Examining the napkin, he added, “There’s no macaroni involved, though, I promise.”
Jessamine giggled. “Okay.”
“You’re good at that,” Martin said. He hadn’t seen Theo with kids before.
“I have,” Theo said, “a truly excessive number of cousins. And I like kids.”
Jillian turned to look at him, her eyes warm.
“I think I can see where that’s going,” Tiffani murmured to Martin. “And it makes me feel very old to think about Jilly becoming a mom.”
“You’re not old,” he said automatically. “But I have to tell you, I don’t think I’d have the energy for this.”
“I don’t think they usually get popped out in batches of twelve.”
“That’s something, at least. If Theo and Jillian only have one, at least they’ll outnumber it.”
Their party was big enough that the overwhelmed servers had been bringing out their food as soon as it was ready, just to keep something in front of the kids at all times, but now lunch arrived for the four of them. Martin thought he’d never been hungrier in his entire life. Even for a family friendly crayons-on-the-table restaurant’s chicken quesadilla.
It wasn’t everything he had hoped to offer Tiffani, but given the way she tucked in at once to her own club sandwich, he thought she was also just grateful to have sustenance at this po
int.
If they could just gulp everything down before it got contaminated by any more flying crayons...
Tiffani and Jillian made quiet, fervent conversation. Their concession to the surrounding kindergarten quickly became obvious.
“What did he look like when he was a p-e-g-a-s-u-s?”
Tiffani, to Martin’s delight, had a good memory for the specifics for his shifted form and went into enthusiastic detail about the white star on his head, the length of his mane, and the way his wings had bent the light that hit them into little rainbows. Martin’s inner pegasus preened at all this attention, pawing at the ground and tossing its head from side to side.
Ridiculous animal. But it was a thought with no heat behind it.
Our mate is pleased with us, his pegasus said loftily. You’re ridiculous if you don’t think that’s worth celebrating.
He had trouble arguing with that.
“It’s probably not safe to take a picture,” Jillian said. “I know it’s not the kind of thing that we’d ever want to get leaked, but—Martin, will you s-h-i-f-t sometime for me so I can see for myself?”
“Of course.”
He’d never been one of those shifters who viewed their other nature as something that to be doled out only to a precious few—if Martin could trust someone, he had no problem revealing himself. And he knew he could trust anyone who was both Theo’s mate and Tiffani’s stepdaughter. The days of the pegasi hunters were long over now.
“Anyway, Treasure,” Theo said to Jillian, “he wouldn’t show up on camera when he was transformed. Myth—ah, m-y-t-h-i-c s-h-i-f-t-e-r-s don’t.” He frowned. “Did I add an extra s anywhere in there?”
“I don’t think so, sweetie,” Tiffani said. “So, you’re like vam—v-a-m-p—you get the gist.”
“Not in literally any other way,” Martin said quickly. “We have reflections, we don’t drink their, ah, preferred cocktail, we don’t live forever, we don’t have psychic powers over rats and spiders...”
“That last part would be nice, actually,” Tiffani said thoughtfully. “You could make sure they both stayed out of your house. But I wouldn’t want to live forever.” She gave Martin a shy kind of smile. “I just want to make the most of the life I have.”
He leaned in to kiss her on the cheek.
A burnt sienna crayon bonked him in the middle of his forehead. It was a small price to pay.
*
“I know that wasn’t the lunch either one of us had exactly been hoping for,” Tiffani said as the two of them walked back to the courthouse hand-in-hand. “But I’m glad we did it.”