was chasing them, they were being chased. No matter who had framed him, he’d been framed. And like he’d said, the situation was a ticking time bomb.
Especially once the snow started falling.
10
Gretchen had known this snowstorm was coming, but it still managed to surprise her in how fast it showed up. One minute, it was nothing but heavy clouds on the horizon and a reason to crank up the heat. The next, it was a complete whiteout. In between, there had been the faintest sprinkling of snowflakes, exactly the kind of thing she would have loved on Christmas morning—and then, just like that, they were getting buried under them.
There was so much snow and hail in the air, whipped to and fro by vicious winds, that she could barely see a foot in front of her. Even with her headlights on, and even with moving only at a crawl, she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t going to drive them straight off the embankment. She had to pull off to the shoulder.
Cooper squinted through the wintry haze. There was an oddly familiar expression on his face, one Gretchen had seen before but couldn’t exactly place.
“Can you see in this?” Gretchen said, surprised.
“Not much. But I’ve driven this way before, and... I think there’s an old motor court a few miles ahead of us, just off the exit. It’s rundown, but—”
“At this point, I’d happily stay at a motel run by Norman Bates himself. But I don’t think we can make it a few miles. Not in this.”
She didn’t have to say why. He was seeing the same weather she was, and if he knew enough about this road to guess at the location of the nearest motel, he knew as well as she did that there were plenty of treacherous ravines and steep drop-offs along the way. Fumbling around out there would be a good way to wind up in a ditch. And if the crash didn’t kill them, it could easily hurt them enough to keep them from getting back up again—and then the cold would take care of the rest.
“We could try going on foot?” Cooper said.
“We’re not dressed for it. You especially.” The prison had at least given him a reasonably bulky coat, but the snow would soak right through the cloth legs of his jumpsuit.
“I can take it.” He didn’t sound one hundred percent sure about that, though.
“I couldn’t,” Gretchen said. “Even with more padding. The last weather bulletin I saw before my cell signal gave out said something like twenty degrees below zero with the wind chill. That’ll cut straight through my coat, and as slowly as we’d have to be walking in all this...”
She hated to be a downer, but she just couldn’t think of a good way out of this. They’d just have to wait it out and hope the storm dropped soon.
The gas they had should last them a while, and keeping the heat on would keep them warm. But if the storm lasted all night, or if the tailpipe got blocked by the snow...
She couldn’t afford to think about that. They could have Tiffani’s rock-hard cookies for dinner, and—
Suddenly, she dug into her coat pocket. Had she remembered it? When her hand closed around something the right shape and size, she broke into a smile so wide that it made her mouth ache.
“I have a surprise for you,” she said.
“If you want to start playing your Moby Dick audiobook, I’m not opposed to it, but I think it’ll drain your cell battery.”
“It’s not Moby Dick.” She needed to just accept that she was never going to finish that book. “It’s something we talked about earlier today. Given that we’re stuck in a winter wonderland, call it a belated Christmas present.”
She passed him the bar of ultra-dark chocolate.
“Eighty-five percent dark,” Gretchen announced. “It’s practically a black hole.”
Cooper turned the fancy candy bar over in his hands, studying it like it was some priceless work of art. His lips were parted slightly.
Gretchen wanted to kiss him.
It was an almost absurdly reckless impulse. It was so far from correct Marshal protocol that Keith had probably bolted upright in his hospital bed just from sensing she’d imagined it.
But God, she wanted to do it. She wanted to taste the sweetness of his mouth before the bitterness of the chocolate changed it. She wanted to find out how he kissed—if he would put his hands in her hair or on her shoulders, if he’d be gentle or