Christmas Griffin: A Mate for Christmas #5

by Chant, Zoe

Delphine had set the table—something he wouldn’t have thought possible, given the cabin’s thin provisions. A stack of hot, butter-yellow biscuits steamed gently on a plate in the middle of the table. There was a stick of butter on another plate to one side, and two mugs of what smelled like the same deathly coffee he’d made the night before.

  He didn’t know where she’d found the butter. By the condensation dripping from the stick laid out on the kitchen table, and the way it fought the knife he tried to cut through it, he suspected it had been frozen. How long had she been up before he woke, to work this sort of magic?

  “Oh, it’s nothing,” she murmured when he asked how she’d found it all. The lie scratched, though there was no sign of it on her face. “I like to get up early and make myself useful. Well, I always do, anyway.”

  Another lie. But—her final sentence was closer to the truth. Hardwick frowned. Had she forgotten he could sense untruths?

  “How did you sleep?” he asked, tempting fate.

  “Poorly.” Her mouth quirked at his surprise. “I’m sorry. I know I should be a better guest, but there’s no point lying, is there?”

  “No.”

  “No.” She echoed him, her voice making the word more musical than his had done.

  He cleared his throat. “Were you too cold? I only arrived yesterday afternoon. I don’t know if the heat gets through well enough to the other room.”

  “Mmm. No. I think my restless sleep had more to do with being in a strange bed, snowed in miles from anywhere, than it did room temperature.”

  Pain shot through Hardwick’s forehead. He jerked one hand up to rub it, and when he lowered it again, Delphine was watching him. Her eyebrows were drawn together.

  “You—” she began, and stopped herself. “You said last night that you’re a detective?” she said after a brief hesitation. “That must be interesting, with your, um, particular skills.”

  “It’s a living.” Hardwick eased himself into the familiar conversation. It was the same one he had with other shifters who knew about his shifter type. Usually those conversations ended with the other person sloping off before the small talk got too close to the bone. “I have a gift. It’s my duty to use it.”

  “Any good stories?”

  He thought about the sting that had gone wrong and left Jackson with the scar from a bullet wound across his forehead. How a job that had been simple when he was a new recruit had turned into such a tangled mess.

  But this was his duty. What was his gift for, except to help people?

  Anyway, he had a story. Something from early in his career, featuring a lost kitten, two neighbor kids communicating with tin-can phones like something from the 1950s, and the sort of convoluted scheme that only a pair of eight-year-olds caught in their own lies would come up with. Bland and inoffensive. Cute.

  “…and it turned out there were two kittens, after all, which explained the collar changing color. Every time their parents got suspicious and they handed off what they thought was the only kitten to what they thought was the other kid, one of the kittens got picked up by the old lady who was living downstairs.”

  “It’s like that puzzle with the wolf, the sheep, and the cabbage,” Delphine said. “What happened to the kittens afterwards?”

  “I don’t know.” Hardwick searched his memory, but his griffin was sure that his automatic response had been the truth.

  “Back to the pound, I suppose, if they weren’t allowed in the apartments.” Delphine’s voice had an undertone of pessimism that made his attention jerk towards her.

  “It’s a happier ending than most,” he said.

  “Even with your gift?”

  “People don’t need my gift because they were already having a good day.”

  Delphine made a face and gestured with her butter knife. “Point. Sugar for your coffee?”

  He shook his head and she spooned sugar into her own mug, which she then looked at as though it was going to jump up and bite her. Which wasn’t far wrong. Even his griffin agreed with that.

  Hardwick wanted to be confused about why she was asking about his powers when it was so obvious she knew he’d seen through her attempts to lie about who—what—she was. But he wasn’t. Even though it made his heart ache and his griffin hide its head under its wing, he knew the main reason people gathered information like that was to find a way around it.

  She was getting better. He had to give her that. His griffin was having to peck out her lies, untangle them from words that were mostly truth. But everything she said was still hazed around with a fog of deceit. It was as though her whole being was a lie.

  Despite his better judgment, he found himself wanting to know more.

  * * *

  The ‘scones’ were good.

  Really good.

  And not just because they were delicious. Hardwick tried to remember the last time anyone had cooked for him. Picking up a coffee from the station cafeteria didn’t count.

  Hell, when was the last time he’d cooked for himself?

  Most days, by the end of his shift, he was too exhausted and in too much pain to do more than order takeout. Even when he was stocking up for this trip, he’d limited himself to readymade frozen meals and a few basics. It was some sort of miracle that Delphine had found enough ingredients to do any baking at all.

  No. He gazed across the table. The miracle was that she’d wanted to cook for him.

  She caught his stare and looked up. Her cheeks went pink. Hell. What was he doing? He had to tell her the truth. Had to—

  “I’d really like to try and get back to Pine Valley today,” Delphine said.

  Pain shot through his forehead. Hardwick dropped his knife with a clatter. He was half-aware of Delphine getting up from the table and he waved her away, his gesture jerky as he tried to breathe through his griffin’s reaction.

  His griffin cowered inside him, puffing itself up to make it look bigger. Hardwick clutched his hand to his forehead. Calm down, he told himself, or his griffin, or both. Breathe through it. It’ll fade soon.

  Slowly, reluctantly, his griffin’s feathery ruff deflated. It settled itself back on its haunches, tail flicking.

  And the pain faded.

  Hardwick sighed. “Sorry, bud,” he whispered, rubbing his forehead.

  “What was that?”

  Delphine looked like she was sitting down by sheer force of will alone. Her hands were braced on the edge of the table. Her eyes bored into his. If she’d been a shifter, her inner animal would have been blazing out through her gaze, demanding the same answer.

  But she was human, and the blazing was all her.

  “Migraine,” Hardwick gritted out. “They’ve been getting bad lately. Give it a minute, it’ll pass.”

  Until the next time she casually lied to him.

  Even that circle-round-the-truth made his griffin pace warily. Hardwick muttered something that he deserved a rap across the knuckles for and forced the pained grimace off his face.

  “Thank you for breakfast,” he said, meeting Delphine’s blazing glare with a mild expression of his own. “It’s delicious. Really. Can’t remember the last time I had anything this good.”

  Her eyes widened. Some of the fire in them faded—and then they narrowed sharply. “You’re serious. Because you don’t lie.”

  “Right.”

  “They’re scones.” She looked outraged. “They take no effort! All sorts of food are better than them! Haven’t you been looking after yourself?”

  Her mouth dropped open as though hadn’t meant to say that last bit. Or any of it, Hardwick mused.

  She recovered quickly. “Not that it’s any of my business,” she added, mildly, and a serrated knife-edge ran around the base of his skull.

  Lie.

  She did think it was her business.

  Hardwick’s mouth was suddenly dry. He sipped his coffee. Didn’t help.

  What if she knew?

  Or if she didn’t know, what if she could guess? The
connection between them. The way he couldn’t stop himself from turning towards her, his constant awareness of her every mood, the changing expressions on her face and the hidden thoughts and emotions she tried not to let show.

  He didn’t know how humans experienced the mate bond. They didn’t have an inner creature to tell it to them straight. But they couldn’t be completely unaffected, could they?

  Delphine couldn’t be. The emotion blazing from her eyes wasn’t anything that could be explained by her just seeing him as some random asshole who’d saved her life. When he doubled over, she hadn’t backed away, like any sensible person would when the stranger they were sharing a cabin with started behaving strangely.

  She wasn’t just concerned, she was mad.

  He sorted through what he knew. They both knew where things stood with his abilities—didn’t they? He could tell when she was telling the truth. She knew he could tell when she was telling the truth. Neither of them had said anything about any connection between them.

  She hadn’t said anything.

  Why not?

  “None of your business,” he repeated, his voice a gravelly rasp. “You sure about that?”

  Her eyes narrowed further. Excitement fluttered in his stomach, a bright spark that drove the last of the pain in his head away. This wasn’t lying. This was a game. Wasn’t it?

  Delphine held his gaze for a minute that seemed to stretch on forever. The air between them almost sang with tension.

  Then she looked away.

  “There are only a few things in my life I’m sure of,” she said, her eyes still averted. “One of them is that I feel like I should get back to my family as soon as I can. The snow’s stopped. If you can take me back to my car…”

  Hardwick’s stomach dropped. “Of course.”

  No point telling himself that what he was feeling wasn’t disappointment. Or confusion. The energy that had sparked between them—she must have felt it. And if she was from a shifter family, she must know what it meant.

  Which meant she was deliberately avoiding it. Their connection. Him.

  The sinking in his stomach turned into a pit. His appetite disappeared. He stood up.

  “We’d better get moving before the weather turns again,” he said. “Let me know when you’re ready.”

  Chapter Nine

  Delphine

  Delphine tidied herself up in the tiny bathroom and wondered what the hell she was doing.

  Hardwick wasn’t her mate. That was obvious, wasn’t it? He wasn’t her mate, and he wasn’t interested in her hanging around, so why had it been so difficult to tell him she wanted to go back to her car?

  It wasn’t even a lie. At least, she thought it wasn’t. Ugh, she hated having to second-guess everything she was saying like this.

  At least life with her family was simple. She knew exactly what each of them expected of her, and fulfilling those expectations was the easiest thing in the world.

  Even if they didn’t expect a lot from her.

  She hissed in a breath. The thought had bubbled up before she could stop it. She tried to push it away, but it just loomed larger.

  Her family didn’t expect a lot from her.

  How could they?

  She’d spent most of her life putting herself in a very specific box. She wasn’t fun to be around, like her brothers, or wickedly opinionated, like her cousin Pebbles, or on track to discover the next big cancer breakthrough like everyone said Brutus was going to do. She was just… there. Or not there, most of the time. In the background, being helpful and keeping out of the way.

  Never looking anyone in the eye, in case they noticed there was no winged lion looking back at them. Never replying to any telepathic conversation. She’d accepted years ago that that meant her relatives would think she was either a snob or stupid, and she’d been fine with it. Hadn’t she?

  If she told Hardwick she was fine with it, would he look at her like she’d just admitted to kicking puppies?

  She smoothed down her sweatshirt. Her hands were shaking.

  It was a good thing she was going back to town, if just one night around Hardwick was messing her up like this.

  If I said that to Hardwick, would he—

  She shook her head firmly. She had to stop thinking like that.

  And start thinking about what she would tell her family when she got back to the hotel.

  If they were at the hotel. She ran over the holiday schedule in her mind. Yesterday, her grandfather had planned to visit the Heartwells so the younger lions could go flying out of sight of the town and the older ones could bask in the various ways they decided they were superior to the dragon shifters.

  She didn’t need to be there to know that was the plan. The only reason her grandparents ever thought other varieties of shifters were worth talking to was to cement their position as the top of the heap. Winged lions with pedigrees going back thousands of year were just better than everyone else, don’t you know?

  At least she wouldn’t have to pretend to already know what had happened there. So far as everyone else was concerned, she’d been out of range of even the loudest telepathic shrieks. Which meant there was an opportunity for conversation. Maybe Aunt Grizelda would like to give her a blow-by-blow of the visit, and that could keep her out of having to do... whatever was on the cards for today.

  Dogsledding? Ice-skating?

  She couldn’t remember.

  Delphine stared at herself in the mirror, horrified. She couldn’t remember? She always remembered. Remembering was how she got everything done. Not even the most complicated scheduling app could keep up with Mr. Petrakis’s wayward planning, and she’d developed those skills through long years with her family. If she couldn’t remember where they were meant to be, how could she arrange her own life to be in the perfect place to avoid anyone confronting her?

  She leaned over the battered tin sink, breathing heavily.

  I should stay here.

  The thought was tempting. Too tempting. And ridiculous. What was she thinking? How could spending more time in this run-down, practically falling-down shack, with a man who looked sick every time she spoke to him, be preferable to spending Christmas with her own family? Yes, she’d been happy enough to spend a night away from them by herself, but this was... was...

  She pushed herself away from the sink and walked swiftly back into the main room.

  Where Hardwick was waiting for her.

  “You’ll want this,” he said gruffly, holding out a coat. It was bigger and thicker than Delphine’s, designed entirely for warmth instead of partially for warmth and partially for fashion. And chosen, she had to admit, because to choose a winter coat built only for warmth would be to admit that she had a frail human body that needed extra insulation.

  Unless, apparently, you were Hardwick, whose clothing choices were more sensible than all the Belgraves combined.

  “Thank you.” She shrugged the jacket on. It swamped her shoulders and reached down to her knees. Warmth surrounded her, and she remembered why the thought of staying here with Hardwick was more than just ridiculous.

  It was dangerous.

  Because the longer she spent with Hardwick, even with his grumpy face and the obvious resentment with which he treated her presence, the more she was tempted to tell him the truth. About her, and her family, and everything she’d done to keep a wall of lies between them.

  She didn’t understand it. She couldn’t understand it. It made no sense. But in between the awkwardness and the feeling of rubbing up his fur the wrong way and, oh, God, the lying awake the night before unable to stop thinking about the fact that he was right there in the next room, crammed onto the sofa she’d been sitting on only a few hours before, possibly undressed or even partially undressed…

  …Quite apart from any of that, she’d enjoyed talking to him. Once she figured out that he’d figured out that she wasn’t actually a shifter, talking to him had—eventually—been relaxing in a way she’d forgotten conversati
on could be. She’d wanted to know about his work, and his powers, and he’d told her, without her having to hedge her side of the conversation with rubbish about how her inner animal did such-and-such, or how her job was perfect for a winged lioness, because it combined the Belgraves’ essential traits of sucking up to other mythical shifters while pretending they were better than them, or something.

  And he hadn’t pushed her to talk about herself. He’d known she was lying about being a shifter, and he’d just… let her lie.

  Which on top of everything else, was a terrible reason for her to want to tell him everything. Was she really so self-centered that some guy not wanting to know her innermost secrets made her determined to serve them up to him?

  She couldn’t, anyway. This wasn’t about her. It was about the same thing Belgraves were always about.

  Family.

  Chapter Ten

  Hardwick

  “I take it I’ll be flying us down.”

  Hardwick had thought that went without saying, but the shock on Delphine’s face—quickly hidden—told him that she’d forgotten that particular detail.

  A sudden surge of frustration gripped him. How could she forget something so simple? Almost everything she said was a lie. What sort of fraud made a slip like that?

  One who crashed her car and almost died, and spent the night dealing with your ugly face treating her like she was on the other side of the interview table?

  Sometimes he wondered if his griffin would be as hard on him as he was himself, if it could talk.

  “Oh… yes.” Delphine bit her lower lip and Hardwick had to look away.

  He wanted to say so much more but forced himself to go outside. He’d cleared a path through the newly fallen snow while she was getting ready. Snow was heaped in against the sides of the cabin, but the flat space out the front wasn’t too deeply blanketed in the stuff. The carport was a pure white cube. His own truck was somewhere inside it.

  None of which boded well for the state of Delphine’s rental.