Christmas Griffin: A Mate for Christmas #5

by Chant, Zoe

  She closed her eyes tight. Why do I keep going back to this? Haven’t I already decided it’s nonsense?

  If she was Hardwick’s mate, he would have said something.

  Unless…

  She went very still.

  Unless he had a reason not to.

  A reason like his mate being a woman who’d built her life around lying to the people who should love her the most. A woman who’d lied to him, first deliberately and then by omission.

  The cold that stuck chill fingers down her back now had nothing to do with the weather. It crept inside her, stiffening her lungs, making her stomach clench.

  And met a sudden, hot anger.

  She wasn’t the only one who’d been lying by omission.

  With a screech of metal and snow grinding on snow and rock, Hardwick hauled the car up out of the ditch. He paused a moment, sides heaving with effort, then shoved it again, pushing it fully onto the flat. Snow cascaded off his wings as he settled them across his back and he turned to Delphine, dark eyes glittering.

  This was it, she thought, as ice and fire met inside her to create something churning and awful. We’re done. I’ve gotten everything I want: back to the car, and soon I’ll be back with my family, and out of his hair. Everything is going to plan.

  She searched inside herself for upbeat, professionally grateful and one hundred percent not on the edge of regretting all of her life choices and found an appropriate smile.

  Hardwick looked uncomfortable. He glanced from the car, to Delphine, to the road behind her, and then let out a sigh that made his wings rustle. He moved behind the car and the air around him began to shimmer.

  Delphine turned her back. It wasn’t polite to watch people shift, she told herself, but it wasn’t just that. Plenty of shifters were practically exhibitionists. But Hardwick had been shy about the no-clothes issue, so it would be especially wrong not to give him some privacy.

  That wasn’t it, either. The truth wormed into her mind. She turned away, because despite everything she told herself some hopeful part of her heart still believed he was her mate. But that couldn’t be real. A decision she’d made over a decade ago, a decision she’d shaped her life around, meant that even if that was real, it couldn’t happen.

  And if it wasn’t going to happen then she was not going to try to steal a glimpse of him.

  “Delphine—”

  She swallowed down a sudden lump in her throat and turned around. “You actually did it! Thank you so much. I am sorry to have taken so much of your time, but—”

  “You don’t seriously think you’re going anywhere in that?”

  Hardwick had been standing behind the car, but now he stalked around it. Her pulse spiked until he rounded the car and she saw he’d pulled on his trousers. He must have carried them with him.

  What about the rest of his clothes?

  “What are you talking about?” she asked, trying her best to ignore all the bits of Hardwick’s body not covered by his trousers, but also not to stare at his trousers. “You got the car out—”

  “Car’s not the problem. The road is.” He gestured behind her, and she tore her eyes away from not-his-chest and not-his-trousers.

  He was right. The road, like the patch of flat ground she was standing on, like everything else she could see, was two feet deep in snow.

  Her stomach dropped. “You’d better drop me back in town then.”

  “That’s an hour’s flight, at least.” He added, reluctance in every angle of his body: “I don’t know if you saw over the ridge while we were flying, but more snow’s on its way. Looks heavier. It’s going to get colder. I don’t want to risk you losing your grip and falling off me or ending up flying blind in a blizzard with no shelter.”

  He was right. She had seen the snow, and realized, like him, that the calm surrounding the rustic cabin had been a lucky chance.

  But him being right didn’t make this any easier.

  As she thought that, the first flakes of snow began to whisk through the air.

  “Well I can’t stay here!”

  “No.” His dark eyes caught hers, even through the flurrying snowflakes. “We’ll have to go back to the cabin.”

  Before she could decide how she was going to answer that, let alone how she actually felt about it, he dug around in his trouser pocket and pulled something out.

  “Good news is I’ve got signal. If you make it quick, you can call your folks, leave a message for them—”

  “No!”

  She didn’t need to think. Possibly she should have. Yes, it would have been a good idea to stop for even half a second and think before shouting out that she didn’t want to let her family know that she was alive and not dead in a ditch somewhere. Here. Dead in a ditch right here.

  Her tongue stumbled over her next words. “I mean—that is—they don’t know—”

  Hardwick’s eyes widened and she slammed her hands over her mouth before she told him everything.

  Shit. She couldn’t lie. He’d know at once. And he might have been willing to give her some leeway so far, but even the most incurious person in the world would wonder why she didn’t want to tell her family where she was.

  She had to tell him the truth.

  Spine rigid, she thought of her grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, and twisted her tongue around the words: “They’ll be happier if I don’t get in touch.”

  Hardwick blinked at her. She couldn’t read the expression on his face.

  “You’re telling the truth.” He sounded dismayed.

  “I thought it was about time I started.” She sounded snappish.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Delphine pulled her coat closer around herself. No, not her coat. Hardwick’s coat.

  He’d been so kind to her. Even if he was her mate, he deserved better.

  But as for what she wanted…

  “No.” She looked him in the eye. “No. I really don’t.”

  Chapter Twelve

  Hardwick

  The flight back up to the cabin seemed faster than the flight down.

  Probably because he wanted it to end even less than he had the first one.

  His head was still aching when he shifted back into human form. That last lie had left him reeling in more ways than one. And the truth—

  The truth had hurt even more. Not his head. His heart.

  He just didn’t understand her. But, God, he wanted to. The longer he spent in her company, the more he realized that his first suspicions that Delphine was running some sort of scam had been wrong.

  This wasn’t a woman who was gleefully pulling one over her shifter family. Delphine was scared.

  And he was an asshole.

  What was he meant to do?

  He’d always thought that if he was lucky enough to find his mate, it would be easy. Like with his parents. They were both griffin shifters. Neither of them had lie-sensing powers as powerful as his—they had told him they got a feeling when someone lied around them, like something wasn’t right, but it had never hurt. But they had both been honest enough people that the whole falling-in-love process was almost hilariously simple. They met and realized they were each other’s mates; they got a marriage license and had a court wedding within the week. Not the most romantic of stories, but it was Hardwick’s baseline for how these things were meant to work.

  It wasn’t meant to hurt.

  And there was no way of avoiding hurt now. Hiding something like this from your mate was unforgivable. If Delphine’s family were as traditional as she made them sound, then she would know what an insult it was to pretend someone wasn’t your soulmate. He couldn’t excuse himself for what he’d done. Maybe if she had left, if the road had somehow been miraculously clear enough and her car un-frozen enough that their initial plan had worked, he could have pulled off a romantic last-minute change of heart and chased after her.

  Instead, they were both lurking around the cabin, trying to put as much distance bet
ween themselves and the other as possible.

  Hardwick had exiled himself to the bedroom. He sat down on the bed, head in hands, and tried to think past the pain beating through his skull.

  The bed was a mistake. Just like sleeping on the sofa the night before had been a mistake. Delphine had been in here, and her scent was on everything. The sheets, the pillow, the air.

  And now—shit. She was back on the sofa right now. Which meant that tonight, when he tried to sleep—

  He groaned and buried his face in the pillow. The pillow that smelled like Delphine. The woman who was meant to be his mate but who he could barely look at without his head hurting.

  He stuck it out in the bedroom for another few hours. Every minute that ground by, he was acutely aware of Delphine in the next room. The sofa creaked slightly as she moved around; water hissed as she filled a glass.

  He stared at his watch. Lunch time. No more excuses. Not if he wanted to seem like a halfway decent host, and not the surly prick that he’d probably come off as so far. Damn it.

  Delphine looked up as he stood in the door. He had a strange impulse to knock on the doorframe. He cleared his throat. “Are you hungry?”

  Her eyes fell to his mouth and her own lips parted, just briefly. He couldn’t look away.

  “Um—” Delphine swallowed.

  “I’ll make lunch,” he said quickly.

  Shit.

  He’d told himself she was in shock. In shock, from almost dying, and then embarrassed, from being stuck here with him. But even non-shifters could feel something of the mate bond, couldn’t they?

  And her family were shifters. She must know what was going on. Which meant she knew he knew and that he wasn’t doing anything about it, and now he knew she knew and... his head hurt.

  And all he had to serve for lunch were frozen meals. He’d planned for this trip thinking he’d only be feeding himself. Not feeding his mate. Not that he was trying to seduce her.

  Well, freezer-burned enchiladas were the perfect not-seducing food.

  The meal took an excruciating hour to cook. Hardwick couldn’t find an excuse to hide in the bedroom while they were in the oven—and it would have been hiding.

  He just couldn’t find an excuse to do anything else, either.

  He stood like a lump by the oven, close to wishing he could hurl himself into it.

  Delphine was not reading a book. By the time the enchiladas were ready he was pretty sure she was on the same page she’d been on when he started, and that page was page one. She wasn’t looking at him, either. Her eyes were fixed on the page like she was trying to burn through it.

  He looked at her. He couldn’t help it.

  There were dark shadows under her eyes that hadn’t been there the night before. She’d said she slept badly, didn’t she? Had she lain there in the bed, thinking about him as he thought about her? What had gone through her mind?

  That he didn’t want anything to do with her.

  The thought settled like a rock in his chest. Some instinct he didn’t know he had and definitely shouldn’t have paid attention to made him seek inside himself for that bright light of the mate bond.

  His griffin was sitting curled around it, as though the light was a fire it was trying to warm itself beside. Or as though it was trying to protect it. He’d always thought of mate bonds as sure things, as unbreakable as they were magical, but what if they weren’t? What if the mate bond could be broken? Whatever was between them right now felt like a tight string about to snap. If it did—

  He reached inside himself and, as gently as he could, touched the glowing light at the center of his soul.

  On the sofa, Delphine jumped.

  She looked up at him. Too quickly for him to look away.

  Their eyes met like a flash fire starting. A shiver went through Hardwick’s spine. This was right. This was the woman he was meant to be with, and they both knew it. He breathed in, luxuriating in her scent. It didn’t even matter that he could only catch glimpses of it, this far across the room. A hint of sweetness, a hint of something wild. The world felt full of possibility.

  “What was that?” he murmured.

  Delphine went still. If he hadn’t been watching her so closely, he wouldn’t have noticed it. Nothing about her changed. She was still sitting up, poised for action. Her eyes were lit with something that he didn’t peg as hope until it froze. That look—she—didn’t stop, or back down. It was as though she was... waiting.

  The moment stretched out.

  Delphine licked her lips. “I... thought I spilled my drink,” she said. Her glass of water was still safely on the floor beside the sofa, untouched.

  Hardwick looked away. Pain shuttled around his skull, starting above his left ear and diving deep behind his eye. He swallowed back a grimace.

  When he looked back at Delphine, she was still watching him, a strange look on her face.

  Neither of them said anything.

  He ran away again while Delphine was doing the dishes. Back into the bedroom and the spiral of his own shame.

  He just needed some time alone. God, please, he begged silently. His griffin tucked itself into an unhappy ball. All he needed was a week, tops. Then he would be able to think straight.

  Just a week.

  His head hurt.

  And the blizzard was getting worse.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Delphine

  It was like some sort of horrible logic puzzle. If the cabin has three rooms, and one of them is a bathroom and the total size of the building is less than fifty square feet, how long until either Hardwick or Delphine decide to go outside and freeze to death rather than spend another moment in each other’s company.

  The afternoon crept by. Hardwick emerged from the bedroom to put another frozen pizza in the oven, and the meal that followed was the most awkward dinner she’d experienced since Pebbles brought home her bird of paradise shifter mate.

  Hardwick looked after the dishes afterwards. Delphine considered taking a leaf out of his book and hiding in the bedroom until he was done but reconsidered. Over-exposure might be a better cure for how she was feeling than avoidance.

  The cabin had a small shelf of well-thumbed books. Louis L’Amour, Dick Francis, a few other authors she’d never heard of whose book covers were promisingly full of suave men with guns and tropical palms. She grabbed one at random and curled up on the sofa. If she was stuck here until the weather cleared with a man who couldn’t make it more obvious that he didn’t want her around, she could at least read some good old-fashioned airport novels.

  She cracked the book open. It started well. Someone got murdered, there was an explosion, and the characters were talking about cell phones like they were some sort of far-future technology.

  Murder... explosion... tech...

  It took Delphine ten minutes to realize she’d been staring at the same page for significantly longer than ten minutes.

  Hardwick was still at the kitchen sink. If he scrubbed the dishes any harder, there wasn’t going to be anything left.

  Hardwick was leaning over the kitchen bench. His shirt was stretched over his shoulders, outlining sharp shoulder blades and the lean curve of his back.

  She imagined he would look the same if she was wedged against the bench in front of him. Face up, kissing him, or face down, straining around to capture as much of his skin with her lips as she could as he pinned her down.

  It wasn’t just her cheeks anymore. Every inch of her skin was seared with heat.

  She glared at her book.

  At last he finished. Delphine, who was definitely still reading, tensed.

  And Hardwick went straight into the bedroom.

  She closed her eyes and bit off a groan.

  The blizzard couldn’t end soon enough.

  * * *

  She made scones again the next morning. Not so she could sneak some time in the same room as Hardwick before he woke up. Not at all. She just needed to work out some frustration.
>
  Scones were not the perfect thing for working out one’s frustrations.

  They came out more like bricks than cheesy, flakey delights.

  At least they’re a perfect match for the coffee, she thought glumly.

  They ate in silence. Painful, awkward silence. Delphine had never been so aware of being alone inside her own head, not even when she was surrounded by her family.

  “If the weather improves—” she began.

  “I can take you to a friend’s house.” Hardwick’s eyes were fixed on his plate. “I’ve been thinking about it. He lives a way out of town, but not too far. You can tell your family that you flew in and stopped there so that you wouldn’t risk anyone from town seeing you.”

  Delphine couldn’t believe what she was hearing. And she got the impression Hardwick couldn’t believe what he was saying, either. His voice was flat, as though the words were being dragged unwillingly out of him.

  “Your friend?” she asked. She’d met most of Pine Valley’s shifters the Christmas before.

  “Jackson. He’s a good man. He’ll help you out, I’m sure of it.”

  “Jackson Gilles?”

  When Hardwick nodded, she gave a weak smile. “That’s… perfect. I work for his father, so it all fits together… perfectly.”

  Except for the bit where she was leaving him.

  She coughed. Something in her chest fluttered, and for a moment, just behind her eyes, she saw something like a flickering candlelight. She blinked rapidly until it went away.

  Across the table, Hardwick’s frown had deepened. He rubbed his chest with a grimace. “What a coincidence.”

  “He’s the one who brought me to Pine Valley in the first place.” If he hadn’t…

  “Great. Let’s keep that plan in mind, then.” He stood up to clear the table. “I didn’t sleep well last night, so don’t worry about me being in your hair today.”

  “Sure.” Delphine put so much effort into not imagining Hardwick sleeping in the bed she’d tossed and turned in all night that she didn’t put as much tact into her next words as she might have: “Can I borrow some clothes?”