The Griffin Marshal's Heart (U.S. Marshal Shifters Book 4) Page 5

  He would say that Gretchen was a good person, too. He’d stake his life on that, and he hadn’t even known her for a full hour yet.

  If he took a deep breath, he could still catch that mountain air scent coming off her skin.

  And he shouldn’t. He couldn’t afford to get distracted.

  He forced himself to focus just on the conversation, not on the rapidly unwieldy attraction he felt towards her.

  “Well, give Martin whatever of my regards you think he’ll accept,” Cooper said. “I’m glad he made chief.”

  “Are we really going to have a conversation with him?” Keith said. Apparently he thought that if he kept his voice down, either Cooper wouldn’t hear him or Gretchen wouldn’t get annoyed at him for continuing to poke at her choices.

  “It’s a long trip to spend sitting in silence,” Gretchen said. “And you vetoed Moby Dick.”

  “He’s a murderer. He’s a traitor.”

  There was something strangely antique about Keith’s choice of words, and for some reason, they struck Cooper more deeply than “killer” or “prisoner” would have. It was like Keith was implying that Cooper had lost his honor, and that that loss was somehow contagious—that if Gretchen spoke to him for too long, dishonor and shame would leach into her, like contamination into groundwater, and she would be spoiled forever.

  She can’t be. She’s herself, and she’s as true as steel.

  It was like a distant echo inside him somewhere. He hadn’t heard the actual words being spoken, only them bouncing off something close to his heart.

  That handshake knocked you for a loop, he tried to tell himself, but it was hard to argue with the feeling she gave him. It was like his whole soul had been rung like a bell, and he was still feeling the aftershocks. Still listening to the music of them, the way he had listened to her laugh.

  And that music was old and strange, just like Keith’s weighted words.

  He couldn’t stand the idea that Gretchen believed that his soul was as ugly as Keith had just painted it.

  He said, “I don’t know if it would make a difference or not to hear me say it, but—I’m really not either of those things.”

  “What?” Gretchen said. She sounded distracted, like she’d been lost in her own thoughts too.

  “And I just didn’t want to come in halfway through Moby Dick,” Keith added belatedly. “I wouldn’t understand what was happening.”

  Cooper decided not to get involved in the Moby Dick debate. He said, “I didn’t kill Phil. I didn’t turn over any information about my witnesses.”

  “I’m sure you’re not the first prisoner to say he’s innocent,” Keith said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “He wouldn’t be the first prisoner to actually be innocent, either,” Gretchen said.

  Cooper’s heart leapt. She was the first person he’d even heard acknowledge that it was even technically possible for him to have been wrongfully accused, the first person to not act like the system was guaranteed to be flawless.

  His mouth was suddenly too dry for him to talk. To have someone even half-believe him, after all this time—

  “You can’t be serious,” Keith said.

  “I’m just being factually accurate. There’s such a thing as a wrongful conviction.”

  “Not in his case. Don’t tell me you believe everyone who says—”

  “Of course not,” Gretchen said sharply. “I’m not even saying I believe him. I just said that it’s possible.”

  “I don’t think it is.” Keith twisted around in his seat, turning to face Cooper. His eyes were a gray-blue so pale that their edges almost seemed to melt away like snow. “You left conclusive proof of your guilt behind. You weren’t just criminal, you were careless. That anyone could possibly believe you at this point is—”

  “Oh, look,” Gretchen said loudly. “We need gas.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  “I think you’ll find we do,” she said. Even from the backseat, Cooper could see that her jaw was clenched so tightly that she could be in danger of shattering a tooth.

  Keith was in trouble.

  And Gretchen had just defended Cooper yet again.

  If he escaped at the gas station, he would just be throwing that defense back in her face, humiliating her in front of a stickler younger partner who seemed intent on criticizing her at every turn. If he ran now, she would think he was exactly the man he’d just told her he wasn’t.

  This probably won’t be my best shot at freedom anyway, he tried to tell himself. It’s still broad daylight. If I can’t shift, and if I can’t get myself to turn invisible, I’ll stick out like a sore thumb. It wouldn’t be smart to make my move now. I’m not just doing it for her.

  Sure. Right.

  Absolutely.

  5

  Gretchen left the car running, which Keith of course had a problem with.

  She balled her hands up inside her coat pockets, listening to her teeth chatter as she shivered herself half to death and tried to keep calm. She tried to be the Marshal Martin would want her to be. It was the kind of thing that would have been a lot easier if slush wasn’t currently soaking through her jeans and getting her socks wet. She only had herself to blame for that one, though. She was the one who had decided to pull over even though the gas tank was still three-quarters full.

  She was the one who’d forgotten to wear snow boots, too.

  “I know you’re not supposed to leave your car running at the pump, Keith,” she said. “That’s why we’re not at the pump.”

  She almost winced at the exaggerated patience in her voice. He was fraying her last nerve, but that was still no reason for her, the more experienced member of the team, to keep showing it to this extent. She shouldn’t be treating him like a child. It was like something else was stressing her out, but she couldn’t put her finger on what that would be.

  “Besides,” she went on, “if Dawes can work his way out of the backseat, through the barrier, and into the front to steal the car out from under us, then we have bigger problems. That means he could do it when we’re in the car, which could get us both killed. So the way I see it, temporarily leaving the heat on helps all of us and doesn’t hurt anyone.”

  “You mean it helps Dawes,” Keith said, lifting his chin challengingly.

  The trouble was, he wasn’t exactly wrong to be a little suspicious of her motives. Gretchen had to admit that while she was easier on their prisoners in general, she wasn’t usually quite this lenient.

  She’d never shaken a prisoner’s hand before. She’d never gotten herself tangled up in a conversation about a prisoner’s guilt or innocence.

  Gretchen was willing to stand by what she had said about Cooper. It was undeniably true that sometimes innocent people ended up in prison, and that was a horrible thing that it was probably worth keeping in mind as at least a slight chance.

  But under normal circumstances, she would have refused to get dragged into that kind of discussion. She wasn’t a lawyer. Her job was to get the prisoner from point A to point B as smoothly as possible, and she did that as well as or better than anyone.

  Keith was right. She was treating Cooper differently. And Keith didn’t even know the half of it.

  He didn’t know that when Cooper had said he was innocent, Gretchen had believed him.

  Only for a second. The length of a heartbeat. Then she had gone right back to uncomfortable ambiguity, unsure whether she could trust him or not, unsure whether Martin had been right about his character or right about the evidence piled up against him.

  A heartbeat. That was the problem. She was thinking too much with her heart.

  Keith was wrong about a lot of things, sure, but so was she. She couldn’t pretend otherwise, not to herself.

  She took a deep breath. She needed to be honest with him. He was a rookie, sure, but for this road trip, he was also her partner. He deserved to know what was going on with her—if she could even figure it out herself.

  It fee
ls more like Cooper’s my partner than Keith. That’s part of the problem.

  “Okay,” Gretchen said quietly. “I do mean, a little, that it helps Dawes. I’m not going to apologize for not wanting a prisoner to turn into a popsicle. We’re responsible for him, and while we don’t need to baby him, there’s zero harm done by treating him like a human being as much as the situation allows. I feel like sometimes you don’t understand that.”

  “But you—”

  “I’ve been weird,” she admitted. “Martin liked him enough when they worked together that Coo—Dawes’s conviction really threw him for a loop, apparently. He wants to believe that Dawes is innocent, and he asked me to try to get a read on the situation. You deserve to know that that’s where I’m coming from. I went into this trip knowing that someone I really respect thinks that there’s a chance that Dawes didn’t do what he was accused of.”

  Keith opened his mouth and then closed it.

  “I didn’t know that,” he said finally. “But I still think he’s guilty.”

  “That makes sense. He probably is. But if someone you trusted asked you to consider the alternative—”

  She let the words hang in the air.

  Keith said, “I don’t... I don’t really have anybody like that. Someone I trust like that.”

  That deflated her a little. It just sounded so lonely. He really didn’t have anyone, did he?

  Martin had taken her under his wing when she’d been a rookie. It sounded like he’d briefly taken Cooper under there, too. The least Gretchen could do was try to pass on the favor.

  “Okay. Let’s just say, for right now, that we’ve both been screwing this up. I went too far, and I should have trusted you and told you the truth right from the start. But Keith, you need to get better with the people you meet on the job. Part of being a Marshal is serving the public trust—and you’ve got to be worthy of the public trust. You have to make people feel like they can trust you to treat them fairly and decently.”

  “You leave the heat on for them,” Keith said. It was hard to tell whether or not he sounded skeptical.

  “Yeah. Little things like that. You leave the heat on. You’re polite as long as they’re polite.” She patted his arm. “Give it a try, anyway. You’re new enough on the job that you can afford to try out different ways of doing things before you settle into your own pattern.”

  “I don’t want to mess this up,” Keith said. His voice was low and intense. “My whole family is counting on me.”

  She knew how that felt, more or less. Or at least she knew how it felt to feel the weight of expectations on her shoulders, to feel like she had to achieve more than everyone else and do it faster than everyone else, to make up for the fact that she was different. Trying to be perfect—even perfect at being normal—was stressful.

  No wonder she didn’t mind long car trips. They were a vacation from the pressure she put on herself at home.

  “No one’s talking to your family,” Gretchen reassured Keith. “Martin’s not turning in an evaluation to them at the end of every week. There’s no all-unicorn bulletin going out on you. You’ve got time to figure things out.”

  He exhaled, his breath puffing out in a white cloud. He looked as stubborn as ever, but he said, “I’ll think about what you said.”

  She kind of liked that that was all he was promising. It would have been easy for him to promise her he’d change completely, but he was trying instead to make her only the promise he knew he could keep. It made her think that he took his word seriously.

  Maybe he was a pain in the ass, but he wasn’t just a pain in the ass. And maybe, like Martin had said, he could grow out of it.

  “Okay. Good.” She grinned at him. “I’m going to see if Dawes wants a snack.”

  “Now you’re just doing this on purpose,” Keith said.

  “Little bit,” Gretchen admitted cheerfully.

  For a second there, she would have sworn Keith almost smiled.

  Truth be told, she did like having a flimsy excuse to be extra-nice to Cooper. She didn’t know what to make of that. But as long as she paid attention to what that desire was making her do, and as long as she made sure it stayed on the right side of the stupidity line—unlike that handshake—then she didn’t see the harm in it.

  Though maybe that was just because she didn’t want to.

  She ducked back into the car for a second, the warm blast from the heater hitting her smack in the face while the rest of her was still outside in the cold.

  “Do you want anything from inside? Drink, candy bar?”

  He stared at her like she was some kind of beautiful natural phenomenon, like the northern lights or the ocean at sunrise.

  It took her breath away. Their eyes seemed to lock together, like two magnets clicking into place.

  She knew he had beautiful eyes—a clear, lagoon-like green—but this was ridiculous. How she was feeling was ridiculous.

  And right, a little voice in her head said. This is the rightest you’ve felt in a long time.

  Gretchen did her best to ignore it. That was what she was supposed to do with her secret voice, wasn’t it? That was the little voice of wishful thinking, and it was just her imagination.

  “Just a Milky Way, if you really wouldn’t mind,” Cooper said. It felt like it had been a year since she’d asked him, but some logical part of her brain knew that it had only been seconds. “A Milky Way Midnight, the dark chocolate one, if they have it.”

  “I love dark chocolate,” Gretchen said.

  Cooper nodded. “The darker the better.”

  She seesawed her hand. “Eh, there’s a tipping point. Once you hit somewhere around 85% dark, it falls over the bitterness line into ‘unbearable’ for me.”

  “I guess I never paid that kind of attention to it before. I think you’ve been buying better chocolate than I have.”

  “I have fancy tastes,” Gretchen said loftily.

  Cooper smiled. “How fancy?”

  Was he flirting with her? Was she letting him?

  Yes and yes, and that worried her.

  “You know. Nothing but the best boxed wine and supermarket cheese on Ritz crackers in all the land. To be consumed in my oldest bathrobe in front of the TV.”

  His smile had turned wistful. “That sounds nice. I’ve never been a boxed wine guy, but I bet anything’s better than prison pruno: fruit cocktail and a bread heel fermented in some guy’s sock.”

  Gretchen shuddered. “Tell me you didn’t drink that.”

  “Oblivion’s had its appeal lately, but I decided if I needed it that bad, I’d rather risk trying to knock myself unconscious.”

  “Good thinking. And I’ll be carrying that pruno description into my nightmares, thanks.”

  She was relaxed with him, she realized, in a way that was unusual for her. It stood out even more since she couldn’t deny the frisson of attraction between them, a fizz that made each one of his smiles hit her like champagne.

  She’d never felt that exact combination of comfort and flirtatious sparks. She had dated, but she’d never managed to get to the point where she could have both scorching hot sex and cozy nights of Netflix-watching coupledom with the dogs draped over their laps. She’d never had that elusive feeling of total connection, where she was just happy to spend time in the guy’s presence no matter what they were doing.

  Some part of her had always been performing, acting the role of the good girlfriend in the same way she’d acted out Cool Aunt Gretchen and Human Totally Fine With Not Being a Shifter.

  And now, when she really needed to perform the one role she’d never had any trouble with at all, the one role she’d always thought was just her—US Marshal—she was completely relaxed instead. Instinctively relaxed.

  That was bad. She couldn’t trust how much she trusted him.

  “Milky Way Midnight,” she said, forcing a kind of cheerfulness. “Got it. Be right back.”

  She knew she’d just dropped their conversation midstream, an
d she felt bad about that—and worse about how he looked like she’d just turned her back on him.

  Compartmentalize it, she told herself sternly. Whatever you’re feeling, you can’t let it drive you crazy.

  “Keith, want a snack or anything to drink?”

  “Coffee and one of those little packs of chocolate-covered donuts?” Keith said hopefully.

  “I can do that.”

  She headed into the gas station, listening to the little bell on the door ring as she stepped inside.

  The cashier looked exactly like Gretchen’s Nana Miller—round, pleasant face and long gray hair that she wore up in a bun. They even had the same red apple cheeks. “Awfully cold out there,” the woman said to her as a greeting.

  “I’m driving southwest,” Gretchen said. “Here’s hoping it’ll get warmer as I go.”

  “I’ll cross my fingers for you. But it’s supposed to get nastier and nastier.”

  Gretchen selected Keith’s little chocolate donuts and coffee, dispensing a cup for herself as well. She took way more sugar in it than Keith did, though. She took more sugar in her coffee than anyone else she knew, but at least it was a mostly hidden vice.

  She casually checked on the car, looking through the plate glass front of the gas station. Keith was still standing outside, leaning against the door, glowering at the world like he wanted it to know he disapproved of it.

  She could see Cooper’s silhouette through the backseat window. With the glass fogged up, he was just a blur.

  A blur onto which she could project whatever she wanted? Was that the appeal?

  No. She didn’t think so, anyway.

  Cooper didn’t feel like a blank space. She’d gone into all this with plenty of firm, fixed ideas about him, no matter what she’d said to Keith or what she’d promised Martin. Sure, she’d intended to keep her position flexible, but she had still thought that he was guilty.

  She was responding to the reality of him, not to the idea of him.

  Maybe you’re just responding to the reality of his freakishly beautiful eyes.