“Wait, he really is desperate to keep it all moving forward. What if all of this is about him?”
“To sabotage his career?”
“Or even just to mess with him, like you said last night. He’s not the most likable guy in the world.”
“You’ve got that right. He’s the kind of man who makes enemies wherever he goes.”
If that was all this was, he would almost have been tempted to let it go.
Almost.
Martin could have respected a one-on-one battle, aggrieved party against known asshole. He would have tried to keep things from getting to handcuffs and arrests. There had been days when he would have happily torpedoed Terrence McMillan’s career himself.
But whoever was targeting McMillan had no problem roping innocent bystanders into their plan.
They had scared the daylights out of the jury and all the courtroom attendees with that bomb threat. They’d set up the Historical Society as pawns in a bigger game. They’d crossed a line
. He couldn’t let that go.
Worst of all, as far as he was concerned, whoever had done this had threatened Tiffani. Maybe it had all been a joke, sure. But it was the kind of joke he was going to make very sure no one ever tried to play on them again.
Focus.
He brought his mind back to the problem at hand. Not revenge. Prevention.
“Spite is a powerful motivator. Is that all we’re thinking someone would gain from this? Or do they get an actual benefit from McMillan losing control of the trial?”
Tiffani smiled. “You do remember I’m not a Marshal, right? I’m not even a bailiff. I’m not even a mall cop. I don’t know the first thing about investigations.”
“I don’t buy that. You’ve been part of a trial before—a high-profile one, too, with almost this much of a media circus. You know how all this works, and you know the people involved as well as I do. And besides, you’re smart.”
He remembered her backing down first McMillan and then Florence, playing exactly the tune each of them had wanted to hear.
“You know how people think. What they want.”
Tiffani studied him for a moment as if trying to determine whether or not she could take him seriously. It only took a few seconds this time.
Two days ago, Martin thought, it would have taken her much longer to trust him. Now she was just unlearning an old, sad reflex to think that whoever complimented her on anything but her looks was secretly making fun of her.
Once again he vowed to someday tell Tiffani’s ex-husband exactly what he thought of him. Preferably while punching his teeth in.
“Well,” Tiffani said slowly, “another judge might want the trial. It’s prestigious. But no judge here would try that kind of trick, because if the trial got moved, it wouldn’t just get moved down the hall, it would get moved all the way to a different city. And there’d be no way to know for sure where it would go. It would be insane for someone to think that just because it wasn’t with McMillan, it would fall right into their lap.”
As a Marshal, Martin had always either worked alone or with a team, never with a partner. For the first time, he understood how electrifying it could be to have one person working through the same thought process you were. The two of you could ratchet each other along.
It was like going from the hard work of pulling a rowboat to the joy of paddling a canoe. Everything suddenly became so much easier when you were two.
“So it’s not a rival,” he said. “McMillan has two ex-wives, I think, but this doesn’t feel like the kind of plan a vengeful ex would cook up.”
“No,” Tiffani said blithely. “It doesn’t hurt enough for that. If I’d been married to McMillan, I could hit him a lot harder than this.”
“The mates of pegasi are always to be feared,” Martin said.
Tiffani blinked. “Mates? That’s what you call them?”
He’d forgotten that Gretchen had said that humans didn’t use that word for themselves. Shifters used almost nothing else. If you introduced someone as your wife or husband, your girlfriend or boyfriend, all it meant was that they were not, in fact, your mate.
“It is.” He decided not to apologize for how animal-like it sounded.