Somehow she had known it from the moment they’d met. Even when he had just been a stranger wrapped in a cloud of lies, suspicions, and hopes, even when he had been standing there shivering in the parking lot of Stridmont, she had known. She’d been pulled towards him.
Whatever conversation they were having was lost for a few minutes, because she surged forward against him and all they could do was kiss.
She wasn’t good with words. All the tenderness and passion she was feeling had to spill over somehow. And so did his: he had gotten his hands in her hair, what little there was of it to grab, as if he had to hold as much of her as possible.
Every touch was a confession of all the things that would have sounded clumsy if they’d tried to say them out loud.
I’m so glad I found you. Thank you for opening up my heart to everything I’d been missing. Thank you for bringing me back to myself. I love you, I love you, I love you.
She knew they would wind up saying all of those things eventually—and more than once—but for right now, the kiss felt as eloquent as any speech she could have possibly made. When they finally broke for air, his smile matched hers.
“You knew from the start,” Cooper said. “Just like I did. I’d buried my griffin down so deep that he couldn’t actually show up and tell me until after I’d shifted, but that was just confirmation. I already knew how much you meant to me. Yesterday, I was thinking about escaping, about taking any chance I could to get away from prison... and then I met you, and I couldn’t make myself leave you a second sooner than I had to.”
Professional pride intruded. “I’m not sure you could have escaped anyway, Coop. I’m pretty good.”
“You’re better than pretty good.”
“Of course, you’re better than pretty good too,” she said musingly. “Maybe sometime we could try it out—see if you really could get away from me, Houdini.”
She realized that she was imagining such a normal future for them, one where they could afford to treat escape as a game and not a necessity, and some of her joy dimmed a little.
There was no guarantee they’d ever have anything like that. They might have to spend the rest of their lives using all their professional skills to avoid being captured.
Well, tough. She wasn’t leaving him, she wasn’t letting him fend for himself, and she wasn’t signing off on any plan that included dropping him off at yet another prison.
“Humans don’t feel the mate bond,” Cooper said, and it almost startled her to realize that he was still thinking only about her. She’d only been thinking about him. “Not like that. Maybe they’re attracted, maybe they fall quickly, but—”
“But they don’t do it with prisoners,” Gretchen said.
Was he right? She thought back to what she knew of mates from her family and her friends.
Jillian had been interested in Theo right away—but the most that had stood between them was his unfortunate task of seizing her criminal father’s ill-gotten gains. Jillian hadn’t liked her dad, so even though the experience had been hard, she’d been ready to cooperate with law enforcement.
Tiffani hadn’t been able to resist Martin—but since he was just the handsome, warm-hearted hero who was everything her rotten ex wasn’t, why would she have wanted to?
Aria had been head over heels for Colby from the start—but he’d been both her biggest fan and the man assigned to protect her from a homicidal werewolf.
Their paths to love might not have been smooth, but they hadn’t had an enormous hurdle right out of the starting gate the way Gretchen’s had.
But her little sister Tricia, the same one who had been coaxed and bribed into biting her, had wound up with a human mate, a woman named Bonnie. Bonnie had still been in the closet when she’d first met Tricia, and she stayed there for almost a year after that, too. She had spent a while running from their obvious chemistry because she’d known a relationship with Tricia would change her life completely, and it had terrified her. They were happy and comfortable now, but it had taken months for them to get that way.
Whatever Bonnie had felt about Tricia hadn’t been enough to automatically make her willing to overturn her whole life and risk her family’s disapproval.
But Gretchen had been willing to do that for Cooper.