“Oh, calm down, Prince Theo, I’m just saying. And you were all over Martin’s love life before you found out your soon-to-be mother-in-law was in it.”
Martin remembered what Tiffani had said about him having three kids. At the moment, as Theo and Colby began to bicker over etiquette vs. honesty and Gretchen clearly tried to tune them both out, he felt the truth of that more than ever. And another truth, too.
He hadn’t needed to be lonely. He’d had family right here if he had just opened his eyes to see them.
“We’ll take things slowly emotionally,” he said, to put an end to the arguing.
“I think it’s great that the two of you dove right into something, at least,” Gretchen said. “You both deserve a good time after everything you’ve been through.”
“Seconded,” Theo said.
Gretchen cleared her throat. “Now, does anyone remember the part of today where we got a bomb threat? And the part of our jobs where we’re supposed to make sure that doesn’t lead to an actual bomb?”
“Thank you,” Martin said. “For the sentiment and for getting us back to work. Like I told Colby, I’m going to stand guard in the courtroom myself. That means I’m on crime prevention and you’re on crime solving.”
Colby nodded, his mouth wrinkling back in a uniquely wolfish snarl. “This is our territory. The courthouse people are our people—and now that includes our alpha’s mate. We get this wrapped up and we do it as quickly as possible.”
“Amen to that,” Gretchen said. “Chief, permission to start allocating manpower?”
“She means us,” Colby said to Theo.
“We’re powerful men,” Theo agreed.
“Permission granted. I trust all of you to get this right.”
Gretchen assigned Theo to talk to the notoriously prickly bomb squad—he looked a little glum about this and started polishing his cufflinks and then all the spare change he was carrying around, a reflexive dragon instinct to tidy his hoard to soothe himself—and Colby to talk to the prosecution and defense teams. She was going to handle the judge. She said it with a kind of lip-smacking delight that made Martin think she knew exactly how irritating Judge McMillan could be and was already planning on taking him down a peg or two.
“And you, Chief...” Gretchen smiled. “If I know anything about shifters, it’s that you’re only good for one thing right now.”
Colby snorted.
“Once again,” Martin said, “I can still fire you.”
“When we’re already under-staffed? Please, I have complete free rein right now and you know it, boss.”
“Anyway,” Gretchen said, glaring at Colby, “I meant that your mind is going to be on Tiffani, so go be with Tiffani. You’ve carried all of us at one time or another. Let us pick up the slack for you right now.”
Maybe Martin should have been embarrassed by this, but he wasn’t. He left the office with a little bit of a spring in his step.
The spring died out once he heard that Tiffani was going to be stuck in Judge McMillan’s chambers for the rest of the day. He didn’t have the right to barge in no matter how much he wanted to. The best he could do was hope that Gretchen would lure McMillan out soon, breaking up whatever meeting was going on in there.
He helped himself to a waxed paper cone of stale-tasting water from the cooler in the hallway and then walked the length of the hall several times. It wasn’t a long hall and pacing it made him feel a little ridiculous, like he was trapped in a shoebox.
Was this ridiculous? All he wanted to do was to spend time with her. He was sure she wanted to spend time with him too. He was her perfect mate as much as she was his, even if she didn’t know it yet.
Then again, any woman as smart and lively as Tiffani would get bored eventually if her mate did nothing but pine away for her. He might not be good for much right now, as Gretchen had so elegantly put it, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t at least try to look less like a puppy waiting forlornly for his owner to come back. He scrounged up a discarded newspaper. Local papers bred in every public area of the courthouse, usually stripped of their comics, sports, and arts sections.
Martin sat down on one of the rigid, uncomfortable benches and tried to talk himself into caring about a factory that made recycled crayons to donate to local children.
He might have succeeded in looking like an ordinary, we
ll-informed man of the world and not a head-over-heels-in-love shifter longing to be reunited with his mate, but the second Tiffani stepped back out into the hall, he knew that no number of newspapers could have made a difference in how he felt. Even if they’d had their sports sections.
Right now, he only had eyes for her.
Martin hadn’t come from a full-blooded shifter family. Ancient Greece had made a sport out of hunting pegasi for their feathers, which were supposed to possess the magic of flight, and their numbers had thinned so much that there were hardly any pegasi left. Martin was one of only a handful in North America. He was thankful that his clan hadn’t isolated itself to preserve some illusory purity of bloodline—he hadn’t had Theo’s experience of growing up surrounded by people who congratulated themselves on all being alike. He had a human uncle, a stag shifter aunt, and a lion shifter cousin in addition to his little pegasus colt of a niece. And aside from a few frayed tempers at crowded Thanksgiving dinners, they all mostly got along.
So Martin had been raised with some shifter relatives who had found their mates and believed fervently that that was the one right way to live—they used words like “transcendent” and phrases like “once in a lifetime”—but he had also been raised with some human relatives. They had taught him that there were lots of different ways to be happy, not just ones that involved falling in love at first sight. When he had turned forty, he had reluctantly decided that his prime years for finding his mate had passed, and he had been able—without too much trouble—to turn to the solutions of his human cousins. Get to know someone. Get to like her. Get to love her.