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

“I hope so. But even if it doesn’t, we have to try. Whoever framed me hurt other people, too, not just me.”

“We can’t just sit back and let them get away with it,” Gretchen said. “And I’m going to clear Cooper’s name if it kills me.”

“I like a good love story,” Ford said. He looked a little shamefaced about it. “My wife used to get those pirate romances with Fabio on the cover, and I always read them after she did. Some of them were damn good yarns.” He cleared his throat and looked down at his gnarled hands, twisting the wedding ring that Cooper was guessing he hadn’t taken off since he’d first put it on. “Those always had a happy ending. I hope you two get one too.”

“And you, sir,” Cooper said quietly. “Thank you for everything.”

Ford cleared his throat again. “Well, you two had better be hitting the road. Innocence won’t prove itself, you know.”

Tell me about it.

16

Hitting the road was a lot more easily said than done. Sitting in a nice, central-heated motel room, it was easy to forget that they’d left their only transportation stranded miles back in a snowbank off the shoulder of the road.

But Ford had offered them his car. Gretchen hadn’t wanted to take it—the absolute last thing she wanted was to drag this kind, gruff old man into trouble with the law—but Ford had insisted, and Cooper had finally pointed out that they could always claim they’d stolen it. Then Ford had objected on the grounds that he didn’t want to have to tell any cop that he was such a damn fool he’d left his keys in his car. Luckily, he’d caved on that point before Gretchen had needed to figure out if hotwiring a car was as easy in real life as it always looked in the movies.

So she and Cooper were on the road again, this time in Ford’s Ford, which was an old beast that still had a tape-deck. Ford had left a Patsy Cline tape in it that they were enjoying.

Cooper was wearing some of Ford’s freshly-laundered clothes, so at least he wouldn’t look like a prisoner—just a young man with an old man’s fashion sense. (Although Gretchen kind of liked that baggy forest-green cardigan on him.)

They had clean clothes, a car, and a good breakfast, and they knew more or less what they w

ere doing and who they were after.

But they didn’t know where they were going, which made the road trip part a little complicated. And Coop had been quiet ever since they’d worked out the truth about Monroe and (probably) Roger. Gretchen could feel him simmering over there in the driver’s seat; he was like a bundle of tension and anger and self-reproach.

“How could I not have seen it,” he said under his breath.

“No one thinks to suspect something like that. You walked into the middle of a conspiracy. You couldn’t have anticipated that.”

He sighed. “I wonder if they were vetting me. I was enough of a loner that they could have figured just being on a team could help bend me in their direction.”

“Sooner or later, they still would have figured out that you were never going to be a bad guy.”

“I could have been,” Cooper said. He was staring out at the road, but she didn’t know if he was really seeing it. “If Monroe had bothered to use his basilisk tricks to figure out how to play me...”

“No,” she said firmly, taking hold of his arm and squeezing it. “If it worked like that, they would have just gotten me to kill you, when I met them in the parking lot. It must be like hypnosis. They can’t make you do anything you really, really wouldn’t do. They have to work with what they have. And no matter what buttons they could have pushed, Coop, you wouldn’t have been like them.”

“How do you know?”

His voice sounded just the littlest bit lost, like after everything he’d been through, he couldn’t even hope for her answer to convince him.

Well, Gretchen was going to convince him anyway. Because even if he wasn’t sure, she was.

“I know,” she said firmly, “because when I met you, you’d gone through hell. You’d been disgraced, locked up, shot, and dragged out of a hospital bed before you could even heal up. You couldn’t find your griffin. Keith was hassling you and wouldn’t cut you a break. You had every reason to hate the world, Coop, but you didn’t. You were polite and funny, and when I was in trouble, when I wasn’t acting like myself, you were the one who noticed and tried to help. You wanted to escape, but you wouldn’t do it at the cost of hurting me or Keith, and you wouldn’t do it at the cost of abandoning us, either. You’re good, Coop.”

There was a hitch in his voice when he was finally able to thank her. He said, “You know something, I think I’m starting to believe you.”

“Good. I’m right.”

He laughed, and the laugh gradually turned into a long exhalation, like he was clearing out all the old lies and clutter inside his chest. A deep breath replaced them with something new: fresh air. Her.

“All right,” Cooper said. He sounded like a whole new person. Her Cooper, the real Cooper, the way she had become the real Gretchen.

Which was good, because she had to ask him a question she really didn’t want to ask, and unfortunately, she had to ask it now.

“You said Phil had worked with Roger and Monroe for a long time. That they were all really tight-knit.”