of horrible wordplay about cockpits.”

  “Right.” Martin cleared his throat. “Airplanes. No, not tonight.”

  He skimmed his hand down her arm. She had ditched the cardigan as the night had gone on and the feeling of his touch on her bare skin made heat rush across her body in a delicious wave.

  “Inside,” Tiffani breathed. “Or we’ll get into the habit of getting things halfway started out in public.”

  Not that there was anything too appalling about that idea. She could very easily picture stepping back into her car and riding him in the seat right there in the parking lot, her hands braced against the headrest and his hands perfectly tight on her hips. Looking into his eyes as she moved herself up and down the length of him—

  That didn’t sound like a recipe for getting any steno practice anytime soon.

  She unlocked her apartment and ushered him inside.

  It was a small place. She’d had to scrounge around a little just to find a reasonably priced one-bedroom. For a while, it had seemed like she’d be stuck with a studio that just had a calico curtain strung across the bathroom portion of the apartment. That had had its own peculiar Little House on the Prairie charm, but the moment she had seen this place, she knew it was the one for her. She would have signed the lease even if she’d had unlimited money and unlimited options.

  After years of rattling around an enormous and mostly empty mansion, her new apartment didn’t feel small. It felt cozy. And everything in it was something she herself had picked out, not an awkward mish-mash of the interior decorator and the previous wife and Gordon’s creepy nutcracker collection.

  Thrift stores and garage sales had even let her find a few traces of affordable, slightly-dented grace and charm. She loved her little rose-colored pouf of an ottoman, settled at the base of her favorite reading chair, and she loved her nicked and scratched white kitchen table with its mismatched zebrawood chairs. Some of Jillian’s old drawings were safely stowed away in a scrapbook on one of these shelves.

  She’d had a house for a long time. Now it finally felt like she had a home.

  She cleared her throat nervously. “What do you think?”

  Martin looked around. She liked that he actually looked, that he did her the favor of taking her question seriously.

  A smile crept across his face, just as warm as the ones he had shared with her before but more wistful now. “It’s like a garden.”

  Of all the answers she could have anticipated—It’s nice or it’s a little small or it’s obviously not as big as your old place—that wasn’t one of them.

  “Like a garden?”

  “All the colors... here, close your eyes.”

  She did. It was strange to suddenly be floating in the dark in the midst of her own apartment, knowing that he was close to her but not able to see him. She could catch the slight scent of his cologne, a hint of clean leather and untamed forests.

  “Now forget that this is your apartment,” Martin said.

  “So we’ve broken in somewhere.”

  She could hear the laughter in his voice. “Yes. The police are on their way, so we have to hurry.”

  “Can’t you reason with them, law enforcement to law enforcement?”

  Did this qualify as roleplay? Better question: did Martin carry handcuffs? She sort of hoped so.

  “There is an ancient rivalry between city police and the US Marshals office,” he said gravely. “I don’t think they’d listen to me.”

  “Goodness. Then you’re right, we really should hurry.”

  She had never said “goodness” like that in her life, but she felt it was exactly the sort of thing a bashful accidental criminal would say. Especially when in the company of her tall, dark, and handsome partner in crime.

  “Pretend we’ve stumbled into a garden,” Martin said.

  Now his voice was soft, almost hypnotic. The darkness around her seemed to intensify, like he had wound a velvet blindfold around her eyes.

  “It’s a garden no one’s been in for years. It’s a little overrun in places, it’s gone a little wild, but that just makes it more beautiful. It isn’t all shoved into neat little boxes. And we’re the only two people there.”

  “Would you go so far as to say it’s a... secret garden?”

  She didn’t mind joking around with him—she liked it—but she wished she hadn’t done it just then. It didn’t match the mood. But the mood had turned more serious than she had been expecting: this no longer reminded her of some light, frivolous roleplay. Martin sounded as if he meant every word he was saying.

  So she said, “Never mind,” quickly, not wanting him to have to try to answer her. She met his seriousness with her own, conjuring up the picture he had described.

  Wild roses, she decided, in colors like strawberry and blush wine, growing in a thick and thorny carpet up one of those white garden trellises. She imagined worn cobblestones forming a carpet beneath their feet. The earth would be weedy with only the prettiest weeds like speedwell and foxglove and some overgrown goldenrod that had spilled out of its flowerbed.

  Tiffani knew what flowers looked like, but mostly from classes in flor
al arrangement, mostly from composing tasteful bouquets in florist shops. She didn’t know if all the flowers she saw in her mind’s eye would be blooming at the same time or not.

  She had never had a garden. Why hadn’t she ever had a garden? Until he had mentioned it, she hadn’t even realized she wanted one.

  “Now open your eyes,” Martin said.

  Tiffani did.

  The garden leapt out at her. Her cream-and-rose chair with the faded stripes looked exactly like the trellis she had been imagining, especially with the rose-colored pouf at its foot. The pale wood floor was the dusty earth of the path. The pale green walls encased them in the color of leaves in full sunlight. All around her were hints of lavender and buttercup and orchid-white, with occasional surprising splashes of deep, rich brown like good soil for planting.

  “It is a garden,” she said, a little awed by how much her vision of it had changed.

  Also apparently she really liked pastels.

  “It’s beautiful,” Martin said. “It suits you.”

  “How did you see it right away?”

  “Because I see you. You come through so clearly that I see right away what suits you.”

  He caressed her cheek with one warm hand and she closed her eyes again. She wanted to savor the moment, but she couldn’t stand not seeing him, so she looked again. She soaked him in.

  What was happening between them? Tiffani sometimes felt she had read every advice column in existence on dating and marriage. She had read every book and every magazine trying to figure out what was wrong with her that her husband cheated on her as easily as he breathed, what was wrong with her that she had fallen for someone so obviously untrustworthy, what was wrong with her that she stayed in love with him through so many heartbreaks.

  She had always been looking for the way she was broken. Always been looking for the key mistake that she had made.

  But that was her old self. Maybe her new self was right: there had been no one mistake. Just a series of bad decisions, made out of fear and her own low self-esteem.

  He won’t hurt you. He won’t lie to you. He’s one of the good guys. Hell, he’s the good guy.

  The guy too good to be true? How could he possibly like her as much, and as quickly, as she liked him? Didn’t he realize the gulf that was between them?

  She had been telling herself that she deserved some fun. Some romance.

  She had never told herself that she deserved love.

  You met him this morning, Tiffani reminded herself. Pace yourself.

  Except she strongly suspected pacing oneself was overrated. She wasn’t a project to be perfected, not this time. Not now. She was a person with wants and needs and the gumption—could she think of a better word than gumption? She really wanted to—to fill them.

  Maybe she did know what she was doing, if she could just be brave enough to do it.

  Maybe it wouldn’t be a mistake to fall for Martin so fast that she could almost hear the whoosh of her heart dropping into his hands. Maybe, despite everything that scared her, she was making the best choice for her heart.

  And maybe she trusted him to be making the best choice for his.

  What she said next wasn’t the key to everything she wanted, but at the moment, it felt like a very acceptable shortcut.

  “Kiss me.”

  Martin did.

  Sirens.

  She took the time to luxuriate in his mouth, in the taste of him and the way he yielded to her kiss and persuaded her at once to yield to his in return, the way he soon reduced her bones to water. She could have collapsed in a heap at his feet if only she didn’t have so much to do, so much of him to touch.

  His stomach muscles were hard and taut underneath her hands. She unbuttoned his shirt slowly and pushed his ribbed white undershirt up so she could slide her touch underneath it. He peeled it off over his head, somehow maneuvering the gesture so that they never broke contact.

  His arms! They had to qualify as one of the wonders of the world. He could have lifted her no problem. Her body throbbed, some switch in her suddenly flipping over to pure greediness to be touched.

  She was nothing but hunger.

  Martin realized it at once. For the second time that day, he took her out of that sensible blouse, his fingers awkward but sure against the little pearl buttons. He stroked her breasts through the tough silk of her bra. It was so close to what she wanted and yet so stupidly far away that she heard herself make this absurd keening sound out of neediness and frustration. He was teasing her.

  Martin bit very gently at her neck as he put his arms around her to undo the bra clasp at her back.

  Then his tongue was hot and wet and masterful against one of her nipples, leaving the other one to be expertly rolled and stroked and pinched by his fingers. For a second, Tiffani thought she would fall apart just from that. Could she really come without him so much as touching her throbbing sex?

  “You’re so soft,” Martin said, leaning back from her for a moment. “Your skin is so soft.”

  “Well,” Tiffani said absurdly. “I use good soap.”

  He laughed and she felt the little puff of air from it on her sensitive, flushed breasts. She made another ridiculous sound.

  They kissed and touched their way to the bedroom. This time she was the one who first succeeded at getting the other undressed. She felt a kind of fierce, somehow primitive victory in that, as though she had won a battle and Martin was her prize.

  He lay back on the bed and she straddled him, her knees to either side of his hips. As soon as she could, she sank down onto him. It was better on the bed than it would have been in the car, she thought distantly. Here there was no fear of getting caught or bumping the gearshift, here there was nothing to distract her from how delicious this was.

  True to what she’d told him before, her skirt was too long to do this easily. She had had to thrust its waistband all the way up to just under her breasts to straddle him. Even then, bunched up around her waist, the skirt edged forward and fell down low. It kept brushing against both of them as she moved. She was too busy working her body on his to care.

  Martin made a sudden growling sound as silly and as hot as anything that had come out of her mouth during all this. Good to know they were both losing their minds.

  He reached up and pawed the skirt off of her, so decisive about it that Tiffani could hear one of the buttons snap off and roll away on the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, though Tiffani had never minded anything less in her entire life. “I just want to see you. I need to see you.”

  “Then look,” Tiffani said.

  He did. He stroked her, her belly and back and breasts, and he dipped his hand down between them and rubbed gently at her clit. She could feel his eyes on her as she came and she knew he was memorizing the look on her face. She knew that however undignified it was, he loved it.

  She squeezed him tight with all the muscles she had and his climax followed hers, his fingers hard and careless and gorgeous against her thighs as his hips thrust up into her again and again.

  He loves me, Tiffani thought, her mind still dazed and almost drunk on the sex. He doesn’t just love looking at me, he loves me, and it doesn’t matter if it’s too soon. It’s happened.

  Chapter Nine: Martin

  After they’d made love, Tiffani was quiet. She kissed Martin on the cheek and slid out of bed, donning an ivory silk robe over her bare, apricot-colored skin. He wanted to trace the line of its hem where it was suspended like cream against her darker skin, but when he saw her make her way to her desk, he left her alone. He had promised her whatever steno practice she wanted. He wasn’t going to break that, no matter how lonely it suddenly felt to be in her bed without her.

  “Should I sing something for you to type?” he said.

  Tiffani didn’t turn around. He didn’t have so much as a twitch of her tawny, sun-streaked hair to help him read her mood. And when she answered him, her voice was level. Careful.

  “
No, that’s okay. Tell me a story instead.”

  “What kind of story?”

  “Any kind. A fairy tale. Family history. The last episode you saw of Law and Order.”

  She paused, even though he had the feeling she already knew exactly what she wanted to say. Then she added in the same tone:

  “The story of whatever you’re thinking about right now. Where you see this going. I know men hate it when women ask that.”

  “You’ve known too many bad men,” Martin said.

  “That’s true. But it’s not a story.”

  She needed reassurance, he thought. Men—particularly Gordon Marcus—had treated her like an object. She wanted to know that he had her feelings in mind and that he saw her as something other than a good time. Something more than just fun.

  Was it time to tell her? He had the feeling it would never be the right time.

  There was no good way to tell the woman you loved that you could turn into a mystical horse and that that same power meant you knew that your love for her would never fade and never fail. There were, however, less bad ways.

  And there were times when it would be actively bad to hold your tongue. He had the feeling this was one of those times.

  “All right,” Martin said. “A story. This ties into what I was telling you earlier about my parents—about ancient Rome and ancient Greece.”

  The soft clicking of her steno keys was reassuring: a promise that she was listening to him. Whatever she was thinking, she hadn’t closed herself off completely.

  “There was a legend back then about pegasi. Winged horses. People said that they were real but that sometimes they looked like ordinary men and women, that they could change at will. Everyone was content to let it just be a story, one of those beliefs that adds a little magic to everyday life. But then someone started another rumor. Another myth. This one was about Daedalus and his son Icarus. Do you know the story about Daedalus and Icarus?”