Christmas Griffin: A Mate for Christmas #5

by Chant, Zoe

  “Can you—”

  Hardwick looked right at her for the first time that morning. His already dark eyes seemed even blacker than she remembered. His mouth opened as if he was about to sleep and Delphine’s eyes were drawn to it. Had his lips been that chapped yesterday? The shadows under his eyes had been less deep, she knew that. And the exhaustion weighing down his shoulders less heavy.

  The rush of heat that had poured through her when she locked eyes with Hardwick faded away. It was replaced by a surge of guilt.

  He’d told her he needed this time to recuperate from his work. And yet here she was, destroying his solitude, eating into his vacation time, and feeding him a terrible breakfast. He’d even figured out a way that she could return to town without giving her family anything to be suspicious about.

  She needed to fix this.

  * * *

  Hardwick loaned her an extra outfit. She showered, if that was the right word for it, in what was little more than a bucket with a tap above it in the bathroom and shivered into the borrowed sweatpants and t-shirt. She would have to heat some water on the stove to handwash her own clothes.

  But that was a problem to solve later.

  Hardwick.

  She’d been off-footed ever since she woke up here. No, that was a lie—hah. A lie she wouldn’t have even noticed before she met him.

  In truth, she’d been off her game since well before Hardwick rescued her. Before the crash, too. Even before she had arrived in Pine Valley, ready to prep Mr. Petrakis’s vacation rental so it would be ready when he arrived.

  It had started the year before, when her work took her to this tiny mountain town and another Christmas away from her family, and she’d woken up one morning to discover that her mother and brothers had come to meet her for the holiday.

  Away from the rest of the Belgrave clan. Away from Grandfather’s ironclad declarations about what Belgraves were meant to be. Away from Grandmother’s flinty eyes that saw far too much, and Aunt Grizelda’s endless stories about their glorious history. It had been just the four of them, together, for the first time since Delphine had left home.

  And she’d acted exactly the same way with them as she had with the wider family.

  Maybe there was nothing left of her except her lies.

  She splashed water on her face. It was cold, but not chilly enough to take the burn of shame from her cheeks. She filled the tiny, chipped sink and let her hands rest in the water until they were cold, then laid them over her face.

  She didn’t regret what she had done. All those years of lies. How could she? The results spoke for themselves. The Belgrave clan had never been more harmonious.

  But now that Pebbles and her mate were married…

  Delphine shook her head.

  That was a problem to solve later, too. Her problem, right now, was how she was going to manage however much time there was left before the storm ended.

  Wind howled around the cabin as though it had heard her and wanted her to know how very long that time would be. She groaned and pressed her hands against her eyes.

  I’ll manage, she told herself silently. Big surprise, she wasn’t convinced. Not listening to the voices in her head was just another sign that she was a failed shifter, she thought with a sigh, even if the only voice there was her own.

  This was nothing new. It was also a pain in the arse. If she ever wanted to really talk herself into something, she had to actually talk herself into it. This wasn’t a problem when she was at work, mostly because Mr. Petrakis rarely listened to what anyone else was saying unless they were saying his name. But here? Now? With a man who could sense lies in the next room?

  A gorgeous man, she thought. The sort of man who would have turned her head even if she’d met him in a crowded room and not in a place where he was the only other person in the room. A man with a restrained, intense energy that was strangely compelling. Hell, he was a griffin shifter who could literally sense lies. She should have been doing everything she could to keep out of his way. Instead, she wanted… she wanted…

  She shook her head. What she wanted, as usual, didn’t matter. What she should do was what she always did: keep the peace. Usually she kept the peace between her boss and his colleagues, or her family and other members of her family, but she could keep the peace between herself and Hardwick, too. Surely.

  That plan felt like solid ground.

  All she needed to do was figure out what would make him the least upset that she was stuck here with him and bend herself into shape until she could make it happen.

  She wished she could bend herself around—

  Nope. Thinking like that wasn’t going to help anything. Not that, she discovered with a thrill of surprise, she was averse to a holiday hook-up. At least not when it came to Hardwick. But the way he’d glared at her through all of their conversations so far didn’t exactly suggest he would be interested in that.

  “Pity,” she murmured.

  Or maybe not. Getting involved with a man who could sense lies, even temporarily, was probably a bad idea.

  Something in her chest fluttered and she rubbed it absently.

  First things first, she should probably not look like a total nutcase when she went back out there. She checked herself in the tiny mirror again.

  “Like a half-drowned rat,” she muttered to herself, and combed her fingers through her hair. With her hair tucked neatly behind her ears and her face patted dry, she looked almost presentable.

  She placed her hands either side of the sink and stared hard at herself. “You can do this,” she told herself, keeping her voice low enough that she hoped Hardwick wouldn’t be able to hear her, even with his super-sensitive shifter hearing. “It’s only for a few days. Just until the weather clears.”

  Was that a lie, she wondered? Did it count as a lie if she couldn’t look into the future and know if she was right or not?

  She’d never asked herself this sort of question before. There was a sort of sinking feeling in her stomach when she realized she’d never really considered whether anything she did or said was a lie or not. All that had mattered was whether it would help her keep up her pretense that she was a shifter like the rest of her family.

  Her shoulders tightened. Only long years of experience stopped them from hunching up defensively.

  Irritated, Delphine took a deep breath and looked herself in the eye. The only person that looked back was herself. Human, tired, and frustrated.

  Those last two sounded a lot like Hardwick.

  Her frown deepened as she thought about him. She forced her mind away from the parts of him it had been focusing on the most, and concentrated on the—

  The tells, she realized with a start. Those little, unconscious tics that she’d tried so hard to iron out from her own expressions and reactions.

  His grim, set expression. The lines that sat so deeply around his mouth and between his eyebrows they might have been carved there. The way his eyelid flickered sometimes, or he pulled back, a movement that might have looked like a flinch if it wasn’t so… slow, and controlled… as though it was something he was used to. Something that happened all the time. Like watching a ball come towards you and knowing you weren’t going to be able to get out of the way in time, so you just watch it coming and think, Shit, this is going to hurt.

  All the little things she’d observed about him bumped together in her head, forming a whole that made her eyes widen. If she was right…

  She wasn’t Hardwick’s mate. She knew that. But maybe, if she was right about this, she could make herself useful. Make him a bit less miserable, since it was her fault she was stuck here, ruining his solo trip.

  And the first step of that was going out and facing him. Or at least being in the same room as him, which was just as nerve-wracking.

  She glared at herself in the mirror.

  “Come on,” she urged herself. “You can do this. You’re a real Belgrave, damn it!”

  In the next room, something cr
ashed to the floor.

  Delphine yanked the bathroom door open. Hardwick was still over by the stove. He was leaning over, one hand clutching his head. A baking tray was lying on the floor, with two frozen meals scattered next to it.

  She felt hot and cold all over. He looked as though a sudden headache had caught him just as he was about to put the meal in the oven. At the same moment as she had said…

  She gulped.

  Was her theory correct?

  And if it was, did that mean…

  Chapter Fourteen

  Hardwick

  Hardwick swore as he waited for the pain to subside. It lingered longer, this time, clinging like wet kelp to the inside of his skull.

  It was getting worse. Like an allergy that got more dangerous the more you were exposed to the allergen.

  How long had he tried to ignore that inconvenient fact?

  Long enough to get your partner hurt.

  Guilt burned at the back of his throat. A year and a half ago, he’d been on stakeout with Jackson Gilles—a drug bust. It should have been simple, especially with one officer who could sort truth from fiction in the blink of an eye. They’d done it before. Hundreds of times.

  And this time, Hardwick messed up, and Jackson paid the price.

  He hadn’t realized how exhausted he was until it was too late to pull out of the mission. His skull had felt like it was about to crack, and there had been a permanent buzz in his ears that no amount of caffeine could shake. Jackson had trusted Hardwick to let him know when a situation was about to go bad, but he’d been too out of it. He missed his mark, and Jackson almost took a bullet to the head.

  The shot had grazed his forehead, right above his eyebrow. He’d dropped like it had killed him. It was the biggest mistake Hardwick had ever made.

  Was he making another mistake, right now?

  He rubbed his forehead and knelt down to clean up the mess.

  “Hardwick?”

  Shit.

  Delphine was standing in the doorway. Her hair was damp around the sides of his face, as though she’d splashed it under the tap. That sounded like a damned good idea. Maybe if he stuck his face in an ice bucket, he could freeze his headache away.

  “Are you okay?” Delphine asked.

  Hardwick scraped frozen vegetables back onto the baking tray and straightened. “Yeah, I just—”

  White flashed across his vision as he straightened. His griffin hissed, clawing at its beak. Shit, he wasn’t usually this thoughtless. Lying out loud, when he was still waiting to get over the last hit?

  “You just don’t look so great.” Suddenly, Delphine was at his side, both hands under his elbow. She detached the baking tray from his paralyzed grip and tugged him, not completely gently, over to the sofa. “Is it a migraine?”

  “Headache.”

  “Glass of water?”

  He nodded, which made his head throb even worse, and could barely force himself to look up when Delphine returned a moment later with a glass of ice-cold water. She looked pale.

  “Does this… happen a lot?”

  “Worse this time of year,” he gritted out, and sipped on the water. Maybe if he tipped it over his head…

  “Would you like a massage?”

  He blinked. “A what?”

  “A…” Her cheeks went a shade of pink that made him want to touch them. “A massage? If it’s a tension headache, it could help.”

  It could help. But… hell. Just the thought of her touching him like that made his griffin want to roll over and beg.

  “Sure,” his mouth said before his brain could tell it what a bad idea it was.

  Delphine got him to lay back along the sofa, with his head propped on the arm. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, and still jumped when she touched him.

  “Sorry,” she said at once, and he grumbled something that was meant to be somewhere between ‘Don’t worry about it’ and ‘My fault,’ and ended up sounding more like an angry bear woken up halfway through hibernation. To his surprise, Delphine took it in her stride.

  She let her fingers rest gently either side of his face. Just the fingertips, but each point of connection seemed to glow. Her fingers were cool, and Hardwick couldn’t repress a groan as she ran them along his scalp. She found every gnarled rope of tension he hadn’t even known was there, from his temples to behind his ears and at the base of his skull. Her touch moved seamlessly from gentle and soothing to firm enough to dig into rock-like knots.

  He’d had physical therapy before, but it was nothing like this.

  It was incredible. Completely professional, and at the same time almost unbearably, toe-curlingly sensual.

  He’d thought that was a figure of speech. Toes curling because something was so good. Thank God he was wearing indoor shoes.

  His griffin was in heaven. To it, all of this was right. Even when he reminded it that being close to Delphine was a sure ticket to hurt, it kept trying to gaze lovingly at her through his eyes.

  Hardwick kept his eyes shut. Letting her look after him like this might mean less hurt now, but it was as good as a promise for more hurt later.

  He groaned again as she got him to tip his head to one side and ran her thumb along the tense cord of his neck. “Where did you learn how to do this?”

  The question was a rookie mistake. She hadn’t lied to him since she’d seen him drop the meal—because she’d been busy asking questions. Make her answer one of her own, and he had no doubt she’d slip back into the lies that seemed like her natural way of being.

  And she would feel him tense under her fingers and know that he couldn’t just sense her lies. They hurt him.

  He couldn’t say why he didn’t want her to know that. Probably some sort of masculine dislike of appearing weak. Frankly, he wasn’t in the mood for that sort of self-introspection right now.

  Her embarrassed chuckle took him by surprise. She rested her hands on his shoulders for a moment before beginning to massage them.

  “It was a work thing,” she admitted. And it was an admission. It was the truth. “A professional development course for personal assistants.”

  “You do this for your boss?” His eyes flew open. He was about to sit up and put an end to the stolen moment of connection when she tipped her head back and gave a gurgling laugh.

  “No! No, that would… absolutely not.” She snorted, unladylike for the first time since they had met. His heart thudded. “I thought the course was some sort of mental self-improvement thing for dealing with difficult managers, and then they brought out the scented oils. The whole thing was like something straight out of the 1950s. Deal with your boss by giving him some personal stress-relief after his busy day being a big, important man.”

  Hardwick didn’t trust himself to say anything to that, so he kept his mouth shut.

  “I told Mr. Petrakis it was a course on mental resilience, or something. I can’t remember what. And filtered all of the company’s follow-up emails to a special spam folder all of their very own.” Her fingers dug into the base of his skull again and stayed there until his head relaxed back, supported by her hands. “I told myself it might come in handy one day, at least… and here we are.”

  It was the longest she’d spoken to him without setting off explosions in his head. His griffin was drunk on her laughter, and he found himself letting go of the wariness he’d clung to since she first woke up. He even forgot about the wavering light in his heart. For a few minutes, they weren’t stalking around each other, stepping over unsaid secrets like prowling cats.

  He talked about his work. Not the mistake with Jackson, but the bigger picture. Using his ability to help get criminals off the street.

  “Not that it’s only criminals who lie,” he found himself saying. “Everyone does. And they all think they have a reason for it.”

  “Even your colleagues?”

  He thought of Jackson again. His partner was the non-shifter son of two shifter parents. He’d acted like he didn’t care, but t
here’d always been a halo of untruth around it. Like when he said he’d left Pine Valley only for his career, and not because a girl had broken his heart.

  He was back with the girl now, though. Hardwick had left town too quickly to hear the story behind that change of heart.

  But Jackson’s lies hadn’t hurt that much. Nor had anyone else. Not until the mistake.

  “Colleagues, sure. When no one wants to own up to leaving their moldy coffee cups under their desks.” Among other things.

  He stole a glance at Delphine. Her eyes were firmly on her work, but she was frowning.

  “How do you—” she began, and then bit her lip. “How does that feel now?” she asked, and he couldn’t shake the feeling she’d been about to say something else.

  He stretched his head from side to side. “Better.”

  “I’ll just finish up, then.” She gently pushed his head back to center. “Let me know if I’m rubbing too hard. Like I said, this is meant to be a scented-oil thing.”

  “Wasn’t planning on it being that sort of vacation,” Hardwick said before he could stop himself.

  “Hah!” Another surprise. Hardwick had barely even gotten started reprimanding himself when Delphine let out a bark of laughter. Her fingers shook. When she smoothed them across his forehead, it was as though she was trying to smooth out her own chuckles as well. “Close your eyes,” she said, and he did.

  His griffin tapped its beak, staring sadly at the darkness behind his eyelids. Hardwick relaxed into the sensation of Delphine’s hands on him. He left his griffin pining, and, almost feeling guilty, checked on the light of the mate-bond in his heart.

  It didn’t flare, or sparkle, or anything else dramatic. But its glow was stronger. It barely flickered at all as he watched it.

  It will hurt more later, he reminded himself. There were too many complications. He’d meant what he said about everyone thinking they had a reason for lying. It didn’t matter how much his heart glowed for Delphine; he couldn’t do this now. He couldn’t afford the time it would take him to unravel her reasons. Not when every attempt would turn into the migraine from hell.