“Thank you,” Cooper said. His voice sounded a little rough. He slid his thumb along the little cardboard casing of the chocolate, popping it open. “You’ll have to share it with me.”
“I don’t want to share it with you,” Gretchen pointed out. “That’s the whole idea. I’m trying to educate you in relative levels of bittersweetness. No bitterness equals perfectly fine. Some bitterness equals better. Medium bitterness equals perfection. And this just tries to turn your mouth inside out.”
He smiled, but her speech didn’t stop him from snapping the chocolate into little squares and holding one out to her. And, weirder still, her speech didn’t stop her from taking it.
“We can eat it on the count of three,” Coop said.
“Toast first.” She tapped her square of chocolate against his. “Cheers.”
“I think we can do better than cheers. Do you have a favorite toast?”
“They’re mostly jokes.” She frowned, thinking: all that was coming to mind was the slightly ribald one she’d made at her little sister’s bachelorette party. Somehow, she didn’t think it would be the best idea to introduce the toast may all your ups and downs be between the sheets right now, not with the sexual tension between them practically making her skin ache.
“I know a couple in other languages,” Cooper said. “Skål—that’s Norwegian—or sláinte—I think that one’s Irish for ‘to your health.’”
Some of the classic toasts she’d heard were starting to come back to her now. She tilted her chocolate square towards him.
“Here’s champagne for our real friends and real pain for our sham friends.”
Cooper grinned. “To the confusion of our enemies. That’s appropriate.”
She remembered another old family one. “Here’s to those who know us well but love us just the same.”
That didn’t feel like it really fit here, though. The people who hadn’t loved Cooper had been the ones who’d never bothered to get to know him.
He’d thought he was broken, but all he’d really been was unlucky. He hadn’t known the right people.
He hadn’t known her. She was beginning to suspect she could love Cooper Dawes very, very easily.
She hastily moved on before he could get out his next one. “May the best of your past be the worst of your future.”
“That’d be something,” Cooper said softly. “I’d be happy with the worst of my past just being far away from the best of my future.”
“It will be.” She was willing to go head-to-head with the universe to make sure of it.
She wondered if too much of that showed in her eyes, because Cooper cleared his throat and looked away. His eyes seemed brighter than ever.
He said, “Just one more, if that’s okay.” He brushed his square of chocolate against hers. “To you, Gretchen. You believed me when no one else did. You saw me when no one else did. And you bought me chocolate of as-of-yet undetermined quality.”
She shook her head. “I’ve determined the quality. It’s too bitter. And you’ve had too much bitterness already.” She curled her fingers around his hand, knowing her chocolate would start melting from their combined body heat. “I’d toast to you. You served your witnesses and your team faithfully, and you had it all stripped away from you, without even a tenth of the defense and support you should have had. You waited in prison when you didn’t even know if you ever had any hope of getting free. And Coop, you stayed good. You’re still the man you were before you were locked up—someone kind enough and brave enough to try to save a stranger. To you.”
“To us,” Cooper said.
She could live with that. More than live with it, actually: it sent a pleasant shiver up her spine, a shiver that was hot instead of cold.
They ate the chocolate in unison.
As always, Gretchen’s nose wrinkled as her mouth automatically puckered around the ultra-bitter chocolate. She liked dark chocolate, but there was a line.
This was just blech.
Cooper’s expression was more thoughtful. He chewed slowly, his eyes half-closed like he was taking the taste in. Gretchen didn’t see what there was to take in: she’d rather just spit it out.
But maybe he liked it. She could try to be nonjudgmental about his very incorrect taste in chocolate.
“What do you think?”
“It’s definitely bitter. But it’s still chocolate, and I like chocolate.”
“It’s barely chocolate,” Gretchen emphasized. “It’s like pure cocoa held together with wishful thinking. You deserve better chocolate.”
“To be fair,” Cooper said, a spark of humor in his eyes, “you didn’t buy me better chocolate.