by Zoe Chant
The first was the scent of his skin, which was clean but harsh, like cheap soap. It made her want to hold him, more than anything else, because it reminded her that his last shower had been back at Stridmont, where he wouldn’t have had any privacy, let alone any luxury.
She wanted to spoil him in ways she didn’t even know guys could appreciate. She could get him in a huge marble bathtub and fill it up with steaming hot water and bath salts and bubbles, let him soak until every muscle in his body had relaxed completely and every trace of prison had been washed away.
The second and more important thing that stopped her was the gauze. She could feel the bandages.
He’d been stabbed. Aroused or not, he probably wasn’t up for any strenuous physical activity.
It wouldn’t have to be strenuous, the voice in her head suggested. He could lie back and take it easy. We’d be happy to do all the work.
Gretchen banished it. It was one thing to have her old childhood habit suddenly surge back to life; it was another thing entirely to make it the voice of her horniness.
And should she be worried that the voice of her horniness was apparently using the royal we?
She shifted her weight around, trying to make sure she didn’t accidentally put any pressure on his wounds.
Cooper touched her chin. “What is it? You look like something’s wrong.”
“I forgot you were hurt.”
He chuckled. “So did I, since you got on top of me.” He pulled her down, moving her—with uncanny accuracy—back to how she’d been most comfortable. “You’re the best painkiller I can imagine, Gretchen Miller.”
“I bet you say that to all the girls who accidentally snuggle up to your knife-wounds.”
Coop shook his head. His eyes looked warmer and more luminous than ever. “Just you.”
She kissed him again, long and slow, and then found a compromise position that was as gentle on him as possible without actively contorting her into a pretzel. She found herself checking the edges of his bandages automatically, wanting to make sure that she hadn’t messed up the surgical tape. She traced the long rectangles, amazed at the size of them. When they’d rushed the order to move Cooper to Bergen, she’d assumed that his injuries must have been minor. But these bandages felt major.
“When were you hurt?” she said slowly.
“Two days ago.”
She shot upright, shifting dramatically enough that then he did wince as the bandages pulled at him. He sucked his lower lip in between his teeth.
“Sorry, sorry, sorry! Just—two days ago? It feels like someone tried to make you into a pincushion.”
“You’re the second person today to have said that,” Cooper said, with a funny little smile, like he was feeling some kind of unusually sour nostalgia. “It’s pretty spot-on. They did a number on me, but I heal fast.”
“You heal fast,” she repeated.
She’d heard that line before a hundred times. She knew it like the back of her hand.
And in Cooper’s case, it seemed as true as it had ever been with her family or friends. He’d suffered through multiple stab wounds, and two days later, even though he was still in pain, he was walking, crouching, running, fighting through snowstorms. He’d been moving so easily and gracefully that Gretchen had almost forgotten that he was injured at all.
I heal fast.
She kissed his cheek, now with scientific interest as much as tenderness, and found exactly what she’d expected to find. Even though the temperature inside the car was dropping rapidly, and even though his face wasn’t flushed, his exposed skin was still warm to the touch. Not unaffected by the cold, not quite, but close.
Like Keith, like her family, like her friends, Cooper had good genes.
“You’re a shifter,” Gretchen said.
13
Cooper stared at her.
He didn’t know what he’d expected to follow that lingering kiss to his cheek, but it hadn’t been that.
Gretchen lined up the evidence before he could even answer her. “You heal fast. Eerily fast. You’re strong. You—”
“You’re right,” Cooper said, his brain finally kicking back into gear. “I’m a griffin shifter.”
There had been about a thousand emotions flickering through her face, like a carousel of feelings going around and around, and Cooper had only been able to parse a fraction of them. But now they resolved into something singular and incredibly clear: delight.
“A griffin!” Gretchen said. Her eyes looked positively starry. “I’ve never met a griffin before.”
“We put our pants on one leg at a time like everyone else.”
All he wanted to do was luxuriate in the bizarre, totally unfamiliar experience of someone just being enthusiastic about him, but the joy he was feeling at her reaction faded away when he remembered what had become the one hard, inescapable fact about his griffin.
It was missing. And it might be forever out of his reach.
Gretchen’s hand found his, and their fingers intertwined. She didn’t say anything, but he knew that she’d seen the look on his face. He’d been hiding this fear for a long time now, but he was completely unguarded around her. What she’d seen was him remembering that a part of his soul was dying on him.
“I can’t hear it anymore,” Cooper said. “I can’t feel it. All that time in prison, it was like it just... wasted away. I felt a flash of it during the fight, but nothing since then, no matter what I do.” He swallowed. His eyes felt hot, but he didn’t want to cry around her. If going to prison had meant losing his griffin but gaining Gretchen, well, it was worth it, and he didn’t want her to think otherwise.
But she looked more confused than pitying. There was a crease in her forehead as her face scrunched up a little. “I don’t think you can lose your animal. That doesn’t sound right.”
“That’s what it feels like.”
“But it’s part of you. Experiences change you, sure, but... your soul’s not something that can get pushed to the back of a shelf and get dusty because you’re not using it. It’s who you are. Even if you can’t express it, it’s still there.”
Maybe. He wanted to believe that, but it was impossible to be sure, especially when his griffin stayed incommunicado. He could have sworn that he’d sensed its presence at least a little today, but apparently it took more than a conversation to attract its interest.
He didn’t want to get his hopes up and have them come crashing down. He wanted to believe she was right, but he couldn’t handle the idea that he might just be disappointed again.
It would be better to just change the subject.
He said, “Are you a shifter too?”
Gretchen’s eyes had been bright, blazing with intensity, but now some of the light in them dimmed. It wasn’t that noticeable, not since she was still radiating interest, not since her actual expression didn’t change, but Cooper saw it all the same.
“No,” she said. “My family are all lynx shifters, but I’m a genetic quirk, I guess. Born human. But I’ve lived around shifters all my life, first with my family and now with my team.”
As nice as it sounded to have a family and a team that would surround you, people that you could claim and be claimed by in return, Cooper couldn’t help thinking that Gretchen’s position sounded kind of lonely all the same. She, too, had been the stray Monopoly piece in the Scrabble box.
Then something she said clicked with him. “Your team? All of them?”
Gretchen nodded. “Martin’s a pegasus, Theo’s a dragon, and Colby’s a wolf. Keith’s a unicorn.”
“Keith,” Cooper repeated, “is a unicorn. You’re sure.”
“I promise. I’ve seen him shift.”
“I just can’t picture that at all.” Prissy, stuck-up Keith, who hadn’t unbent until a car crash had almost split his head in two? He was secretly a majestic white horse with a flowing rainbow-colored mane?
Admittedly, Cooper had never actually seen a unicorn up close and in person. He wa
s mostly going off a mental image cobbled together from kid’s toys and the covers of fantasy novels. Maybe the real-life version was more dignified, and maybe it suited stuffy Keith as well as any animal could have.
He decided not to ask for clarification, though: he was getting too much of a kick out of picturing Keith as something straight out of a little girl’s toybox. And since Keith was recovering just fine, he didn’t think he had to feel too bad about laughing at the guy in his head.
Besides, that wasn’t what they needed to talk about. That was a more professional reason for staying on topic.
And around Gretchen, he did feel like he still had a profession, amazingly enough. She brought out the best in him... and the best in him was definitely a US Marshal.
“Your whole team,” Cooper said slowly. That couldn’t be a coincidence. He knew his whole team being shifters hadn’t been a matter of luck.
“The higher-ups cultivated it,” Gretchen confirmed immediately. “Martin networked with some shifter communities and figured out who to recruit.”
“Yeah. They did it with my unit too.”
“We really could have worked together, then,” Gretchen said. “If the shifters Martin had talked to had known you...”
She looked wistful at first, but then an idea seemed to cross her like a chill, and she shivered a little.
“What is it?” Cooper said.
“You would have loved it in Sterling. Everyone I work with is incredible. I wish it had gone that way—but I can’t say I like the idea that I could have ended up on your old team.”
Even though he’d defended his former coworkers to her, he still felt some reflex deep inside himself lash forward at that: I’m glad too. I’d never let that happen to you.
Like that fate was a bullet he wanted to take for her.
It shook him up. He knew why he felt protective of her—he’d fallen for her, plain and simple—but he didn’t know why those instincts flared up so strongly when he thought about Gretchen sitting at his old desk, right next to Phil and Monroe and Roger.
He tightened his arms around her, and she wriggled in closer against his chest, resting her head on his shoulder.
Maybe it was just that if she had been there, she could have been a target for whoever had framed him. Like Keith had said, Gretchen could have wound up just like Phil.
He couldn’t stand the thought of it.
She was there to distract him from it, though. He didn’t know how she had such a tender, automatic sense for when he needed to think about something else, but she did. She combed her fingers through his hair and said softly, “Maybe we should try to sleep. This storm’s not dying down anytime soon. We might have a lot of time to kill.”
She was right, and he knew it.
At first, he thought that the flurry of snow against the windows and the howl of the wind would keep him awake even if all his worries didn’t, but it turned out that none of those were a match for his exhaustion and the sheer comfort of Gretchen’s arms. He fell asleep immediately. Despite everything, it was the best and most deeply restful sleep he’d ever had.
*
Gretchen slept well, too, at least for a few hours. But unlike Cooper, she was human, and the cold that was slowly filling up the car was hitting her hard, even with his warmth to shelter her. He still felt toasty to her, and as comforting as ever, but she could feel shivers starting to set in, no matter how much she tried to fight them off and tell herself that they were in her head. She felt stiff and aching, like the cold had seeped into her very bones. No matter how closely they cuddled up to each other, he couldn’t make her warm enough to counteract that.
And she couldn’t make him warmer either—she was probably just making him colder. It had to feel like he was sleeping against an ice sculpture, and if he hadn’t woken up yet, it was only because he was completely worn out.
Poor Coop. And poor her.
The last of the trapped heat had leaked out of the car, and it wasn’t well-built enough to keep out the freezing cold. The mini-thermometer on the dash had dropped all the way to ten degrees below zero, and the bluster and snow outside showed no signs of stopping. Their shelter was reaching a crisis point. They could stay here and hope for the best, and it might work out—but with each passing hour, the odds were more and more against it.
If they left the car and braved the elements in search of central heating, she wouldn’t survive that walk. But he might. Even if he couldn’t summon up his griffin, his human form was tougher and more resilient than hers was.
She had to convince him to go.
He was a shifter, and she wasn’t his mate. He hadn’t recognized her on first sight. If he had, he would have told her once he knew that she would understand.
He was the right person for her—she had no doubt about that at all—but she wasn’t the right person for him, however much she wanted to be, and however much he did care about her. Of course he liked her: she was the first person to come along and believe him, and they had chemistry to burn.
In another world, if both of them had been human, they could have been perfectly happy together. She would have had no doubt at all that they were made for each other.
But they weren’t, and now she was grateful. It was kinder this way. Coop needed to have a fate that didn’t include her—in case she didn’t make it out of this alive.
He deserved to have a full, happy life with whoever his real mate was. She didn’t want him to feel what she was feeling right now: devastated that she had to lose him when she’d only just met him.
The sooner the better. If I have to do this, it’s best to just get it done.
She patted his cheek until he stirred.
Those eyes. They’d been the first part of him she’d loved, and she’d loved them even before she’d met him, even before she’d known him, even before she’d been willing to admit any of it to herself.
She had to say something, but she struggled with the words, partly because her lips were stiff and numb with the cold and partly because she felt like she was going to cry. She wanted him to live, and if it took pushing him out of the car to save his life, she would shove as hard as she could—but at the same time, she knew she didn’t want to die cold and alone.
She had been brave her whole life only to be scared now. But being scared couldn’t stop her from doing what she needed to do.
“Coop,” she whispered.
He tucked his chin against the top of her head, and Gretchen wondered, a little dizzily, if he’d heard the same trivia she had about most of your body’s heat escaping from your head. He was doing everything he could to keep her warm. She could feel the rumble of his throat against her forehead as he answered her.
She swallowed down her tears. If she let them out, they’d only freeze anyway, just like the rest of her.
She could see goosebumps on his shoulders where the blanket didn’t quite cover them. Cooper’s skin was chilly now, however nice he felt against her. Being a shifter didn’t make him invulnerable. That only drove home that he needed to leave. He needed to get to shelter while he still could.
“You have to go.”
He stilled. She couldn’t even feel him breathing anymore.
“No, Gretchen.”
“Yes.” She wrenched away from him, as much as it killed her to do it, and met his eyes. She needed him to see how much she meant this. “The storm’s not showing any signs of letting up, and if we keep waiting for it to stop, you won’t have any strength left by the time we know you need to run. You’re tougher than I am. You have a chance of making it out there. Being a shifter—”
“I can’t shift,” Cooper said. “I told you—there’s just nothing there anymore.”
“Even if that’s true, you can still get to that motel. You can still last longer in the cold than I can, and you have to try. You can’t just stay here and risk dying to keep me company.”
“I won’t leave you.”
“Yes, you will, dammit. You have to.�
� She took a deep breath and tried the tactic she thought might have the best chance. “It could be your chance at freedom, Coop. Do you really want to throw that away? Run and keep running.”
He touched her cheek, and she realized she could no longer feel much of a difference between the temperature of his skin and hers. They were both on a downhill slide. She willed him to feel that too, to understand how his own body was giving up on him, how little time he had left. He needed to go.
“I can’t leave you.”
At first she thought that he was just repeating himself, but then she noticed the slight difference. This time, he hadn’t said that he wouldn’t leave her, he’d said that he couldn’t. As if he physically couldn’t make himself do it, not even to get the freedom that must have been so precious to him.
Could she get herself to leave him?
She didn’t even have to think about it. No. She would never be able to leave him to die.
But it was her responsibility to protect him, and it wasn’t his job to protect her.
And if you weren’t a Marshal, does that mean you’d just waltz off and be able to leave him to freeze to death? Don’t be ridiculous. You wouldn’t leave a prisoner behind to save yourself, but you couldn’t leave Coop. You know the difference just as much as he does.
But that didn’t mean that she was going to just give in and agree to let him stay. She wanted to save his life by whatever means she could.
“It was my idea to do this,” Gretchen said. “I’m the one who said we should try to outrun the weather. I put you in this situation, and I’m the one who has to get you out of it.”
“I would have done the exact same thing in your shoes.”
She blew out an exasperated breath, which at least restored a little feeling to her lips. “But you weren’t in my shoes. You’re in the passenger seat.”
“I think you’re mixing your metaphors.”
“Dammit, Cooper.” Now she really was crying. “I need you to make it out of this. We can’t just both stay here hoping we’ll live until morning when I know we won’t. I can’t die knowing you’ll die too. I can’t stand it.”
