He was waiting two seconds, and if no one answered, he was breaking in.
But someone came into view. It was an elderly, white-haired man with a close-trimmed beard, using a walker with cut-up tennis balls on the floor posts.
Cooper suddenly remembered exactly what he looked like right now.
A big guy in a maximum security prison jumpsuit, cradling an unconscious woman who, on the other side of the glass, could easily have been mistaken for dead. The old man wasn’t going to let him in. He was going to call the cops, and the cops wouldn’t come for hours, and if Cooper tried to break in now, all that would happen was he’d make this poor old guy have a heart attack—
But then the old man unlocked the door.
“Well, come in,” he said in a creaky voice. “You’ll suck all the heat out of the place. You picked a bad time to escape from prison, son.”
Cooper got in quickly, before the man could change his mind, and he laid Gretchen down on the couch in the lobby. He knew you weren’t supposed to chafe someone’s hands if they could be suffering from frostbite, but aside from that, his mind felt horribly blank.
Finally, something clicked: get the snow off her. All it was doing was keeping her cold and wet. He brushed the snow off her jeans and onto the floor, undoing her coat so that the warmth could reach her.
“Do you have a blanket?”
“Yes,” the man said, “in the little room behind the desk, but it’d be faster for you to fetch it yourself. These days I make the damn DMV look efficient.”
“Will you look after her?”
“Sure. She doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.”
Cooper hightailed it behind the desk and into the room the man had mentioned, which was basically a little cubbyhole: he guessed the owner holed up in there on night shifts to stay within easy reach of the bell in case they got a surprise guest. There was a ratty couch and a plaid fleece blanket.
He took the blanket back out to Gretchen and gently wrapped it around her, tucking it up over her ears to warm them up too. He knelt down beside the sofa, stroking her hair.
If the old man asked, Cooper was just trying to comb the snowflakes out. He didn’t have to know that Cooper would have been doing it anyway.
Suddenly the old man’s gnarled hand landed on his shoulder, startling him.
“Here,” the man said gruffly. He handed Cooper a steaming mug of coffee. “It’s only instant, but it’s better than nothing. I don’t know if you’ve noticed it or not, son, but you’re dripping ice all over my lobby and shaking like a leaf. You need to get something warm in you.” He followed the coffee with a big wad of gauze stuffed in a roll of duct tape. “You’re bleeding like a stuck pig, and blood’s hard to get out of the carpet. I don’t have much in the way of first aid supplies, but this should help you tape yourself up.”
This was really a day for people being nicer to him than he’d ever expected. He cleared his throat. “Thanks.” He lifted up the hem of his shirt and looked at the bloody mess he’d made.
Thank God for accelerated healing.
He flattened the gauze against the wounds and strapped it down.
“Duct tape will do everything,” the old man said, watching him. “They say that, and they’re right. Now I’ll go make up some soup for you and the lady.” He took a few steps and then paused, turning back over his shoulder to scrutinize Cooper again. “Did you just break out of prison?”
Cooper smiled. “No, they’re just moving me from one to the other.”
“And the lady?”
“She’s my ride. A United States Marshal.”
“Well, that’s all right, then,” the man said, and he went away again.
Cooper went back to stroking Gretchen’s hair. “It’s all right, Gretchen. We made it.”
Her eyes fluttered open, and for a second, he was just unbelievably relieved to see her waking up.
Then it was like fireworks went off inside him, a cascade of lights and sparks that he’d never, ever felt before.
She was his mate.
His griffin had been buried too deeply inside him for him to recognize it before, but now that he’d found his way back to his own soul, a single look was enough for him to know that she was his destiny.