Christmas Griffin: A Mate for Christmas #5

by Chant, Zoe

  He knew he was an asshole when his head started playing up. Better he not say anything than dig too deep and lash out at her when his investigation only got him more lies.

  “One more thing…” Delphine rested her fingertips on his forehead, just above his eyebrows. “It doesn’t hurt you when I lie. Does it.”

  Not a question. A statement.

  A knife to the center of his forehead.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Delphine

  The moment she lied, Hardwick flinched. The tension she’d eased from his forehead slammed back. If she had her hands on his neck or shoulders, she was sure she would have felt the knots she’d worked so hard to get rid of come back with a vengeance.

  And she hated herself for it.

  She’d needed to know, she told herself. If she was going to figure out what was going on with him, and help him, she needed proof that he couldn’t just sense lies. They hurt him.

  She’d hurt him.

  She’d been hurting him since the moment she woke up.

  Her lungs suddenly couldn’t fill properly. She stepped back and her hands clenched into fists. She was horrified—at herself, at everything she’d so casually lied to him about, at the cruel test she’d just put him through. And that horror turned into anger.

  How dare he not tell her that she was hurting him. They were stuck out here together, in the middle of nowhere. He’d saved her life. She had wanted to find some way of making the situation less awkward and awful for the both of them, and his plan had been to sit there for as long as they were stuck together, and let her hurt him?

  What sort of a person did that?

  Her chest felt as though it was about to burst. Hardwick swung his legs around and stood up. He wasn’t moving as though every action made his head throb anymore—he was all controlled strength and wary grace. So compelling her mouth went dry. She wanted—she wanted—

  “What the hell was that?” he growled. The look on his face wasn’t angry, though. He looked betrayed.

  Her heart twisted.

  “What was that?” she replied. She wasn’t even angry at him, she told herself as her voice turned into a snarl. She was angry at herself. At her grandparents. At this whole twisted, horrible world. “What about telling me the truth?”

  He flinched back. Surprise, not pain. “The truth?”

  “Your powers. You don’t just sense lies, do you? They hurt you. I’ve been hurting you.”

  Hardwick ran one hand over his mouth. She couldn’t read the expression in his eyes. “You’re right.”

  “Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “It wasn’t important—”

  “We’re stuck out here together, and it wasn’t important?” She clutched her head, then her chest, not knowing what she was doing. “You’re not just here for a vacation, you’re—you’re detoxing.”

  He nodded.

  “And I’m about as tox as it gets.”

  All her rage faded away, so quickly she still didn’t know who or what it had been aimed at.

  “In that case, I’m even sorrier that you’ve been landed with me,” she muttered.

  “I thought you deserved a break.”

  She shot him a confused look. “A break from what?”

  “You said your family would be happier if you didn’t get in touch.” Hardwick’s voice was low and even. He sounded as though he was reading off of notes. She wondered if this was the voice he used in his job, trying to get suspects to admit their stories weren’t straight. “If there’s something going on, if your family is hurting you, there are—”

  “My family isn’t hurting me!”

  Hardwick winced.

  No. No, that hadn’t been a lie. Her family weren’t hurting her. Because she’d figured out how to stop that from happening. That was the whole point of—

  “It’s nothing like that,” she said quickly, which was a neat, tidy cover-all, especially if she didn’t specify what that was. She ran her fingers through her hair.

  “What is it like, then?”

  “It’s—”

  Complicated. Too much a part of her life for her to peel off and talk about like it was something separate, like it wasn’t her.

  “—not my story to tell. Not all of it,” she said at last. “But I’m not—I’m doing it to stop other people from being hurt. Like I don’t want to hurt you. Nobody’s hurting me.”

  Hardwick grimaced and put one hand to his forehead. “That’s not true.”

  “I just told you, my family—”

  “I’m not talking about them.”

  Regret clawed at his features, making him look older than he was. “You must have guessed. You must have felt something. You’re right about lies hurting me, but I can’t blame you for hurting me when I’ve been doing the same to you since we met.”

  “You haven’t—” Her heart thrummed in her chest. Her cheeks were hot. “I d-don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “My power hurting me isn’t the only thing you suspect me of hiding, is it?”

  “You—” Delphine cut herself off and went completely still.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Hardwick

  Hardwick was acting like an ass. He knew that. He’d been acting like one since the moment he woke up, alone and wretched on the sofa.

  But he wanted to hear her say it. Not for any bullshit macho reason. This wasn’t a power play, or some sort of twisted game.

  He just needed to hear her tell the truth. Needed it like he needed to breathe, or eat, or for his heart to keep on beating. Looking at her now, her face like a mask, he felt as though he’d opened his heart and was about to have it crushed.

  “I understand why you didn’t say anything. You’ve been watching me, figuring me out, and I think I figured a few things about you, too. You’re a non-shifter who lives among shifters and you have to convince them you’re one of them. You’re always watching. You can’t trust your own senses because they’re not the right senses: you can’t send or hear telepathic messages; you can’t shift. You can’t even meet their eyes, in case they look inside you and all they see is human,” he added, remembering the way her eyes danced away from his after that first, wonderful moment of connection. “The only way you can know what people are saying, with words you can’t hear, is by waiting for their reactions. Body language, expressions, vocalizations… Like my griffin. A whole different language that they don’t even know they’re speaking.”

  He took a step closer to her.

  “You probably don’t even trust your own senses anymore.”

  She leaned towards him, her feet rooted to the ground.

  “Not your normal senses.”

  “I don’t have any other sort,” she whispered, and he couldn’t tell whether the thudding in his skull was new or the same baseline pain. Perhaps she didn’t know, either.

  He stopped. He wanted to reach out to her, lay it all out, give her the framework she so clearly relied on and let her build her story on top of it—but he didn’t only want to reach out to her.

  He wanted her to reach out to him, too.

  She licked her lips.

  “You’re right,” she said.

  True. His griffin crooned relief.

  “I can’t trust senses I don’t have. I have to guess—educated guesses, but I don’t always get it right. And that’s with things I know. People I know. I can pass it off as a misunderstanding, mostly, or let them think that I wasn’t paying attention or didn’t care enough to be listening to them, but it’s never… never anything important. I make sure of that. If there was… something important… and I felt something new, something I didn’t understand…”

  Her hand fluttered to her chest again.

  “How could I believe it?”

  “Trust yourself,” Hardwick urged her. “Stop thinking about what you ought to do and trust what your heart wants.”

  “I could hurt—”

  “I don’t care if you hurt me,” he said. �
��I thought I did. I thought I could push you away until I was better, but I’ve just made it worse.”

  Her hand flew to her chest. “I don’t know what you—”

  A flash of pain across his forehead. She gasped.

  “Please,” he whispered, and her mask slipped.

  Delphine clenched her fists. He got the feeling she would have looked away from him if she could, but her eyes were fixed on his.

  “You feel it, too?” she asked, her voice cracking. Before he could reply, she made a sharp, negating gesture with her hand. “No, don’t—don’t answer that. I have to do this. I want to.”

  She took a hesitant step forward. “I wasn’t going to say anything. I never do. Not unless I’m absolutely sure.” The corner of her mouth twitched. “So I’d better be sure.”

  She darted forward and slipped her hands around his neck. Before Hardwick could react, her lips were pressed against his.

  And the spark that had flickered to life inside him when he first saw her burst into flame.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Delphine

  Oh, God.

  This was real.

  Delphine had never experienced magic. The itch of knowing someone was trying to speak to her telepathically didn’t count. It was just a reminder of what she couldn’t do.

  She’d seen magic—seen her brothers and parents transform into mythical animals, seen them communicate without speaking, seen them fly golden and shining in front of burning sunsets. But she’d never had any of her own.

  Was this magic?

  Doubt curled through her, even as Hardwick pulled her closer and kissed her back. The light that flickered inside her burst into glorious flame. But that had to be a hallucination. Her mind was playing tricks on her. How could she see light flaring in her chest when her eyes were closed? It was—

  It was—

  Real.

  All the tension she’d been holding in her back and shoulders released. She melted against Hardwick, pressing the soft curved of her body into the hard lines of his. He softened, too, wrapping himself around her and kissing her until she gasped for breath.

  He lifted his head.

  Her eyes fluttered open.

  Hardwick’s face was only inches from hers. She breathed in and inhaled his unique scent of whatever I said it was earlier. Earthy and magical at the same time. Perfect. Him.

  His eyes stared directly into hers. She was no stranger to this by now. They’d spent long enough glaring at each other. But she’d never seen him with this look in his eyes: soft and gentle, and strangely vulnerable.

  He started to pull away; she held him tight.

  All the words she’d stopped herself from saying the day before, the words that had whirled around her head as she lay in bed trying to sleep and trying not to think of Hardwick sleeping or not sleeping in the next room, came out in a rush.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything. I was going to leave...”

  “I know.” Regret tightened Hardwick’s mouth. “I was, too.”

  “I was afraid—”

  “Yes,” he sighed, and his sigh took her heart with it. This was it. She was afraid, and she was a liar, and she wasn’t good enough. Not good enough to be a proper Belgrave, and not good enough to be his. “I was afraid, too.”

  What?

  “What did you have to be afraid of?”

  “Myself.” He closed his eyes and rested his forehead against hers. “The two of us, together. I’m... complicated... and with my griffin’s powers, things are so black and white. You need someone who can handle complexity. Someone who—”

  “Don’t say it.”

  “Someone easier than me.”

  She hissed a curse and dug her fingers into his hair, pulling his head back to look him in the eyes. “We’ll make it work,” she told him. “We’ll find a way. I promise. It doesn’t have to be complicated.”

  She tensed, waiting for the wince that would betray her lie.

  It never came.

  Hardwick must have been waiting, too. His eyes widened. “Delphine—”

  Whatever he was about to say, she never heard it. She kissed him again, pressing her whole body against him until he stumbled backwards.

  Her skin was electric. Hardwick put one hand around her waist, steadying them both, and the sensation took all the breath from her lungs. His other hand went to her cheek, the line of her jaw, cupped the back of her head as he deepened the kiss. His tongue flicked against her lips and she opened her mouth, desire a sharp pull inside her.

  He lifted his head. “Are you sure now?”

  Delphine nodded. There were no words for how sure she was. So other words came up, instead.

  “How did you know that I don’t do what I want? I don’t even know what I want, half the time.”

  “I guessed.” He pressed his forehead against hers. “When you let slip that your family didn’t know you weren’t a shifter. I thought, there was no way you could want to do that all the time. And once you start building your life around one thing like that, once you start putting your own desires behind whatever grand plan you came up with… Of course you’d get confused.”

  He understood her. She should have been terrified. Instead, she melted.

  “You weren’t, though. Confused. You knew straight away?”

  “From the moment I saw you.” There was a growl in his voice that made all the hairs on the back of her neck stand on end. He raised one hand to cup the back of her head, then dragged it down, smoothing the hairs as though he knew what effect his voice had had.

  But he hadn’t said anything. Because—

  “From the moment I started hurting you,” she corrected him.

  No wince. No grimace of pain. Just a flicker of guilt in the depths of his eyes. Was she seeing him, or his griffin?

  Delphine breathed in. Hardwick was all his particular smells, wild and magical, strange and home at the same time. She wanted—God, she wanted—

  “Tell me,” he breathed, and the growl didn’t stop at her neck this time; it traveled down her body, prickling and enticing, bringing parts of her to life she’d almost given up for dead. “Tell me when you first sensed something between us,”

  “From the moment I saw you,” she admitted. “Sitting there, watching me. I should have been dead—”

  “No.”

  “I would have been dead. And then I was alive, and you were there, and I felt...”

  She kissed him again. She couldn’t help it. The day she’d spent fighting her feelings had stretched her out like a bowstring, and now that it was released there was no way she could fight any longer.

  “I know what I want now,” she whispered against his lips. “I want you.”

  Hardwick’s arms tightened around her. The hand at the back of her neck held her more firmly, keeping her in place. Where she belonged. Oh, God, how could she have doubted this?

  “Say it again,” he growled.

  “I want you.”

  Hardwick groaned. She tensed, thinking she’d said something wrong, hurt him again—but when she tore her lips from his and stared into his eyes, they were shining and dark, the difference between his pupils and irises barely visible.

  “Again,” he whispered, trailing his hand over her jaw. “Tell me something else true.”

  Something else true. The thrill of it took her breath away. It felt wrong, somehow. Wicked. It was so opposite to everything she’d built around herself, and so dangerous. To tell the truth was to reveal part of herself she kept hidden even from herself.

  “I want you to kiss me—”

  He kissed her, his fingers tangling in her hair. She wriggled against him.

  “No—here—”

  She indicated with her fingers. First her jawline. Then her neck. The thick muscle at the top of her shoulder, then the sensitive skin over her collarbone. She pulled at her clothing. “There—”

  He trailed a line of kisses down her chest. Each touch made her bite back a moan until his m
outh landed on her breast and she gave in. A shuddering sigh escaped her as he dragged her bra down and kissed her nipple.

  “Oh, God—teeth —”

  “I’ll be gentle.”

  “No—I want—”

  Hardwick’s growl of understanding was almost as incredible as the sensation of his teeth scraping against her nipple. He bit her—gently, then harder, as she gasped with pleasure. The pain twisted inside her, joining with the strange, vulnerable wrong-right-ness of telling him what she wanted. Her fingers dug into his shoulders.

  “I want you to take your clothes off.”

  Hardwick looked up at her. His dark eyes flashed, and he straightened, reluctant, but cheeks flushed with desire.

  “No!” she burst out as he pulled on the hem of his shirt. “I want to do it.”

  He let out a bark of surprised laughter. “You don’t know what you want.”

  “I do.” She grabbed at his shirt. She felt light-headed. “I just keep changing my mind about how to get it.”

  “Oh?”

  His smile was one Delphine had never seen before. Slow and sly and intimate. It fit his face so much better than the wary scowl she was used to. She kissed him, bunching her hands in his shirt. “You should do that more often.”

  “Do what?”

  “Look at me like that.”

  He let out a ragged breath. “Delphine—”

  She pulled his shirt up. He raised his arms, helping her drag the shirt over his head. She didn’t notice where it went. His chest was hot, so hot, his heartbeat strong under her fingers.

  And he was just really fucking sexy to look at.

  “I love your body.”

  Hardwick’s breath caught in his throat. She looked up at him, her fingertips dancing lower. “You told me to tell the truth.”

  “I didn’t realize I’d be letting the dam loose.” He caught her fingers and kissed them. “Don’t stop.”