The Griffin Marshal's Heart (U.S. Marshal Shifters Book 4) Page 17

  “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.”

  “Of course, you’re better than pretty good too,” she said musingly. “Maybe sometime we could try it out—see if you really could get away from me, Houdini.”

  She realized that she was imagining such a normal future for them, one where they could afford to treat escape as a game and not a necessity, and some of her joy dimmed a little.

  There was no guarantee they’d ever have anything like that. They might have to spend the rest of their lives using all their professional skills to avoid being captured.

  Well, tough. She wasn’t leaving him, she wasn’t letting him fend for himself, and she wasn’t signing off on any plan that included dropping him off at yet another prison.

  “Humans don’t feel the mate bond,” Cooper said, and it almost startled her to realize that he was still thinking only about her. She’d only been thinking about him. “Not like that. Maybe they’re attracted, maybe they fall quickly, but—”

  “But they don’t do it with prisoners,” Gretchen said.

  Was he right? She thought back to what she knew of mates from her family and her friends.

  Jillian had been interested in Theo right away—but the most that had stood between them was his unfortunate task of seizing her criminal father’s ill-gotten gains. Jillian hadn’t liked her dad, so even though the experience had been hard, she’d been ready to cooperate with law enforcement.

  Tiffani hadn’t been able to resist Martin—but since he was just the handsome, warm-hearted hero who was everything her rotten ex wasn’t, why would she have wanted to?

  Aria had been head over heels for Colby from the start—but he’d been both her biggest fan and the man assigned to protect her from a homicidal werewolf.

  Their paths to love might not have been smooth, but they hadn’t had an enormous hurdle right out of the starting gate the way Gretchen’s had.

  But her little sister Tricia, the same one who had been coaxed and bribed into biting her, had wound up with a human mate, a woman named Bonnie. Bonnie had still been in the closet when she’d first met Tricia, and she stayed there for almost a year after that, too. She had spent a while running from their obvious chemistry because she’d known a relationship with Tricia would change her life completely, and it had terrified her. They were happy and comfortable now, but it had taken months for them to get that way.

  Whatever Bonnie had felt about Tricia hadn’t been enough to automatically make her willing to overturn her whole life and risk her family’s disapproval.

  But Gretchen had been willing to do that for Cooper.

  And sure, there were a lot of reasons for that, and Bonnie had still probably had the harder fight, but—

  She knew. She knew just like he did.

  “I’m a shifter,” she said, stunned.

  When she said it out loud, she knew it was true.

  But it changed so little that she had to laugh.

  “I’m a shifter who can’t shift. I don’t know that that means much, then, Coop.”

  “It means you’re still stronger than most humans,” he said earnestly, “and you can heal faster.”

  “My insurance provider will be happy to hear that. My mom will be too.”

  “And it means that we might be able to figure out what your shift form is, if it isn’t a lynx. That might help you turn into it.”

  She breathed in sharply. “You mean that?”

  “Sure. You couldn’t shift before, but weren’t you always trying to turn into a lynx? You were reaching for something that wasn’t there. But something is there, so maybe it’s just not what you were looking for.”

  It made sense. And if it was too close to fulfilling every dream she’d had since she was old enough to understand what made her different from her siblings... hadn’t he already made some other dreams come true?

  She kissed him again, lingering on the taste of his lips, and then said briskly, “We can worry about that later. For right now, we still have a couple of killers on our tail, and I don’t want to lead them to Ford if I can help it. We need to get out of here.”

  She stood, naked, and walked over to the window, opening the curtains just enough to confirm that the snow had stopped. The roads would be bad for another few hours, but the plows would already be getting started. They could get out of here soon.

  She took a deep breath. “If I can get a signal, I’m going to call Martin.”

  Cooper said, “What are you going to tell him?”

  “Everything. We can trust him.”

  “If you trust him, I trust him. He definitely seemed like a good guy when I worked with him. But we’re putting him in a hell of a difficult position. He’s still a Deputy Chief Marshal.” He swung his feet down to the floor. His gaze was intent on hers. “And you’re still a Marshal, Gretchen. You’re even more of a Marshal than you are a shifter. I can’t let you give that up.”

  “I’m not giving that up.” She wasn’t one hundred percent sure that was true, but it felt like the right morning for being hopeful. “I’m too much of a workaholic to just shrug off my life and say we should head to South America and try living on a beach somewhere in a country that doesn’t have extradition. Besides, I have nieces and nephews who are going to be expecting birthday presents from Cool Aunt Gretchen, and there’s no way I’m not going to be around to see Theo and Jillian have their baby. We’re not going to throw my career away. We’re going to get yours back.”

  “How?” he said, sitting up even straighter. His face was shining.

  She deflated a little. “Okay, admittedly I haven’t figured that out yet. But I’m not giving up, and neither should you.”

  “As long as I’m with you,” Cooper said, “it’s pretty easy to be hopeful.”

  *

  So she called Martin. The landlines were still down, but she at least had some spotty cell phone signal.

  He answered at once. “Gretchen, thank God. The storm hit so fast last night that I was worried.”

  “I’m fine, and so is Cooper. He tore some of his stitches last night, but he’s doing a lot better now. How’s Keith?”

  “Out of the woods. He signed out of the hospital about an hour ago, so he got out of there before
they noticed how much he was on the mend. We’re looking after him, but he’s more or less back on his feet.”

  “Good. Tell him I’m glad. He wasn’t bad in the field, you know, not when it came right down to it. I think he’ll shake out okay.”

  “Mm,” Martin said.

  “You sound skeptical.”

  “Not about Keith. I’ve been saying that all along. I sound skeptical because you sound like you’re about to drop another problem on my lap now that you know Keith’s is safely off it. I’m just trying to prepare myself.”

  “Nobody likes people who are right about everything, Chief.” She reached over and took Cooper’s hand, intertwining their fingers. She needed to hold onto him. “People are probably going to ask you later what I said in this phone call, and whatever you tell them, I don’t think it should be the truth.”

  She heard a staticky silence on the other end of the line, and then Martin said gently, “Tell me.”

  “Cooper’s innocent. You already knew I thought that.”

  “I think that too. I trust your instincts.”

  “I can’t take him to Bergen. Or any other prison.”

  “Gretchen—”

  “Prison is killing him, Martin. His griffin was wasting away—”

  “Wait, his what? Dawes is a shifter?”

  “Yeah. A griffin.”

  Martin sighed. “Long-term confinement is hard on anybody, but especially when you know in your heart that you’re supposed to be off somewhere flying. Tell him I understand that much. I couldn’t get along without the sky either.”

  “So prison is bad for him,” Gretchen said. “And even if it wasn’t, being cooped up there just makes him an easy target. I think the people who are after us now are the same ones who framed him.”

  “Law of conservation of suspects,” Martin agreed. “Why have two different groups of bad guys when you could just have one?”

  She nodded, forgetting that he couldn’t see her, and then slowly worked her way back through it, thinking out loud. “They framed him, and once everyone blamed him and it was all in the past, they tried to have him killed. We think it’s the mob trying to tie off loose ends. They hacked the records and framed him, but they screwed up by leaving him alive to maybe poke around in their business, and now they’re trying to correct that little mistake.”

  It didn’t sound wrong, but it didn’t sound entirely right, either, and she didn’t know if Martin was completely convinced.

  He sounded a little skeptical as he said, “Maybe. Or maybe Cooper knows something he doesn’t know he knows.”

  “I’ll check,” Gretchen said dryly. She covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “Coop, do you know something you don’t know you know?”

  “I don’t know,” Cooper said.

  He was smiling, his face briefly relaxed despite the awfulness of the circumstances, and his simple pleasure in a silly little joke made her think again about just how much he deserved a team like hers. He was a good guy—smart, kind, funny, and brave. He’d always deserved people who appreciated that, not partners who would fly off the handle about him prioritizing a witness...

  “Well, if Cooper can shift, go ahead and put me on speakerphone. That’ll make the rest of this conversation easier. Keith’s awake and coherent now, and between the two of us, we had an idea about—”

  There was a knock at their door.

  Gretchen looked at Cooper and then said in an undertone, “Bad guys don’t usually knock.”

  “I’m still getting used to hearing anyone knock at all,” Cooper said.

  Right. They wouldn’t knock in prison, even if there were real doors to knock on. She hated that he’d gotten to the point where even a knock at the door was an unexpected luxury. Even if it could be a knock from someone coming to kill them.

  She let her hand drift towards her sidearm as she called out, “Yes?”

  “I was just wondering if you two wanted breakfast,” Ford called through the door.

  They both relaxed.

  “That would be great, sir,” Gretchen said, now with real warmth. “We need to be hitting the road soon.”

  “I figured. Figured the two of you might have worked an appetite, too.”

  Well, they hadn’t exactly been subtle; they probably deserved taking a little bit of ribbing from the world’s most laidback motel owner.

  “It’s not exactly a fancy continental breakfast like you’d get at the Holiday Inn,” Ford continued, “but it’ll stick to your ribs. I’ll let you know when it’s ready so you can go on and get yourselves decent. I’ll leave some clothes out here for your fellow to try on.”

  Gretchen knew she’d turned a little pink, but she just said, “Thanks, Ford. We really appreciate it.”

  “None of my business what people do in their own motel room,” Ford muttered, barely audible through the door, and Cooper heard him shuffle off.

  “Sorry,” Cooper said in the direction of the phone as Gretchen switched it so they could both hear. “That was our host.”

  “I couldn’t hear all of that,” Martin said, amused, “but from what I could pick up on, I’d almost think this guy has some idea that the two of you... got up to something.”

  There was an awkward silence while Gretchen frantically tried to think of something to say.

  It might have lasted a little too long.

  “Ah,” Martin said. He cleared his throat. “Oh.”

  “He’s my mate, Chief,” Gretchen said. She might have been embarrassed about being basically caught out having sex, but she wasn’t embarrassed about this. She could hear the ringing confidence in her voice, and she hoped Coop could hear it too. “It’s a long story, but he’s my mate, I might have a secret shifter form, and I know what I’m doing. I promise.”

  To his credit, Martin took this string of revelations as well as anyone could have. “If I know anything about you at all, Gretchen, it’s that you know what you’re doing. And if I know anything else about you, it’s that there’s no way the perfect match for you would be anything other than a good guy. Cooper, I believed you before, but I believe you even more now.”

  Lately, Gretchen had been hit by a lot of epiphanies. She might be a shifter after all. She had a mate. Keith was mildly likable.

  But one of the biggest realizations was that the people in her life really did—or should—trust her judgment, so she was certainly right to trust it herself. She’d let one mistake in her childhood overshadow all her other choices. She’d trusted her family’s love for her so much that she’d overlooked the fact that the way they’d protected her had left her with scars that she was only just now starting to deal with.

  It wasn’t their fault, but she had to let go of some of the ideas they’d given her. Maybe she could risk her life. Not because it was less valuable if she wasn’t a shifter... but because she was smart enough to know if she’d really found something or someone worth risking it for.

  “Thanks, Chief,” she said quietly.

  “Thank you, sir,” Cooper echoed.

  “You’re going to have to start calling me Martin again if you’re going to be one of the family. Only Theo calls me ‘sir,’ and that’s just because dragons hoard their habits, too, and it’s too damn hard to get them to stop. I wish I’d known you could shift, Cooper. I would have recruited you years ago.”

  Now Cooper looked like he was the one with a lump in his throat. If Gretchen had to guess, she’d say that no one had ever called him family before, let alone invited him to be part of theirs.

  Cooper had known so many jerks. Gretchen was determined to introduce him to a ton of good people. She squeezed his hand.

  Cooper shot her a glance that was so full of love it made Gretchen’s toes curl—what she wouldn’t give to take him back to bed!—and then he cleared his throat, like he didn’t want to sound openly emotional on the phone.

  “Before Ford came in, you were telling us Keith woke up?”

  “Right,” Martin said. “Keith couldn’t
remember everything that had happened around the gunfight, but he said he remembered that there were snakes.”

  “There weren’t snakes,” Gretchen said, though—didn’t she remember Keith having said something like that at the time? Maybe that they needed to run away from the snakes? It was weird how often snakes were coming up lately. “Trust me, if there’d been snakes, I never would have gotten out of the car.”

  “I have an idea that’s a little off-the-wall,” Martin said, “but maybe he didn’t mean actual snakes. Maybe he meant basilisks.”

  Cooper went completely still. “Did you say basilisk?”

  Martin, of course, couldn’t know exactly what that meant to Cooper. “I know, they’re not supposed to be around anymore. It’s a wild guess, but it fits.”

  Gretchen’s hand tightened around Cooper’s. She felt like he was holding onto her for dear life.

  If his old teammate Monroe had been responsible for this, then Cooper hadn’t just been framed. He’d been betrayed. The idea had clearly knocked him for a loop, which meant she had to be the one to get to the bottom of this.

  She kept her voice steady. “What do you mean? Are they supposed to be extinct?”

  “That’s what I always heard. There were purges, like the Salem Witch Trials. Even other shifters turned on them. It was a nightmare.”

  That sounded even worse than what had happened with pegasi, and Gretchen remembered Martin soberly telling her about how they’d been hunted for their wings back in Ancient Greece.

  “The basilisk hunters were stirred up by fear and hate,” Martin said. “And some people say they wiped the basilisks out forever.”

  “What were they afraid of?”

  “The basilisk stare?” Cooper said, finally speaking up. His voice sounded lifeless, though, and it worried her. “Because they’re supposed to be able to kill people by looking at them? Because Monroe—” He cut himself off. “Because I always heard that was a myth.”

  “The legends shifted around over the years. Sometimes people said they could kill you, sometimes that they could turn you to stone—basically, if a basilisk looked at you, it was supposed to be bad. But my parents were big into shifter history, especially ancient shifter history, and they said that one of the original terms for basilisks was ‘nightmare serpents.’”