And his green eyes were calm and unmistakably sincere.
“Yeah. I can’t be sure, but I think it’s possible.”
“Just because my sister couldn’t turn me?” It seemed like too little evidence—too flimsy a hook to hang such weighty hopes on. “I got a lot sicker than a few sniffles.”
“But you were young,” Cooper pointed out. “Your shift form hadn’t even manifested yet, so it hadn’t gotten strong enough to fight off an invading form without breaking a sweat. It had to struggle tooth-and-nail to stay with you. The lynx-bite came close to winning, but whatever was in you put up too good of a fight, and you stayed you.”
Whatever she was. “That’s not a whole lot to go on. I could still just be a fluke.”
“But it’s not just that. There’s more.”
He propped himself up on one elbow, and Gretchen realized, belatedly, that they were having this conversation completely naked. The sheet had slid down the length of his naturally-sculpted muscles, showing off a long segment of extremely touchable skin. The fact that that could attract her even as distracted a
s she was right now was saying a lot. He really was irresistible. Even her lifelong dreams couldn’t compete with him.
“The cold hurt you,” Cooper said, “and sure, it hurt you more than it hurt me, and it took you a little time to recover. But once you woke up again, you were fine, Gretchen.”
He was right. She’d been too distracted last night, for obvious reasons, to think about it too much, but she had gone from a freezing, unconscious heap to a would-be seductress very quickly.
She could attribute that to him—if he was hot enough to inflame her passions, why shouldn’t he be hot enough to thaw her? That was cheeky and made her smile, but she knew that it was a joke, not the reality. He had taken good care of her. But no amount of good care should have been enough to turn her from ice to live wire in a matter of hours. She should have been weaker, more rundown. Instead, she’d never felt better or more alive. Hadn’t she just been thinking that before Cooper had woken up?
Cooper said, “There’s something else, too,” and for the first time, he sounded nervous.
He’d sounded calmer and less jittery when he was getting ready to face down gunfire.
“What?”
“I don’t have to tell you what mates are,” he said.
If her heart had skipped a beat before, now it seemed to just switch off entirely. There was nothing inside of her but an immense, waiting stillness, a silence ready to be broken by whatever he was going to say next.
He held out his hand like he was pressing it to some imaginary pane of glass between them.
Her hand met his without her even realizing it, and then their fingers were pressed together. She could almost feel his pulse against hers.
“You know we are,” Cooper said. “Don’t you?”
Light was pouring into her, chasing away every shadow that had ever been cast over her soul. She was warm inside and out, and almost incandescent with joy and relief.
“Yes.” She was smiling so widely that her cheeks hurt. “Yes, I know we are.”
Somehow she had known it from the moment they’d met. Even when he had just been a stranger wrapped in a cloud of lies, suspicions, and hopes, even when he had been standing there shivering in the parking lot of Stridmont, she had known. She’d been pulled towards him.
Whatever conversation they were having was lost for a few minutes, because she surged forward against him and all they could do was kiss.
She wasn’t good with words. All the tenderness and passion she was feeling had to spill over somehow. And so did his: he had gotten his hands in her hair, what little there was of it to grab, as if he had to hold as much of her as possible.
Every touch was a confession of all the things that would have sounded clumsy if they’d tried to say them out loud.
I’m so glad I found you. Thank you for opening up my heart to everything I’d been missing. Thank you for bringing me back to myself. I love you, I love you, I love you.
She knew they would wind up saying all of those things eventually—and more than once—but for right now, the kiss felt as eloquent as any speech she could have possibly made. When they finally broke for air, his smile matched hers.
“You knew from the start,” Cooper said. “Just like I did. I’d buried my griffin down so deep that he couldn’t actually show up and tell me until after I’d shifted, but that was just confirmation. I already knew how much you meant to me. Yesterday, I was thinking about escaping, about taking any chance I could to get away from prison... and then I met you, and I couldn’t make myself leave you a second sooner than I had to.”
Professional pride intruded. “I’m not sure you could have escaped anyway, Coop. I’m pretty good.”
“You’re better than pretty good.”