No wonder he’d attracted this kind of vendetta.
“No extra security,” McMillan said. “That’s final. I won’t have you inducing terror and panic.”
He stood up and pointed them both towards the door.
“How much terror and panic do you think it would induce if someone started waving a gun around?” Tiffani said under her breath as she and Martin filed out.
“I’m afraid we might find out,” Martin said grimly.
In the hallway, surrounded by people briskly passing by to either side of them, they stood close together, like two people huddling over a fire—in this case, she supposed, their shared certainty that something was very wrong here.
“Could I talk you into suddenly feeling like you had to call in sick?” Martin said.
From the look in his eyes, he already knew the answer.
Tiffani shook her head. “I have a job to do. And if I’m not there to do it, they’ll just send in someone else. Someone who might not be willing to pitch in and help you if things go wrong. You want to protect me? I want to protect you. And I don’t want to put anyone else in danger just so I can be safe.”
Martin touched her chin. Just for a moment, but Tiffani felt as though the warmth of his hand would linger there all day.
“My brave mate,” he said, his voice pitched too low for anyone else to hear the words. “I never thought perfect for me would mean you being this perfect.”
She couldn’t explain it, not even to herself, but there was something so straightforward about him, something that slipped past all her defenses. He was so matter-of-fact even when he was saying these romantic lines that any woman would kill to hear. He didn’t seem to know they were lines at all—and maybe from him, they weren’t. No, she knew they weren’t. They were just what he felt. He was honest, and she was his truth.
No, she wasn’t going to let anything happen to him.
*
“All rise!”
And here we go.
Tiffani rose along with everyone else, smoothing her skirt down as she stood. She made eye contact with Martin and twitched her gaze towards Bruce, hoping he would follow her look. He did and gave her a tiny nod.
She would have guessed that being so nervous would be a huge distraction. She’d have thought that her fingers would slip and slide off the keys or come down too heavily. She’d expected any and every kind of mistake that would result in her having an error-ridden set of notes that it would take forever to correct.
But even if she was nervous, her hands were not. They flew over the steno machine keys like they were totally separate from the rest of her body.
It had been one thing to know that she was good at her job. It was another thing entirely to see it in action.
How about that.
But for the whole morning, it seemed like all their nervousness, all their planning, and all their caution might have been for nothing. The trial moved on as smoothly as it was ever going to—testimonies and cross-examinations were peppered with heated objections, the spectators responded audibly even when told multiple times to remain quiet, and anyone stepping out of the room was greeted immediately with camera flashes. But that was all par for the course,
more or less. It came with the publicity.
Martin had been right: Tiffani knew this kind of thing. She had been through it before. And so far, she thought, today was going as well as it could.
Maybe there had never been anything wrong.
Maybe even if Bruce had been trying to strike out at his boss, the increased attention this morning had scared him off. Especially since Tiffani didn’t trust McMillan not to have mentioned something about Martin interfering in his running of his own courtroom.
Bruce could have gotten spooked, especially if the earlier events had partly been about lulling them into ignoring any hint of a threat. He wouldn’t have liked that tensing them up instead.
It was like some alternate take on the boy who cried wolf, Tiffani reflected. One where the townspeople started to think that something was a little creepy about how much this kid wanted them to think a wolf was coming, and in the end the kid wound up in therapy.
Which was, actually, a kinder ending to the story than being eaten by a wolf.
Or knocked in the head by a pegasus’s hoof.