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

“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.