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

“I’d be shocked if you didn’t. At least you didn’t reopen your stitches.” She fished the fleece blanket out of the front, eyeing the hand warmers for a second: no, it’d be better to save those for later. She didn’t like to think about there being a later time when they might be saved by Martin’s emergency hand warmers, but she had to.

And for right now, anyway, she had an emergency Cooper Dawes. That was better anyway.

“You should be on top,” Cooper said. “I’m heavier than you are.”

Gretchen grinned. Never mind decorum: they’d already kissed each other senseless, and any plausible deniability about the sexual tension that made the air between them crackle had already gone out the window. “Do you like women on top?”

She was rewarded with another eye-crinkling smile. It was a look she didn’t think she could ever get tired of. “I like a lot of things, actually. I’m easy to please.” He tentatively touched her cheek, caressing down the length of it in a way that made her feel like a match being struck. He made her whole body blaze into flame.

She could almost believe that if they took this show outside, the heat between them would melt all the snow and bring on the summer.

They shifted around, Gretchen maneuvering until she rested on top of him.

If this was close to car sex, something she’d never had, she had to say she could see the appeal.

Sure, it was cramped, and sure, they both seemed to suddenly have twice as many elbows and knees as usual, with all of them aimed in the wrong direction so that their ribs were being poked like pincushions. Sure, neither of them could stretch out across the length of the seat, so they were both awkwardly bent and Cooper’s neck, in particular, was turned at a deeply worrying angle. Sure, it was uncomfortable.

But being on top of him like this, with this little dignity or grace, with the sense that they just needed it so badly: that, Gretchen had to admit, was kind of hot. In the center of all this cold, they were warm against each other, and they were willing to say that this was worth any amount of discomfort.

They were like lovers in a snow globe, sealed away from the world. It was just the two of them and the blizzard, sealed away from everything else.

The snow in a snow globe fell when you shook it up, and today had certainly shaken her up. Today had changed her life for good.

And she was glad. Somehow, with him, she was happier than she’d ever been before.

They wrapped themselves in the blanket, tucking it in on all sides so that it would hold in as much of their body heat as possible.

“Okay,” Gretchen said when they were done. “We’ve successfully become a human space heater. But we need to strip down some layers inside the heater, because right now my parka and your coat are hurting us more than they’re helping us.”

Bare skin on bare skin was the best answer, and she knew he knew that as well as she did. The only reason she wasn’t willing to go that far was that this was Martin’s car, and if Gretchen wound up naked in the back of her boss’s car, let alone having sex in it, she would never be able to look Martin in the eye ever again. They had to compromise. She unzipped her coat and shed it and her sweater and jeans, leaving her in just her socks, underwear, and a plain cotton tee.

There was no way Cooper could see much of her body, given that all the contortions she was going through were hidden under the blanket. And while he could undoubtedly feel a lot of it—that was more or less the point—that didn’t explain the way he was looking at her like he was almost impressed.

“What is it?”

“I’ve just never seen someone undress with that kind of... fluidity.”

> She wound up laughing despite herself. “Fluidity?”

“You did it in two seconds! And you barely moved!”

“High school locker rooms,” Gretchen said. “They’re great training for quick changes, especially if you’re a teenage girl in mortal terror of attracting mean girl scorn.”

He looked gratifyingly baffled. “What could they have possibly scorned you for? You’re gorgeous.”

“No one’s gorgeous in high school, Coop.”

“I bet you were.”

“I had a frizzy perm, braces, and no boobs.” She resisted the urge to add that she still had virtually no boobs: there was no need to draw his attention to that. Besides, since the boobs she did have were currently flattened against his chest by the way she was lying on him, he hopefully had a high opinion of them all the same.

“You’re gorgeous,” Coop repeated. He traced the edge of her ear, like he was trying to warm her there. “But I’ll admit that I’m glad you don’t have the perm anymore.”

“It was pretty bad. It was like I was surrounded by an explosion of my own hair.” She prodded him. “You have to lose some layers too. Right now I feel like I’m losing a game of strip poker.”

“You would be losing,” he said, even as he opened up his coat and started shifting out of his clothes. “You already said you were a bad poker player. I’m a good one. Also, I’d be highly motivated.”

She would be highly motivated too. She couldn’t see much of him—he was almost as good at the quick-change as she was—but she could feel him, and that was more than enough to get her blood stirred up. His skin was soft, like velvet laid over hard muscle, and his long, lean body laid out beneath hers was now almost completely bare. She could feel his thighs brushing against hers.