With the two of them pressed against each other, it didn’t take long for him to get hard. His erection stirred against his briefs, nudging against Gretchen, and the thought of rubbing back against it was so agonizingly tempting.
Maybe she could cave on her objection to having sex in Martin’s car...
But even if her principles were going to go out the window, something else stopped her. Two things, actually.
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