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

“Let me take you out to lunch,” Tiffani said. “They won’t be able to reconvene the court until later, right? We have time.”

“It’ll take the bomb squad a while to finish the search, but...”

She wanted to see him smile.

“Come on. As a favor to me in return for my excellent child entertainment skills.”

“None of those were my kids.”

“No, as far as I can tell, you have three grown kids you employ full-time.”

His mouth quirked. “That’s about right. And I guess you’ve entertained all of them before.”

“That’s right,” Tiffani said briskly. “So that means lunch.”

Martin cast his eyes over the now much more controlled chaos of the courthouse exodus. People were settling onto park benches and dispersing to their cars. Some enterprising elderly man had started frantically peddling used lawn chairs and three-dollar-a-can sodas and was probably going to make a fortune off it. It was a mess, but it was an orderly mess.

She could almost feel Martin give in. She knew he was sold the moment he broke into the most stunning smile she’d ever seen.

“Lunch,” he agreed.

They went to a little streetside Italian place she knew. Its lunch menu was quick and simple, mostly salads and paninis. You ordered at a counter and then ate either on barstools or at a handful of spindly tables. It was brisk and airy and she felt at home there in a way she never did in grander, more expensive restaurants.

They ordered paninis, which came out steaming hot and wrapped in paper, and ate them huddled together at their tiny table. She’d wanted that for the visual. Against the little toy chair and table, Martin looked even bigger than before and also softer and more adorable, like he was hosting a child’s tea party.

He raised his glass. “To first days.”

“To long waits,” Tiffani said, clinking glasses with him. “That is, if you really are going to be on guard duty yourself.”

“I am.”

“I won’t lie, I’ll feel safer with you there. At least until we know everything’s been taken care of.”

Not that he wouldn’t be a distraction, too. Maybe McMillan would start finding errors in her work after all. That should make him happy.

“I promise I’ll keep you safe,” Martin said. He touched the tabletop near her hand, leaving just a centimeter of scratched, varnished wood between them. He smiled and it was another real smile, one that crinkled his eyes, showing a spark of humor in the gray. “I’m willing to follow you into a thousand panini restaurants.”

“Oh, I wish you could, but I don’t think our sleepy little city could cough up that many. You’d have to follow me to Italy.”

“I’d like that. I’ve never been.”

There was nothing pretentious about him at all. If he’d been to Italy and liked it, he would have said so, and he would have talked enthusiastically about it without worrying about whether or not enthusiasm was in or out of season that year. He didn’t pretend.

Tiffani had spent most of her adult life in a world where everyone had to pretend all the time. So many of the conversations at Gordon’s parties had been about pretense. “Getting to know someone” didn’t mean having a real conversation with them, it meant holding a champagne flute while not-so-subtly feeling out where they stood on the social ladder. Where did they summer? Where did they winter? Would they recognize a reference to a joke made at the mayor’s last Christmas party? Had they been to Italy, to Spain, to China? If so, where had they stayed? There were only so many approved “right hotels,” just like there were only so many approved “right people.”

With no college degree and no blue-blooded family, Tiffani had never stood a chance. That had always been fine with Gordon, but not for the reason she would have liked.

He hadn’t cared if she fit in because she wasn’t there to fit in. She was there to be “fun.”

She hadn’t even really been allowed to be a trophy wife. All she had ever been was a trophy.

And she had let people treat her like that, like she was nothing more than something shiny always lacking just that last little bit of polish. No more.

In Martin’s eyes, she could see the reflection of the woman she wanted to be.

“I’ve never been either, actually,” she said. “I always wanted to. I have this image of it of being nothing but incredible pasta, bicycles on cobblestones, sunlight on ruins, and language in the air like music. And then more incredible pasta.”

She took another huge bite of her panini. Should she keep going with her cheesy frankness, even if made her seem naive? Even if it made her seem like a bad bet for any man who had his life together?