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

“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.