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,
