“I can take it.” He didn’t sound one hundred percent sure about that, though.
“I couldn’t,” Gretchen said. “Even with more padding. The last weather bulletin I saw before my cell signal gave out said something like twenty degrees below zero with the wind chill. That’ll cut straight through my coat, and as slowly as we’d have to be walking in all this...”
She hated to be a downer, but she just couldn’t think of a good way out of this. They’d just have to wait it out and hope the storm dropped soon.
The gas they had should last them a while, and keeping the heat on would keep them warm. But if the storm lasted all night, or if the tailpipe got blocked by the snow...
She couldn’t afford to think about that. They could have Tiffani’s rock-hard cookies for dinner, and—
Suddenly, she dug into her coat pocket. Had she remembered it? When her hand closed around something the right shape and size, she broke into a smile so wide that it made her mouth ache.
“I have a surprise for you,” she said.
“If you want to start playing your Moby Dick audiobook, I’m not opposed to it, but I think it’ll drain your cell battery.”
“It’s not Moby Dick.” She needed to just accept that she was never going to finish that book. “It’s something we talked about earlier today. Given that we’re stuck in a winter wonderland, call it a belated Christmas present.”
She passed him the bar of ultra-dark chocolate.
“Eighty-five percent dark,” Gretchen announced. “It’s practically a black hole.”
Cooper turned the fancy candy bar over in his hands, studying it like it was some priceless work of art. His lips were parted slightly.
Gretchen wanted to kiss him.
It was an almost absurdly reckless impulse. It was so far from correct Marshal protocol that Keith had probably bolted upright in his hospital bed just from sensing she’d imagined it.
But God, she wanted to do it. She wanted to taste the sweetness of his mouth before the bitterness of the chocolate changed it. She wanted to find out how he kissed—if he would put his hands in her hair or on her shoulders, if he’d be gentle or fierce or some bone-melting combination of both.
“Thank you,” Cooper said. His voice sounded a little rough. He slid his thumb along the little cardboard casing of the chocolate, popping it open. “You’ll have to share it with me.”
“I don’t want to share it with you,” Gretchen pointed out. “That’s the whole idea. I’m trying to educate you in relative levels of bittersweetness. No bitterness equals perfectly fine. Some bitterness equals better. Medium bitterness equals perfection. And this just tries to turn your mouth inside out.”
He smiled, but her speech didn’t stop him from snapping the chocolate into little squares and holding one out to her. And, weirder still, her speech didn’t stop her from taking it.
“We can eat it on the count of three,” Coop said.
“Toast first.” She tapped her square of chocolate against his. “Cheers.”
“I think we can do better than cheers. Do you have a favorite toast?”
“They’re mostly jokes.” She frowned, thinking: all that was coming to mind was the slightly ribald one she’d made at her little sister’s bachelorette party. Somehow, she didn’t think it would be the best idea to introduce the toast may all your ups and downs be between the sheets right now, not with the sexual tension between them practically making her skin ache.
“I know a couple in other languages,” Cooper said. “Skål—that’s Norwegian—or sláinte—I think that one’s Irish for ‘to your health.’”
Some of the classic toasts she’d heard were starting to come back to her now. She tilted her chocolate square towards him.
“Here’s champagne for our real friends and real pain for our sham friends.”
Cooper grinned. “To the confusion of our enemies. That’s appropriate.”
She remembered another old family one. “Here’s to those who know us well but love us just the same.”
That didn’t feel like it really fit here, though. The people who hadn’t loved Cooper had been the ones who’d never bothered to get to know him.
He’d thought he was broken, but all he’d really been was unlucky. He hadn’t known the right people.
He hadn’t known her. She was beginning to suspect she could love Cooper Dawes very, very easily.