The Griffin Marshal's Heart (U.S. Marshal Shifters Book 4) Read online

  “Lie down,” Cooper said against her neck. His voice was almost frantic. “Lie down, sweetheart.”

  She did, and he moved between her legs and parted them. He kissed her there with a kind of passionate urgency, and she had to bite down on the back of her hand to keep herself from crying out.

  He lifted his head. “I want to memorize the way you taste, Gretch. Just in case there’s not—”

  In case there wasn’t a second time? She couldn’t think about that right now, and she didn’t want him to have to think about it either.

  “Shh,” she said, dragging her heel over his shoulder. “You’ve got me. You’ve got all of me.”

  He lowered himself down again and licked at her, his lips and tongue hot and skilled and perfect. She felt like she was dissolving into the same steam that had surrounded her in the shower, like she was breaking apart into nothing but pleasure. She came hard, her whole body shaking, and he just stayed with her through it all, licking her softly and steadily even as the last of the aftershocks faded.

  Gretchen bent forward and tugged at his shoulders, drawing him up until he met her face-to-face.

  “I was going to keep going,” he said. “For as long as you want.”

  “I know. But I want you.” She stroked down the length of his body until, reaching blindly, her fingers closed around his cock. She wanted so badly to make him feel good, but even more than, she wanted them to feel good together. She wanted him to be inside of her, for their bodies to be locked together so closely, just for a few minutes, that they would feel inseparable. Orgasms were good. Amazing, even. But that would be better—just to have him, just to feel him.

  He didn’t take any more persuading than that, thankfully. He let her tilt her hips up to him, and he put one hand against the smooth underside of her thigh and lifted it up slightly, opening her up for him. She couldn’t get any more ready, certainly. She’d never been so hot or so wet in her life. And when he slid into her, agonizingly slowly, it was so perfect that it made little reverberations run through her, heat pulsing behind her clit. Yes, yes, this. Coop.

  He rocked against her, his hips brushing against hers, and Gretchen buried her face in his shoulder. She was going to come again, and she couldn’t believe it. She’d never had multiple orgasms in her life—one had always been enough, before, to make her desire taper off. But with him, she couldn’t get enough.

  She didn’t see how she could ever get enough.

  She bit gently at his shoulder, muffling the noises she was making. She was close, so close—

  Then pleasure seemed to white out her mind, taking over and making her surge up against him, pumping her hips and tightening around him until he came too.

  Love you. The words echoed around in her head. Love you, love you, love you.

  Then Cooper actually said it: “I love you. You know that, don’t you?” He sounded soft and wondering, like he couldn’t believe where they were and what had happened to them.

  She couldn’t either, but she trusted it. “I do.” She settled alongside him, curving her body against his. She fit perfectly under his arm. “I love you too. Anything else... we can figure it out in the morning.”

  15

  They slept through the whole night in each other’s arms.

  Some small part of Gretchen’s mind knew that she had plenty of things she needed to worry about, but they were still inside the snow globe. As long as the wind from the blizzard was rattling the glass in the windows and as long as the snow was beating down thick and fast, she thought she could be forgiven for taking a little break. They both could be.

  Yesterday had been the strangest, longest, and best day of her life.

  She ran her hand down the smooth planes of Cooper’s back, tracing the outline of his shoulder-blades. It seemed impossible that there had ever been a time when she hadn’t known him, when he hadn’t been as familiar to her as the feeling of her own heartbeat in her chest.

  She had never felt anything like this before.

  A couple of times in her life, she’d experienced a kind of magical, instantaneous click. Right away, she had known that Martin, Colby, and Theo were slotting into important empty spaces in her heart: they’d felt like family from the word go.

  But they had filled gaps in her life. They hadn’t... they hadn’t transformed her.

  Right or wrong, sane or insane, she couldn’t argue with what she knew to be true. Cooper Dawes hadn’t satisfied some craving or taken a seat in some empty chair in her mind, filling out her life and enriching it. He had changed her, not into something new but into something true. Being with him wasn’t just better than being without him, it was also right, and it made her better—it made her into a woman she could only think of as GRETCHEN as opposed to mere Gretchen.

  Honestly, the closest thing she could really compare it to was how she felt about the job. There was a passion embedded deep in her soul that only Cooper and her work had ever unlocked. He had shown her who she was, and he had let her love him back.

  She loved him, and she trusted him.

  So there was no way in hell she was going to take him to Bergen.

  She stretched out, careful not to wake him, and felt the stiffness in her body loosening.

  She felt good. Way better than anyone would think she had a right to feel, given that yesterday, for her, had mostly been made up of a long, cramped car ride followed by some hypothermia.

  I guess this is what sexual healing feels like.

  Her mouth curved against Cooper’s shoulder, and she pressed a little kiss there.

  Seriously, though, she felt—different. And not just because she was in love.

  The feeling she’d had her whole life, the feeling that some important part of herself was like an idea just on the tip of her tongue, had finally disappeared.

  Without noticing it, she had started tracing the shape of her scar. Was it her imagination, or did it feel like some of the ancient, lingering puffiness there had finally died down? It didn’t hurt to touch it anymore. She’d always had the idea that that pain was more in her head than anywhere else, but it was still bizarre to not feel anything but the soft touch of her own hand. Some of the feeling was creeping back there, too.

  It was hard to get a good look at it without a mirror, but she contorted herself to try.

  Doing so woke up Coop, who’d deserved more sleep than that, dammit. He rolled over and caught her trying to crane her neck to stare at the scar close to her collarbone.

  His hair was rumpled from the pillow, and his eyes were warm and sparkling. It made her mouth dry up just to look at him.

  “Good morning, pretzel girl,” he said.

  She gave up on trying to get a good look at the scar and just kissed him instead. “Morning. Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  To her surprise, he just pointed slightly in the direction of her scar and said, “That looks better. Not that it looked bad before. I just noticed it because...”

  Instinctively, Gretchen somehow knew that what would most make him trail off like that. He was thinking of those awful minutes when she’d been hovering between life and death—and then, like a flash of lightning, she knew exactly why he’d noticed the scar.

  He’d noticed it because he’d briefly thought about giving her another one.

  The chill of those old memories came back to her, but at least now she had Cooper to press up against. He was warm and reassuringly steady; he wouldn’t let her get mired in her past.

  “It wouldn’t have worked,” she said quietly. “I’m a fluke.”

  He put his arm around her, hugging her close. “You’re not a fluke.”

  “I literally am, though. I’ve asked around, and if a shifter bites a human, they either become a shifter or they die. There’s not supposed to be a third option where you just wind up with a nasty scar and a week in bed that costs your parents a fortune.”

  “You were a kid?”

  “Thirteen. I bribed my little sister into biting
me, even though our parents had apparently been telling everybody for years that they couldn’t.” She knew they’d only been trying to protect her, but somehow a trace of bitterness leaked into her voice anyway. Maybe you never got over the whiplash of finding out that the people around you had been keeping secrets from you. “It... didn’t go well, obviously, and I felt like a real jerk for convincing her to do it. I think she still has nightmares about almost killing me.”

  Cooper covered the scar with his hand, pressing his palm against it like he could blot it out. “I’m sorry you both had to go through that.”

  He did sound sorry, but even more than that, he sounded confused.

  “What is it?” Gretchen said.

  “I don’t know if there are any other cases of a human resisting the turning process without dying.” She could hear the sound of him choosing his words carefully. He knew that this was important to her, and she could tell that the last thing he wanted was to get it wrong. “Most of what I know about shifter lore, shifter history—it could fit into a thimble. But Roger said—”

  “Roger? Your old boss?”

  “Yeah. He’s a jaguar shifter.”

  “Another big cat,” Gretchen said dryly. “He and I would practically be related.”

  “He had this mark on his arm.” Cooper tapped a little spot near the crux of his inner elbow. “It looked like a snakebite. It was always red and puffy, every time I saw it. One day I asked him how he’d gotten it—and for a second, he looked seriously pissed, which wasn’t like him at all. Then he put on this goofy grin, which was like him—but it was creepy, coming on the heels of him looking so angry.”

  Makes you wonder how many of those other smiles were fake, Gretchen almost said, but she bit her tongue. If Roger had been the only person to even sort of stay on Cooper’s side after his conviction, she should do her best not to run him down.

  Even if everything Cooper was saying about him left a bad taste in her mouth.

  A Chief Deputy who wore friendliness like a mask and a partner with a temper bad enough to chew Cooper out for just trying to do the best by one of his witnesses. Something had been rotten in Cooper’s office.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Cooper said.

  “You probably do.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t the best place. Nobody there was any Martin Powell—or any Gretchen Miller.”

  “Or any Cooper Dawes?”

  “Not even a clone,” he agreed. “But it was the closest I ever got to being surrounded by people who were supposed to understand me. I still feel like I owe them a lot.”

  Even though they’d kept him feeling like a Monopoly piece in a Scrabble box. Maybe Cooper had once believed that his old office was as good as they got, but being with her—and even with Keith—had shown him that there were more people out there in the world who cared about doing the job right. Martin hadn’t been a one-time anomaly.

  Gretchen didn’t think Cooper owed them anything at all. They owed him, and it didn’t sound like they would ever realize it. But she didn’t want to twist his arm to make him admit it—that would just hurt him more.

  “The scar,” she reminded him.

  “Right. He said he’d had Monroe, another guy on our team, bite him. He’d wanted to see if Monroe could turn him.”

  She felt like she’d missed something. “But he was already a shifter.”

  “He was. But he wanted to be Monroe’s kind of shifter instead. But when it didn’t work, he figured out that already having an inner animal is like having been vaccinated against some virus. Roger’s jaguar acted like an immune system, fighting off the invasion from Monroe’s bite. So if he were a human, he’d either turn or die, but as a shifter, he just got the sniffles for a few days. It’s the same thing that happens when shifters fight each other—you get a lot of biting and clawing then, but nobody turns. At worst, they feel a little run down afterwards. Their animals are too strong to let anyone else’s in.”

  “So Roger got a mild case of the shifter flu.”

  “And a nasty-looking scar from a basilisk bite.”

  A basilisk? Gretchen didn’t know much about those at all. “That’s a giant snake, right? That’s what Monroe is?”

  Maybe it was just the fact that snakes gave her the creeps, but Gretchen couldn’t see why anyone would want to shed an awesome shift form like a jaguar to become a basilisk instead.

  Judging by his contained shudder, Cooper felt the same way she did. “Really giant. His scales are the size of my hand.”

  She shivered too. “No thanks. Keep the giant snakes far, far away from me. Why would Roger want to become a basilisk?”

  “He never gave me a straight answer on that. He just said that there were advantages Monroe had that he wouldn’t mind having himself. Basilisks are supposed to be able to kill anyone they look at directly, but Monroe didn’t do that, obviously. I saw him in snake form a few times, and I’m still alive to tell the tale. He said that story was bullshit, but he never said if he had a hunch about what it was Roger was after.”

  An obsessive jaguar, a temperamental dragon, and a cagey basilisk. This team was sounding worse and worse by the minute.

  And even if she put her bias in favor of big cats aside, how could Roger have wanted to trade one shift form for another? Your inner animal was supposed to be an expression of your soul. It was your subconscious given its own voice and shape. How could anyone want to alter something so fundamental about themselves, especially just to get something as trivial as a special ability? How little could your soul possibly mean to you, if you were willing to throw it away that easily?

  Or was she just being melodramatic? She had always longed to be a shifter, and maybe she was just jealous and bitter that Roger, who already was one, would treat it so cavalierly and think that he should just shop around for a new animal form since he was bored with the one he had.

  It wasn’t until Cooper spoke up again that she realized that she’d missed what he had really been trying to tell her.

  “That’s the only other time I saw that kind of scar,” Cooper said. “And it’s the only other time I ever heard about a transformation attempt failing without the bitten person dying.”

  It took Gretchen a second to fully process what he was saying, and then her heart seemed to skip a beat.

  “But there’s a lot that I don’t know,” he said. “Just because I haven’t heard about—”

  “You think I’m a shifter,” Gretchen said.

  For one long, horrible moment, she thought he was going to laugh at her. It was her biggest, oldest wish, one that she’d spent years trying to bury, and for it to come back up again now—it was like suddenly having someone imply that you’d been wrong all your life, Santa Claus was real. It had to be a joke.

  Except he wouldn’t tell that kind of joke at her expense. He wouldn’t tell it at anyone’s expense. He was too kind for that.

  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.