It would be better to just change the subject.
He said, “Are you a shifter too?”
Gretchen’s eyes had been bright, blazing with intensity, but now some of the light in them dimmed. It wasn’t that noticeable, not since she was still radiating interest, not since her actual expression didn’t change, but Cooper saw it all the same.
“No,” she said. “My family are all lynx shifters, but I’m a genetic quirk, I guess. Born human. But I’ve lived around shifters all my life, first with my family and now with my team.”
As nice as it sounded to have a family and a team that would surround you, people that you could claim and be claimed by in return, Cooper couldn’t help thinking that Gretchen’s position sounded kind of lonely all the same. She, too, had been the stray Monopoly piece in the Scrabble box.
Then something she said clicked with him. “Your team? All of them?”
Gretchen nodded. “Martin’s a pegasus, Theo’s a dragon, and Colby’s a wolf. Keith’s a unicorn.”
“Keith,” Cooper repeated, “is a unicorn. You’re sure.”
“I promise. I’ve seen him shift.”
“I just can’t picture that at all.” Prissy, stuck-up Keith, who hadn’t unbent until a car crash had almost split his head in two? He was secretly a majestic white horse with a flowing rainbow-colored mane?
Admittedly, Cooper had never actually seen a unicorn up close and in person. He was mostly going off a mental image cobbled together from kid’s toys and the covers of fantasy novels. Maybe the real-life version was more dignified, and maybe it suited stuffy Keith as well as any animal could have.
He decided not to ask for clarification, though: he was getting too much of a kick out of picturing Keith as something straight out of a little girl’s toybox. And since Keith was recovering just fine, he didn’t think he had to feel too bad about laughing at the guy in his head.
Besides, that wasn’t what they needed to talk about. That was a more professional reason for staying on topic.
And around Gretchen, he did feel like he still had a profession, amazingly enough. She brought out the best in him... and the best in him was definitely a US Marshal.
“Your whole team,” Cooper said slowly. That couldn’t be a coincidence. He knew his whole team being shifters hadn’t been a matter of luck.
“The higher-ups cultivated it,” Gretchen confirmed immediately. “Martin networked with some shifter communities and figured out who to recruit.”
“Yeah. They did it with my unit too.”
“We really could have worked together, then,” Gretchen said. “If the shifters Martin had talked to had known you...”
She looked wistful at first, but then an idea seemed to cross her like a chill, and she shivered a little.
“What is it?” Cooper said.
“You would have loved it in Sterling. Everyone I work with is incredible. I wish it had gone that way—but I can’t say I like the idea that I could have ended up on your old team.”
Even though he’d defended his former coworkers to her, he still felt some reflex deep inside himself lash forward at that: I’m glad too. I’d never let that happen to you.
Like that fate was a bullet he wanted to take for her.
It shook him up. He knew why he felt protective of her—he’d fallen for her, plain and simple—but he didn’t know why those instincts flared up so strongly when he thought about Gretchen sitting at his old desk, right next to Phil and Monroe and Roger.
He tightened his arms around her, and she wriggled in closer against his chest, resting her head on his shoulder.
Maybe it was just that if she had been there, she could have been a target for whoever had framed him. Like Keith had said, Gretchen could have wound up just like Phil.
He couldn’t stand the thought of it.
She was there to distract him from it, though. He didn’t know how she had such a tender, automatic sense for when he needed to think about something else, but she did. She combed her fingers through his hair and said softly, “Maybe we should try to sleep. This storm’s not dying down anytime soon. We might have a lot of time to kill.”
She was right, and he knew it.
At first, he thought that the flurry of snow against the windows and the howl of the wind would keep him awake even if all his worries didn’t, but it turned out that none of those were a match for his exhaustion and the sheer comfort of Gretchen’s arms. He fell asleep immediately. Despite everything, it was the best and most deeply restful sleep he’d ever had.
*
Gretchen slept well, too, at least for a few hours. But unlike Cooper, she was human, and the cold that was slowly filling up the car was hitting her hard, even with his warmth to shelter her. He still felt toasty to her, and as comforting as ever, but she could feel shivers starting to set in, no matter how much she tried to fight them off and tell herself that they were in her head. She felt stiff and aching, like the cold had seeped into her very bones. No matter how closely they cuddled up to each other, he couldn’t make her warm enough to counteract that.
And she couldn’t make him warmer either—she was probably just making him colder. It had to feel like he was sleeping against an ice sculpture, and if he hadn’t woken up yet, it was only because he was completely worn out.
Poor Coop. And poor her.
The last of the trapped heat had leaked out of the car, and it wasn’t well-built enough to keep out the freezing cold. The mini-thermometer on the dash had dropped all the way to ten degrees below zero, and the bluster and snow outside showed no signs of stopping. Their shelter was reaching a crisis point. They could stay here and hope for the best, and it might
