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

by Zoe Chant

  He wouldn’t be surprised if, according to Florence, Terry McMillan had done it too.

  “You’re out now,” Martin said. He tried to keep his voice calm. “Whatever he did to you, I’m sorry, but it’s done and you’re out of it now—Jamie, don’t play right back into his hands and get yourself thrown back in juvie.”

  Jamie shook his head. “I won’t go back. That’s not going to happen.” He jabbed his whole arm forward. “And stop standing in front of him! Stop protecting him!”

  Martin shook his head. “I have to, son. It’s my job.”

  “Why won’t you go back?” Tiffani said suddenly.

  Martin hadn’t even known that Bruce Tompoulidis was still in the room until he heard an unfamiliar voice, sharp and strained: “For God’s sake, Tiffani, don’t get involved. What’s the matter with you?”

  “Nothing,” Tiffani said. “There’s nothing the matter with me.”

  She moved to stand beside Martin. He passionately wished she was anywhere else and yet knew, at the same time, that she was exactly where she was supposed to be. They were destined to be a team.

  Tiffani said, “Jamie, did someone tell you that nothing bad would happen to you if you came here and did this? Did they say they’d be able to protect you?”

  “What the hell is she talking about?” Bruce said. He was now appealing to Martin, as though he thought Tiffani beyond reason: the edge of panic in his tone was sharper than a knife.

  Tiffani ignored him so completely it was like she couldn’t even hear him.

  All Martin wanted to do was to airlift her out of this, but his pegasus said, Don’t you dare. Our mate is strong.

  Being strong doesn’t mean you can’t get shot, Martin argued.

  She needs your trust more than she needs your protection.

  Fine. She had his trust—every last bit of it. He still wasn’t lowering his gun.

  “Because,” Tiffani said steadily, “if Bruce Tompoulidis—that guy back there who’s been yelling at me to shut up—if he told you that he could keep anything from happening to you, he lied. He doesn’t have that kind of power. He doesn’t have any influence. He’s just a law clerk who hates his boss and would be glad to ruin his day.”

  Martin watched Jamie take this in.

  The kid’s face washed out to a kind of clammy white—Martin could see every drop of sweat and every inflamed pimple standing out on his skin. He must have been so easy to spin up. His hand faltered, the angle of his shot dropping a little lower.

  Jamie said, “He said he could get me a helicopter.”

  Back behind Martin, Bruce groaned.

  “You lied to me?” Jamie said weakly. “You can’t help me?”

  “Look,” Bruce said, and already Martin could hear him trying to lay on the charm—the charm Tiffani had said he could switch on and off with a flick of his wrist. “It’s just a prank. No one’s going to get you in any serious trouble for a stupid prank—”

  Jamie screamed something inarticulate and swung his whole body towards Bruce.

  And towards Tiffani. She was right in his line of fire.

  Oh, God, no.

  In a cold rush of instinct, Martin launched himself forward.

  He hit the kid—and then the floor—so hard that for a moment he couldn’t have said whether or not the gun had actually gone off. His ears were pounding too hard with his own heartbeat, and he was too jarred by their collision.

  But a few seconds of desperate grappling, scrambling around for the gun, reassured him a little. He had been shot before, and he could feel nothing of that pain now. And when he wrested the gun away from Tim, the muzzle was cold.

  Cold and—not metal?

  He snapped on the handcuffs and got up and away from the kid as quickly as he could. The last thing he wanted now was to put Jamie within reach of his own—much more real—weapon.

  “Are you all right? Tiffani, are you hurt?”

  “I’m fine.” She squeezed his shoulder. Her voice was music to his ears. “I’m fine, you got him in time. You’re okay?”

  He exhaled. “Yeah.” He held up the gun. “It’s plastic, from a 3D printer. It might fire, it might not. But that must be how he got it in past the metal detectors.”

  He didn’t know why he was explaining this—he thought he might be in a little bit of shock. The terror of having his mate threatened and his own life almost taken was slowly sinking in, like cold water had started seeping all the way up his body.

  He blinked a few times. “Where’s Bruce?”

  “Unconscious,” Tiffani said.

  “Unconscious?”

  He had almost forgotten McMillan was even there, but then that skull-faced, lipless man said, with perfect serenity, “He tried to run and I cracked him in the back of the skull with my gavel.”

  Well. He was still an asshole. Martin wasn’t going to forget that anytime soon. If McMillan had been able to work with people, Bruce wouldn’t have hated him, and if he hadn’t been so harsh, Bruce wouldn’t have been able to find a kid dumb enough and aggrieved enough to complete his plan. A kid who had now subsided into muffled crying.

  But he could save all of that for later.

  He took Tiffani in his arms and wasn’t surprised at all when she let out a single sob against his chest. The adrenaline was draining away from them both, leaving behind nothing but shakiness and the vertigo-like fear of what had almost happened right in front of them.

  All he wanted was to bask in the smell of her hair and the feel of her warm, soft body against his own. Her skin smelled like warm gingerbread.

  “You were so brave,” he whispered.

  She tilted her head against him in what he thought was probably meant to be a nod. “I think we were both fairly badass.”

  He kissed her forehead. This was probably the last still moment they would have for a while, and he wanted to leave her with as much tenderness as he could.

  Really, he never wanted to leave her at all.

  He went and cautiously opened the main courtroom door about an inch. The last thing he wanted to do was fling it wide open when he had no doubt there was a SWAT team huddled out there, along with all his Marshals at their tensest and most diligent.

  “It’s all right,” he called out. “It’s over.”

  “That’s Chief Deputy Martin Powell,” he heard Colby say. “Hold all fire.”

  “That’s a fucking order,” Gretchen added, with a sharpness that told him they had spent this whole time wrestling for control. There was no arguing with that voice.

  Attaboy. Attagirl.

  Martin opened the door the rest of the way, letting the assembled crowd see that the courtroom was indeed carnage-free.

  “I don’t want anyone in here but my team.”

  He would have sworn that the SWAT team actually managed to convey even through those black all-face visors of theirs that they felt hurt by this. No one replicated playground dynamics like law enforcement agencies, he thought.

  He added, “And keep the perimeter secure around back, too.”

  That at least gave the SWAT boys something to do. He heard their radios eagerly start to chirp, conveying this information.

  Colby, Gretchen, and Theo strode into the courtroom.

  Theo went at once to Tiffani and hugged her. His dragonmarks, visible now that he’d dropped his guard, were all aglow. If anything had happened to his mate’s stepmother, Martin knew it would have taken everything in Theo not to shift then and there to burn down the person responsible.

  But he would have had to wait in line.

  “We’re so happy you’re both safe,” Theo said.

  “I’m safe too,” McMillan said in his prissy voice. “I am the one the gun was pointed at for the vast majority of the time.”

  “We’re glad you’re safe too, Your Honor,” Gretchen said in what Martin suspected was a deliberately lifeless voice. “And your clerk.”

  “Oh, no,” Martin said. “Not ‘and his clerk.’ Colby, can I borrow
your cuffs?”

  “Sure, boss.” Colby unclipped them from his belt and handed them over. “But I don’t think this kid’s going anywhere.”

  “It’s not the kid I’m worried about,” Martin said grimly.

  He wasn’t surprised to see Colby help Jamie up. He was as gentle with him as if he’d been the victim in all this and not the one holding the gun. Colby had a soft spot a mile long for his punk kids, and Martin trusted that with him taking the lead on handling Jamie, Jamie would do much better bouncing back from this crime than he had the last. He felt good about that.

  But not as good as he felt about clicking those cuffs on Bruce’s wrists.

  “The gun wouldn’t have fired,” Bruce said desperately. “I deliberately used a printing model that wouldn’t work, he couldn’t have shot anyone!”

  “No.” He was so angry that he could barely unclench his jaw long enough to talk. “But I could have shot him. You probably didn’t even think about that. Everyone was just a little pawn in your game.”

  He hauled Bruce around by the cuffs, turning until he was glaring at McMillan.

  “And you, Your Honor. You bring that hammer of yours down on so many kids that you don’t even recognize them when they show up in your courtroom again. And you run roughshod over this whole courthouse—it’s a mystery to me that it took as long as it did for you to attract this kind of trouble.”

  “Chief,” Gretchen said, touching his elbow. “Let’s maybe not get in trouble.”

  “This is worth the trouble,” Martin said. “Now, I can’t control the sentences you pass, aside from voting against you—which believe me, I take a lot of pleasure in doing. But if I hear again of you treating the people who work for you the way you’ve been treating Tiffani, and hell, maybe even Bruce here... I will do everything in my power to get you disbarred for unprofessional conduct.”

  McMillan just looked at him. Maybe he thought Martin was lying. Or just blowing off steam.

  Maybe he had been who he was for so long that all of this just rolled off of him. He wouldn’t change because he wouldn’t let himself learn.

  “That’s quite a speech,” McMillan said icily. “Forgive me if I’m unimpressed.”

  “Well, then let me hit you where it hurts.” Martin smiled as widely as he could manage. “There’s no way in hell that this trial is going to stay in your courtroom, Your Honor. Not after this.”

  And at last, the judge’s awful composure faltered.

  So the trial of the century left Sterling after all. Good riddance.

  Chapter Twenty: Tiffani

  Tiffani had taken two showers since escaping the courtroom, and she still wasn’t sure she had washed off the punky, sour smell of fear. Maybe she had drowned it in lilac and mint, but it kept surfacing like a bitter reminder. She wrapped herself in a bathrobe and made a cup of tea.

  Jillian had only just agreed to leave her alone. She’d wanted to stay with Tiffani until Martin was able to come, but Tiffani had at last persuaded her stepdaughter that she was fine. She hadn’t been hurt. She was only rattled, and all she needed to cure that was time.

  Time and, she suspected, Martin’s arms around her. Jillian had taken the edge off her shakiness, but Martin would be the one to finish it.

  In the meantime, she just had to hold herself together and try not to jump to any conclusions about why he still hadn’t shown up. She had known this afternoon would be a nightmare of work for him—he would need to coordinate the booking of both Tim and Bruce, manage his office’s response to the media blitz, and do a thousand other bits of paperwork. She knew that.

  He was fine. Him not being here didn’t mean anything had happened to him, no matter how vividly she remembered him leaping on top of someone with a gun.

  He was fine. She was fine.

  She just wanted her boyfriend. She was pleased to discover that she was very okay with that. She had faced down an armed gunman—well, an armed gunkid—without flinching and she had refused to leave Martin’s side when he was in danger. If she wanted to spend the aftermath of that cuddling with him, she didn’t think that meant she was weak or silly. It just meant she was human.

  Not a project. Just a person.

  This time it wasn’t a mantra. It was just what she knew in her heart to be true.

  Martin finally arrived at a quarter past seven. Tiffani could read the weariness in every line of his face.

  She smiled, overwhelmingly glad to see him no matter how tired he was.

  “Hi, honey. Hard day?”

  “Do you know how many people came up to me asking me why I didn’t just let the kid shoot McMillan?”

  “Did you tell them he didn’t have a real gun?”

  “I did. Then they just asked why I didn’t loan him mine. Or let him bash McMillan over the head with your steno machine. I told them you’d never forgive me if anything happened to Felix.” He rubbed his eyes and then his whole expression softened. “You look beautiful.”

  “Thank you. It’s the height of bathrobe chic.”

  “No, really.” He wound a long, tumbled-down curl around his finger. “It’s like I closed my eyes and fell asleep and you’re my dream.”

  “I thought it was my nightmare, seeing someone point a gun at you,” Tiffani said quietly. “So it’s the best thing in the world to me to see you here, alive, and know that I’m awake.”

  She hugged him a long time just to really, truly convince herself that he was there and as solid as ever. Then she sent him off for a shower while she poured them both drinks.

  Martin emerged a few minutes later, rubbing at his head with a towel.

  Tiffani was simultaneously envious of the short showers men could succeed in taking and appalled that they considered getting clean the only purpose of a good, hot shower. She vowed to introduce Martin to various luxuries—baths, bath salts, oils, steam. Decadence. She wanted to spoil him.

  His eyes warmed when he saw her. “What are you smiling about?”

  “I’m thinking about the possibilities of you, me, and a nice luxurious bath.”

  “That does sound like it’s worth smiling about. Oh, and so is this.” He picked up the glass and took a long drink. “Thank you.”

  “I figured we could both use it after the day we’ve had. The day you had, especially, since I got to exercise the civilian privilege of going off somewhere to decompress.”

  “The afternoon was long,” Martin admitted. “But I’ve needed this ever since you were in the same room with a loaded gun. What I thought was a loaded gun, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said softly. “I didn’t want to scare you. I just couldn’t leave you like that.”

  “I know. I couldn’t have left you either, and it’s not because I’m a Marshal. It’s just because I’m me and you’re you.”

  He finished off the drink and she got up without saying anything else to pour him another one.

  “There were three people in that room who made the problem we were dealing with, and the one I blame least is the kid. He’s a kid, what does he know?”

  “You and Jillian are going to get along just fine,” Tiffani said wryly, thinking of all Jillian’s stray teenagers at the community center.

  “But by the time Jamie pointed that gun at Bruce, I could have pulled the trigger right along with him. I don’t care how awful McMillan was to work with, Bruce Tompoulidis treated everyone else in his life like they were just there for him to toy with. You. Jamie. Florence and the rest of the Historical Society.”

  Tiffani nodded. “He didn’t like McMillan acting like he was beneath him, but that’s how he acted with everyone else.”

  She laced their fingers together.

  “But you didn’t pull the trigger,” Tiffani said. “You jumped in front of the gun. You got everyone out alive and okay, no matter how much you hated them right then.”

  He smiled. “That is something, I guess.”

  Once, she knew, she would have said that she understood Bruce. He was like Gor
don.

  But it was like remembering the time she had fallen while playing soccer as a kid. She’d landed with her bare knee on a rock. She remembered the pain, sure. In the right light, she could even still see the scar. But it was no longer real to her.

  It was a memory, and it was one that would mean less and less to her as the years went by.

  It hadn’t been the consolation Martin had needed, so it hadn’t been what she had first thought.

  “I don’t know if you know how much better you’ve made my life,” Tiffani said. “I don’t even know if I can explain it to you. But it’s like I was stuck on a treadmill in a tunnel, working really hard to get to the light at the end, doing everything I could... but staying in the same place. Then you gave me your hand and took me out for real.”

  He shook his head. “You would have gotten through that tunnel on your own, Tiffani.”

  “Maybe. But I like the speed of traveling with you. And the company.”

  He cupped her cheek with his hand. “I’d like to travel with you for the rest of my life.”

  “I’d like that too,” Tiffani said.

  She leaned forward to kiss him.

  It wasn’t the tingle of whiskey on his lips or even her own that threatened to get her drunk: it was just the knowledge that, as he’d said, they were who they were.

  As implausible—as impossible—as it had first seemed to her, they did belong together.

  In her forties, long after she’d stopped hoping for this kind of thing, she had finally had the whirlwind romance she had once dreamed of, in all its awkward glory.

  She’d had sex that bumped up against steering wheels, she’d stolen away at noon for the sake of passion, and she’d taken a midnight ride through the stars.

  And now this—her in her bathrobe and him in the pair of pajama pants he’d left at her place last night—both of them exhausted. All the ups and downs of life.

  They could travel through them together.

  Epilogue: Tiffani

  They went, at long last, to Italy.

  They had been in Rome for four days now and Tiffani still hadn’t stopped feeling like she was in the middle of some exceptionally vivid dream. Even the colors seemed richer than they were back home: the red of the tomatoes, the white of the mozzarella, the pale green of the pistachio gelato.