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

by Zoe Chant

  “I can’t believe this,” she whispered. “This is magic.”

  The stars were coming out all around them, peeking through the sky as it darkened. Below them, the city was spread out like a carpet, and all her worries seemed small.

  From here, no matter how big they were on the ground, all the homes and country clubs of the people who had snubbed her and belittled her looked like dollhouses or Monopoly pieces. She couldn’t worry about them from this height. Why would she even look at them when she could look at the river, winding its way through the landscape like a silvery snake? When she felt like she could reach up and touch the moon?

  From here, she could do anything. She could be anything.

  She could be Martin’s soulmate.

  She was Martin’s soulmate. Suddenly she was beyond all reasonable doubt.

  He was a flying horse, and she was a woman who rode flying horses. Her hair had come out of its sensible bun and was streaming back over her shoulders. She felt like she should have been wearing a sword, but maybe that was getting a little bit carried away. All the same, she felt powerful and grand. Heroic.

  It was the only time she could remember ever feeling that way, for sure.

  Martin was the one to bring out that part of her. He made her better, and he made her see how good she really was. Maybe that was what a soulmate was.

  She had promised to let him sweep her off her feet, and he had.

  And now, far above the city that had once overwhelmed her, that had once eaten her alive in a flurry of photos and press releases and gossip, she felt like he really gave her something better. He gave her the kind of solid ground she’d never had in her whole life. She hadn’t even known that you could have this kind of breathlessness and this kind of security all at once.

  To fly and know down in her bones that she wouldn’t fall.

  She buried her face in his mane.

  I love you. I love you so much.

  Chapter Fifteen: Martin

  Martin had landed just around the corner from a restaurant, since their plan had been to go to dinner, but one look at Tiffani once he was human again made him regret that. She looked like someone had turned a light on inside of her. All he wanted to do was take her to bed.

  His stomach protested this, reminding him that they’d both barely been able to get three bites of lunch in the midst of all the chaos of the community center kids.

  Fuel first, his pegasus said, resigned but practical. Animals had high respect for food. Then we will have the energy to please our mate as she deserves to be pleased.

  He had missed companionship all those years, not just sex. If it was hard to pass up the chance to sleep with Tiffani again immediately, it would have been even harder to pass up the chance to have dinner with her.

  “Shall we?” he said, offering her his arm.

  Tiffani looked at the restaurant with the same mingled pleasure and regret he felt himself.

  She put her arm through his. “We shall. But I think I want you for dessert, no matter what brownie sundaes are on the menu.”

  He squeezed her tight. “Deal.”

  After the noisy chaos of lunch, he’d figured all either of them really wanted for dinner was the guarantee of quiet and no flying art supplies. Fifteen minutes in, his choice of restaurant—an upscale steakhouse where the lighting was dim and romantic even if the prices were extravagant—was working out well on both scores.

  He laughed as Tiffani finished up telling him about how she had dealt with the judge.

  “So has he worked out yet that you’re blackmailing him into acting like a human being?”

  Tiffani took a demure bite of her salad. “No, I think he thinks I did it from unswerving loyalty to him. Loyalty that I had automatically because he’s such a great, noble man. I’m a little worried that he’s going to request me for every single trial of his from now on.”

  “Not ideal even if he’s going to be on his best behavior, huh?”

  “Leaving ‘Terry’ out of the official transcript only protects me. I’d still have to put up with how badly he treats everyone else. Including you—I can’t believe the way he talked to you!”

  Martin’s pegasus tossed its mane around, delighted.

  Look how fierce our mate is in our defense! How clever she is in outwitting her enemies!

  Trust me, he answered. I couldn’t stop looking if I tried.

  “You came to my rescue,” Martin said.

  Tiffani flushed, the rose color in her cheeks blending beautifully with the gold of her skin.

  “Yes, I faced down the merciless army of the historical preservation society. Songs will be written of this day. Later, there’s going to be an action movie about it.”

  “No, really.”

  He reached across the table and took her hand. Their intertwined fingers made a better centerpiece than the little tea candle and mini-bouquet of cloth flowers.

  “Talking down the protestors was impressive. I couldn’t have done it. You saw that—I didn’t do it, I didn’t know what they wanted to hear.”

  “Mm-hm,” Tiffani said, but now her smile was teasing rather than tentative. “I’m pretty sure you worked it out by the end, Mr. ‘Let Me Just Show You Where the Photocopier Is.’”

  “I learned from the best.”

  Their waiter swapped out their salads for their entrees.

  Martin was quickly reminded that this place had more to offer than just ambience. He had a dry-aged ribeye with a baked potato with a crisp skin and tender, butter-sweet insides. Tiffani had some sort of tuna steak with little nectarine wedges surrounding it. Martin wasn’t entirely sure he understood how it all came together, but she seemed to be enjoying it.

  Actually, if the way her ash-blonde eyelashes half-lowered every time she took a bite was any indication, she was enjoying it immensely.

  Martin had never been jealous of a piece of fish before.

  Tiffani speared one of the nectarine segments and said, “I know this isn’t good early date conversation, but our circumstances are... unusual.”

  She was looking to him for reassurance, so he nodded. Yes. Very unusual.

  Special. Miraculous, even.

  “You don’t have to tell me right now if it’s too hard to talk about,” Tiffani said, “but I was wondering what your wife was like.”

  Martin knew he would answer her, but he hadn’t known exactly what he would say until he opened his mouth.

  “It’s good to talk about her, actually.”

  He was surprised to find he felt that way. After all those years of grief and loneliness, Lisa’s memory had now become something precious rather than something painful.

  “We had a whole life together and then she was gone and... and no one ever asks. I know why, I know it’s just that they don’t want me to have to talk about something so sad. But then I wind up never talking about her at all, since it’s not the kind of thing you want to bring up out of the blue. People don’t always want someone else’s sorrows to come up in casual conversation.”

  “But it’s hard when you have them and they’re all you can think about,” Tiffani said quietly.

  “Yes. And for a long time, she was all I could think about. She wasn’t just my wife, she was my best friend.”

  “What was her name?”

  “Lisa. Lisa Annemarie Powell.”

  “What a pretty name. Was she—like you? Like you and Theo and Colby?”

  “Yes,” Martin said. Handily enough, he could even say exactly how, and no one who overheard them would know what he really meant: “She was a deer.”

  Anyone besides Tiffani would have just heard “dear.”

  He told Tiffani how he and Lisa had grown up together. Shifter families, no matter what their inner animals were, often formed communities with one another. This was harder to talk about without risking being overheard—the restaurant was quiet, its only sounds the murmurs of conversation and the occasional scrape of a knife and fork across a plate.

 
; Lacking a better option, he substituted in “coin collectors” for “shifters.” There, now he only sounded ridiculous, not delusional.

  He and Lisa had known each other all their lives, since their parents had had the same interest in coin collecting and had wanted their children to grow up knowing other coin collectors so they would feel less alone. They had spent a lot of time running through the woods together, just playing and talking.

  Lisa was shy around crowds and her voice tightened up into a squeak whenever she had to talk in school, but with him, out in the woods, she spoke a mile a minute. She wrote poems on little slips of paper and tossed them into the wind, hoping some stranger would rake one up with their leaves and get a kick out of it. He had always wanted to find one himself, but he never had.

  She’d had long strawberry-blonde hair as smooth as glass and roughly a thousand freckles. They had made her look like she’d been sprinkled all over with cinnamon.

  “But she wasn’t your one true match,” Tiffani said. She sounded skeptical.

  But Martin had no problem shaking his head. “No. And I wasn’t hers. We loved each other, but we always knew that.”

  “But you weren’t...”

  “Disappointed? No. We were happy together. We both thought that our time had just passed us by—that happens sometimes—and that we were really lucky to know each other. We knew that we could love each other enough to make up for all the little imperfections, the little ways in which we wouldn’t necessarily be exactly right for each other. And we did.”

  “She sounds lovely.”

  “She was,” Martin said.

  This time, when the grief washed through him, he found that he could bear it—and he found that he knew that she would have been happy for him. It was like that knowledge was one last poem from her, suddenly blown into his life.

  Lisa wouldn’t have wanted him to spend the rest of his life alone. She would have liked Tiffani.

  Thank you, he thought to her, back through the years. That means everything to me.

  He didn’t want to make Tiffani ask how Lisa had died, so he said it himself. “She had a heart condition. The kind of thing that always catches up to you sooner or later. That was why we never had kids—she didn’t want to risk passing it on. And then I had my team, and they filled whatever we had of that gap in our lives.”

  “More coin collectors,” Tiffani said. She smiled in a way that let him know that they could leave these weightier matters behind if he wanted.

  “More coin collectors. And one person who really understands coin collecting without doing it herself—we can’t leave out Gretchen.”

  “Does it bother you that I don’t collect coins? That I didn’t even know about it, like Gretchen did?”

  “No, of course not. It’s a... niche hobby. Most coin collectors end up with people who don’t collect coins.”

  This was starting to sound like some kind of complicated logical problem. If all coin collectors collect coins, but not all coin collectors marry each other...

  But for some reason this hit some kind of trip wire in his brain.

  Coin collecting. Saving up and preserving history.

  Talking about one thing while pretending you were talking about something else, something innocent and normal.

  He put down his fork. “Did any of the Historical Society protesters tell you how they’d gotten the idea to come to the courthouse today?”

  Tiffani shook her head. “I didn’t even talk to them after they left the courtroom.”

  “Just a second. I have an idea I don’t like.”

  He took out his cell and dialed Colby.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be on a date?” Colby said instead of hello.

  “I am on a date,” Martin said, and took a moment to appreciate the way Tiffani smiled when she heard that.

  Colby said, “I think you might have forgotten how to date, then. You don’t usually take your phone out halfway through and call someone else. Not that I’m not flattered.”

  Martin ignored this. “You talked to some of the Historical Society protesters today, right?”

  In a flash, Colby turned all business. “Yeah. I took down all their names and I cross-referenced it with the official membership—they were all on the books, no random one-day volunteers, and all the IDs I saw checked out. They were the real thing.”

  “How did they come up with the idea of the flash mob protest?”

  “I don’t know,” Colby said after a brief pause. “I didn’t ask. It’s not exactly an original idea, boss. Kind of out-of-date, even. I know they were a little old for that kind of thing, but it’s not like they couldn’t have heard about it.”

  “They could have heard about it,” Martin said. “It’s not really the flash mob part that I’m stuck on. It’s the fact that I’ve lived in this city almost all my life and I’ve never heard of the Historical Society doing any other on-the-ground activism besides picketing actual teardown sites. They don’t just show up places and start complaining about people not caring enough about history.”

  Tiffani was checking something on her own phone and for a horrible moment Martin was worried that he was boring her, but then she looked up, her eyes alight.

  She said, “There’s not an active remodeling or destruction going on right now, either. None of the city’s historic buildings are scheduled to have anything done to them anytime soon.”

  He could have kissed her.

  “Tiffani says that there’s not anything going on right now to outrage them, either. So what I want to know is what made them decide that this courtroom, this trial, is where they wanted to make their stand. There are a lot of places in Sterling where you can find a decent-sized crowd, and in most of them, you wouldn’t risk being taken out in handcuffs. Who was the woman who was leading them?”

  “Florence Edmondson,” Colby said instantly. “She’s a real firecracker.”

  “Get me her address, would you?”

  “On it. I’ll text it to you. And—sorry. I should have thought to ask.”

  “I wouldn’t have thought of it myself if I hadn’t spent half of dinner talking about coin collecting.”

  “Tiffani collects coins? Ask her if she has any Ben Franklin half-dollars!”

  He learned something new about his team every day.

  So he didn’t burst Colby’s bubble immediately, he said, “I’ll let you know,” and hung up.

  He looked at Tiffani.

  “I know I already owe you two kinds of dessert, so I can’t believe I’m saying this, but do you want to come with me to talk to the head of the Historical Society?”

  Tiffani patted her mouth dry with her napkin and folded it beside her plate. The smile on her face was so wide anyone would have thought Martin had offered to whisk her away to the Caribbean.

  “I’d love to.”

  *

  Florence Edmondson lived in exactly the kind of house she fought so hard to preserve, and it was impossible to miss how much love and attention had gone into keeping it up. The Victorian gingerbread trim was freshly painted, the steps leading up to the porch had been sanded smooth, and there was a stained glass window set in the front door that looked like a real antique. Martin could see the bubbles in it from where a real glassblower had done their work. It was, of course, polished to a shine.

  Martin rang the doorbell.

  “It’s late,” Tiffani said, checking her watch. “Almost nine. She might have gone to bed.”

  But a light clicked on the entryway and then Florence opened the door. She had changed into a housecoat of the kind Martin hadn’t seen in years, but she at least didn’t look like they had woken her up.

  She blinked at them a little owlishly for a moment and then said, “Oh, yes, the nice young lady from the courtroom and her young man. I hope you haven’t come to arrest me after all.”

  “No, ma’am,” Martin said. He was privately delighted at having been identified as Tiffani’s young man. “And we’re sorry to bother
you. I just wanted to ask you a few questions.”

  “Well, come on in. You’re letting all the cold air out.”

  There was no quick way to ask Florence Edmondson his questions, because first she insisted on sitting them down in her parlor. Then she insisted on them admiring that it was what she called a “genuine, no-fooling” parlor, down to the wrought iron grate on the fireplace and the clutter of carefully preserved knickknacks.

  Then she had to bring in a plate of cookies—“These aren’t homemade, but who has the time for that nowadays? I’m up sunrise to sunset trying to keep civilization intact”—and glasses of water for them both.

  “A little late for coffee or tea, I suppose,” she said. “But I could put on the kettle and make hot cocoa.”

  “It’s really fine,” Martin said hastily.

  When they were all seated, refreshed, and educated on the history of her home, Florence said, “Now, young man. What questions did you have for me?”

  Instinct told Martin not to just jump in, however much he wanted to. He took a bite of one of her shortbread cookies and praised it. That wasn’t hard: it was one of the best things he’d ever tasted. He might have to start coming to Historical Society meetings after all.

  He said, “Has the Historical Society had any protests like this before?”

  She waved her hand dismissively. “We’ve had protests aplenty. But usually they’ve been more... reactive. Chaining ourselves to gates and fences, collecting signatures to protest against the historic waterfront being destroyed by a land deal that’s already in the works. This was the first recruitment rally we’ve done.”

  “You did a great job,” Tiffani said earnestly.

  Florence smiled. “Thank you, dear. Have another piece of shortbread.”

  Martin counted the remaining pieces of shortbread, trying to make sure there would be enough for him to go back for more once he was done asking questions.

  “So that was what you were trying to do, then,” he said. “Get people interested in the Society.”

  “And we went through those brochures like hotcakes at a church supper, young man, so I think we did just fine. The two of you should come yourselves. People your age need clubs and causes so you don’t forget that there’s life outside of your work.”