make sure she didn’t try to nibble that innocent smile right off his face.
She didn’t even know why she was resisting, but some part of her knew. It hadn’t been fear or reluctance that had made her stop kissing him. It had been professional alertness.
Separated from him, the heat in her blood had time to cool down, and when she got her brain back, she realized what had set off her internal alarm.
The shaky rumbling of the car had stopped. The air vents had stopped blowing out heat.
They were out of gas.
Cooper frowned, recognizing the problem at the same time she did, and he put his hand up to one of the vents. Nothing.
“Well, shit,” he said quietly. “I thought we’d have longer than that.”
“Me too.”
She wrapped her arms around herself, like she was futilely trying to hold in whatever heat was already trapped under her parka. She was taking a kind of obsessive inventory of all the warm clothing they had on hand, and she didn’t like how little time she had to spend doing it.
She exhaled. “I should have stopped for gas. I should have made sure we had a full tank.”
“We’re in the middle of nowhere. It’s not like we’ve had a lot of options. The storm hit sooner than expected and all at once, and we were both focused on putting as much distance as possible between us and the fear gas guys. I would have done the exact same thing.”
Maybe he was only trying to make her feel better, but she found herself believing him. And that did make a difference.
Well, it made a difference to her feelings. It wouldn’t make much difference in determining whether or not they froze to death out here. Her job now was to make sure that didn’t happen.
“Right,” she said crisply. “We’ve got a blanket, we’ve both got coats, and we’ve got Martin’s hand-warmers. That gives us a pretty good chance, but we’re going to have to start conserving all the heat in this car right away.”
There was an obvious way to do that—one that came to mind immediately and with her hind-brain’s glowing approval—but she didn’t know if it would be too much too soon.
On the other hand, if it kept them alive, it would be exactly enough at exactly the right time.
She could at least phrase it professionally. I think we need to share body heat sounded a lot better than I think we need to cuddle.
“I think we need to share body heat,” she said.
By the look on Cooper’s face, he’d heard cuddle anyway and was already visualizing what she meant. His cheeks flushed, but he nodded. “Backseat?”
“If you’re not sick and tired of being in the back of a car.”
The corners of his eyes crinkled when he was happy. “Not with you.”
They couldn’t afford to open the doors again, not when it would just let in a gust of cold air to steal the little heat that they still had, so Gretchen had to wriggle back into the backseat over the central console.
Cooper followed behind a little more awkwardly—he was lean, but his shoulders were broad and he was tall enough that there was just a lot of him. Getting him into the back seat through the narrow space between the two front seats was like playing a really weird game of Tetris.
“Ow,” Cooper said when he finally landed back there with her. “I think I sprained something.”
“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.