by Zoe Chant
But she had liked thinking about him much more than she’d liked thinking about the possible danger. He was warm and the danger made her shiver. She wrapped her arms around herself despite the sticky mid-July heat and the sweat prickling under her sensible professional cardigan.
“Right, I was in the courtroom. The judge called a recess and asked me to his chambers. He wanted to tell me I was too inexperienced to do the job I’d been hired to do and that he’d be double-checking all my work for mistakes. Nice guy. I’d just gotten back to the courtroom when the sirens came on to tell us we were all doomed—so I guess they was just finishing what McMillan started. I’m kidding. I know it was probably just a prank.”
She had dealt with enough of those pranks in the aftermath of her ex-husband’s arrest. Of course, in that case, a bomb had gone off eventually...
But Martin seemed to know exactly what she wanted to hear.
“McMillan wouldn’t know good work from bad if his life depended on it. And if he did, all he’d do is get so jealous of someone else being competent that he’d choose the bad work over the good. And he can’t fire you. Remember that.”
“He can’t, but my boss can, and my boss can listen to a judge’s advice. And probably will.”
“Not McMillan’s.” Martin sounded sure of that. “He’s in a class of his own. Disliking him is above any level of office politics.”
She exhaled. It did make her feel a little better to know that McMillan really was infamous to people outside the stenographers pool.
“Okay. I believe you.”
“Good.” His gray eyes were serious. Concerned. “Are you hurt?”
Besides her pride?
“I got shoved a little on my way out and bumped my elbow. Write your congressman and ask for shag carpeting on all courtroom walls. Very tasteful.”
He smiled, but something about the determination in that smile suggested that he really might.
“It’s really not bad,” Tiffani added, not wanting to be responsible for unleashing seventies decor on an innocent city courthouse. “Look.”
She unbuttoned the cuff of her blouse and rolled the sleeve back, exposing her elbow. With no warning, this suddenly felt like the sexiest striptease she’d ever done. No playful show for a boyfriend or grimly acrobatic performance for Gordon had ever come close to this open-air, sundrenched moment of showing just a little bit more skin than she’d been showing before.
She was glad it was just a bruise, not a mess of blood. Even aside from the embarrassment, the blouse had been expensive and she no longer had much money to throw around on clothes.
Martin seemed as hypnotized as she felt. He lifted his hand and laid one warm, callused fingertip just above the bruise, on the sensitive skin of her upper arm.
Proof one could be hot and cold at the same time.
“I’m sorry,” Tiffani said, pulling back.
She shoved the sleeve down hastily, his touch lingering on her skin. She gathered what resolve she could.
“I like you. But if I were your wife, I wouldn’t like... this.”
He looked stricken. “I—”
“I just don’t want to do that.”
He swallowed, clearly trying to find the right words. Then he said, “She’s gone.”
Tiffani raised her eyebrows. An out of town wife was not the way to her heart.
He shook his head. “Not like you’re thinking. She died. Three years ago last May.”
Tiffani closed her eyes as if she could hide from her own embarrassment.
“I’m so sorry. That’s—I didn’t know. That’s awful, and I’m sorry I made you think about it in such a terrible way.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
Theo could have told me, Tiffani thought darkly. Though why he would have was a little bit beyond her: she couldn’t exactly blame him for not realizing she might one day meet his boss and swoon for him like she was sixteen again.
Still, she wanted to retaliate by making him some of her infamous tooth-breaking chocolate chip cookies. Since Theo was some kind of homeschooled super-gentleman, he would struggle through the whole batch just to be polite.
“It’s fine,” Martin said. “Really. I should have thought about what impression the wedding ring would make. You were right to not ignore it.”
“My ex-husband...” She smiled a tight, unhappy smile. “Well, you know what my ex-husband was like. Everybody in the country does.”
He didn’t pretend to not know what she meant, and she liked him even more for that.
She gathered up her courage to ask if he would be free for dinner.
Let me apologize for misjudging you.
Let me apologize by slowly untying your tie and unbuttoning your shirt. I’m very good at apologies.
He beat her to the punch, but not in the way she’d been hoping.
“Tiffani, nothing’s going to happen to you. I swear. I’ll be in the courtroom myself from now on.”
“But your job must keep you so busy. Do you really have that kind of time?”
“I’ll make it. I’ll be there every day you need me, for as long as you need me.”
A whistle cut through the air. She saw Theo’s coworker Colby striding up. He had a faintly manic grin on his face.
“Boss, the bomb squad’s going over the building with a fine-toothed comb. They’re not finding anything, so I still think we’re talking punk kids.”
“How old are you?” Martin said. “You’re too young to say ‘punk kids.’ You’re the wrong generation to say ‘punk kids.’”
“I grew up on the wrong side of the tracks, boss, I was a punk kid.”
“You grew up in Beverly Hills,” Martin said.
“I’m just saying I don’t think we’re going to turn up someone with an Anarchist’s Cookbook or a long history of angry letters to the editor. This isn’t all that serious. But the bomb squad’s all revved up to look in the wrong direction. They think that when they find the caller it’s going to turn out to be terrorism, maybe organized crime. I’m still thinking punk kids.”
“Any particular reason?” Martin said.
Colby’s grin only intensified. “Nah. Just that this whole thing has a general whiff of immaturity. Can I look into it some more, boss?”
“As much as you like,” Martin said. He seemed relieved. “I like having you out on the hunt, to be honest, and I trust you not to come down too hard on kids. Even punk kids. The courtroom security will have to be increased while you’re out chasing leads, but we can handle that.”
“Gretchen and Theo?”
“I’m going to do it myself.”
“That’s a lot of standing in a corner and staring at people,” Colby said. “For an old warhorse like you.”
Martin smiled. It was a nice smile, one that made the corners of his eyes wrinkle up. He didn’t have enough laughlines for a man his age, and Tiffani wanted, suddenly and intensely, to help him acquire them.
“I’m glad you’re feeling optimistic about catching our suspect, Colby, but don’t push me.”
“I never push,” Colby said, apparently completely genuine. He tossed Martin a salute, one just a little too crisp to have come from anything other than a real military background. “I’m going to go make this particular prank caller wish he’d never crossed paths with me. And I’m going to do it with a smile on my face and a song in my heart.”
He went off. He had a distinctive walk, more fluid than anyone else’s Tiffani had ever seen. For some reason it made her think of a nature documentary.
“He’s taking this pretty personally,” Tiffani said.
Martin nodded. “He got assigned to the courtroom this morning, so it’s his. And he’s got a protective streak a mile wide.” He offered her a sheepish smile. “We all do, really.”
“It’s nice,” she said, meaning it with her whole heart. “The world could do with a little protecting.”
It was good to be reminded that there were people out there actively trying
to make the world better. No matter how frustrated she might get, she should remember that. There was a lot of good to balance the bad.
The choice that had given her Gordon had also given her Jillian, the best daughter and best friend anyone could ever ask for. Today had given her stomach-churning anxiety and fear—but also butterflies in her stomach. It had given her McMillan but also Martin.
All the clouds in the world couldn’t block out all the sky.
“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?
Sure. Why not. Another big bite.
“If there’s a diet you can think of, I’ve been on it. I always hated it. Now I’m just me and I eat whatever I want, whenever I want, because I wasted a lot of time always ordering grilled salmon.”
“You have a pasta deficit.”
“Which at the moment I’m consoling with panini. Close to satisfaction, but still just a centimeter away.”
Like their hands on the table.
She hesitated. “I’ve never told anyone I’ve never been to Italy.”
Martin considered this. “I’ve never told anyone I’ve never been to Borneo.”
“Did people think you should have been to Borneo?”
“I don’t know, it never came up.”
“Italy used to come up. I just... pretended. Usually I avoided directly lying, but not always, and then I always wanted to take a shower afterwards to wash off this... simpering idiot I’d acted like for a whole evening, chiming in with facts she’d gotten off TripAdvisor. Just so people wouldn’t look at me.”
He closed the gap between their hands.
His hand dwarfed hers by so much. But even if she was smaller, she was no longer quite as delicate as she’d been. Now, even if they’d been earned by unheroic typing practice and long hours with her pen, she had her calluses too. She had proof, on her body, of the person she’d chosen to be.
She turned her hand around so her palm was against his. So he could feel the pads of her fingers against his own.
Martin said, “Does it bother you when I look at you?”
“No one’s ever looked at me like you do.” She took a deep breath. “It would bother me if you stopped.”
She couldn’t get her voice to sound light enough, flirtatious enough. She couldn’t tease. She didn’t know why, but for her, this already felt serious.
You rush into things. You always have. You make your biggest mistakes that way.
It wasn’t the rushing that did me in, Tiffani thought. It was the thousand little choices after that. My problem isn’t that I was reckless. It’s that after I was reckless, I panicked and lost all my courage.
She said, “How much time do you think we have before we have to be back at work?”
Martin’s eyes met hers.
“Enough.”
Chapter Four: Martin
The moment he said the word, Martin felt the lie of it.
There would never be enough time. Not for them.
If there had been a clock ticking away inside him counting down to the exact moment when he would have fallen in love with her whether she was his mate or not, it had stopped still before her hand had even touched his.
Tiffani had starved and starved herself to fit an idea that all that deprivation would create something finer and worthier. But nothing could be better than Tiffani as she was. Locked up in her society wife
image, Tiffani hadn’t done the good she was doing now. She would never have been free to stand up to cranky judges or entertain kids with funny, improvised sci-fi fairy tales. She burned so much more brightly now and she kept so many more people warm.
You could learn from her, his pegasus said.
He was certainly learning something. Two hours ago, he’d thought love and excitement were out of his life for good. Now he was walking with her hand-in-hand to a hotel, his heart racing.
Correction: now he was stopping by a drugstore with her to buy condoms. He felt like he had an enormous flashing sign over his head: NEWLY IN LOVE. ABOUT TO HAVE SEX.
He felt alive.
“I’ve never done anything like this before,” he said.
“I’ve never done this just because I wanted to.”
Between the two of them, they had so much past.
He tightened his hand around hers.
“The problem with having never done this before is that I don’t know what would be the best way to do it.”
“Don’t say you only want the room for an hour,” Tiffani advised. “Hotels frown on that.”
He checked his watch. “I’m not sure we have an hour.”
“Oh, then that’s completely different. We’ll just walk up to the desk and say we want a room for half an hour. We’ll say that honestly, fifteen minutes could do in a pinch.”
“If they just have a roomy broom closet...”
“That’s the way to any hotel manager’s heart.”
Their walk had carried them to a reasonably upscale hotel. Once they pushed into that revolving glass door, it was either keep on straight towards their destination or wind up going around in circles.
He looked at Tiffani.
She’d been brave enough to restart her life.
He could be brave enough to restart his. Full throttle.
It was, after all, working out pretty well so far. Even if all this made him feel like a teenager.
“Excuse me,” an irate woman behind them said, “are you in or are you out?”
“In,” Martin said, and stepped forward straight and true.
The clerk at the desk wore a starchy shirt and an even starchier smile.