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

Chapter One: Tiffani

Tiffani had lived for years with a rigorous and unforgiving beauty routine.

Exercise: yoga, treadmill, swimming. Bicep curls, but never with enough weight for her to get any real muscle, just enough to keep her “tight,” as her now ex-husband Gordon had always said. Everything about her was always supposed to be tight and tucked in.

She’d had hand lotion made partly with ground-up pearls. Regular facial peels and mud masks. If her skin didn’t always look flawlessly smooth and tight-pored, some “friend” would make sure to mention it over mimosas. Oh, Tiffani, you look so tired lately, are things okay with you and Gordon?

Her hair had to be perfect, of course. Its natural light brown wasn’t good enough. She needed a tawny, lion-like gold that would set off the glowing undertones of her skin. And if her skin wasn’t glowing, well, whose fault was that? She should take more vitamin supplements. She should exfoliate. Had she tried a sugar scrub?

And let’s not forget the makeup and the clothes.

Her job, according to Gordon, was to make sure every man in the room wanted to get a look up her skirt. Her job was to be his arm candy. She hadn’t understood any of that when she’d married him at twenty-two and he had, with his usual business savvy, banked on her ignorance. She’d been a bubbly hair stylist still trying to pay her way through community college and she’d never met a man who threw away money so casually. When he started throwing it away on her, she fell hard and fast. Who could resist trips to the French Riviera? Candy-colored nights in Vegas hotels? Chanel gowns delivered to her door?

He had never offered to pay her tuition, not even when they were married. College had vanished in the rearview mirror. He had never wanted her to get to know his daughter, Jillian. She was supposed to be fun. She was supposed to be sexy.

In all her years of being married to Gordon Marcus, Tiffani had never once felt sexy. Her body had been an exhausting maintenance project kept up to someone else’s specifications. Even sex itself wasn’t sexy: it was just the end result of all those Brazilian waxes and all those exercises that kept her flexible.

It had taken Gordon going to prison for a laundry list of white collar crimes to give Tiffani a second chance to know herself.

It scared her shitless.

What if there’s nothing about me worth knowing?

But her stepdaughter Jillian had been characteristically firm in her stance that Tiffani had something to offer the world, and she’d been patient while Tiffani had struggled with how to rejoin it. In the end, it had been Jillian’s adorable boyfriend Theo, a US Marshal, who had pointed the way.

“Court reporters are always in demand,” Theo had said. “And it’s significant, valuable work. Even when trials are dull, there’s always something at stake: someone’s life or safety or dignity. Record-keeping is always worthy of respect.”

No one else talked like Theo, which was one of the reasons Tiffani was so fond of him. He’d been gentlemanly to her in a time when she’d thought there were no more gentlemen. And he was good for Jillian, who’d had a glow ever since they’d met, a glow that all the ground-up pearls in the world couldn’t have given her.

“I don’t know how to use one of those machines,” Tiffani had said.

She’d known from TV that court reporters used stenography machines that looked like the offspring of typewriters and plastic Fisher-Price xylophones: there were two short rows of blank keys. None of the keys seemed to have letters on them.

Jillian had only shrugged. “If you want to do it, you’ll learn how.” Courage had never been Jillian’s problem.

Tiffani had wanted to. What Theo had said appealed to her—she wanted to do work that mattered.

One hastily-earned Associate’s Degree and one license later and here she was. Tiffani Marcus, former trophy wife and current court reporter for the city of Sterling.

The not-so-funny part was that she had spent just as much time getting ready that morning as she ever had, only now she wasn’t trying to get anyone to look up her skirt. She just wanted to look serious. She had kept the tawny blonde hair—she’d grown to like it—but she had it tied tightly back. She ditched her contact lenses for tortoiseshell glasses. She wore only light makeup, finally wanting to look her age... well, wanting to look almost her age, anyway. She didn’t step on the bathroom scale.

I’m not a project, Tiffani told herself. I’m a person.

She walked into the courtroom with her head held high.

She’d never been so happy to have no one turn to look at her. She made her way to her desk and sat down in front of the stenography machine. At this point it was an old friend. She patted it like it was a faithful dog, superstitiously asking it to be on her side and keep her from making any mistakes.

She would need the help, too, because her boss, Milo, had saddled her with one of the biggest trials to ever hit the usually-sleepy Sterling. She suspected that he wanted to get rid of her. Theo had probably pulled a few strings at the courthouse to get her the job—she knew that being forty-plus and having hardly any work experience weren’t usually strong sell points even before you had to reveal that you had a white-collar criminal ex-husband—and Milo probably resented having his department interfered with. He had given her something he thought a rookie wouldn’t be able to handle.

Tiffani was determined to prove that she could handle it just fine. She settled her fingers down lightly on the row of keys and waited for the trial to start.