Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,15
on the sofa where she had lain as she regained consciousness, where she’d sat to drink and eat. Her scent had caught on the cushions, the blanket… even the air.
And if that wasn’t enough, his ears strained for every sound from the next room. The slight creak of the bed as she rolled over. Her soft, relaxed breaths, so much surer and steadier than her breathing had been when he pulled her from the—
The memory crashed over him. Her face, half-buried in the snow and so much paler than the healthy gold and warm flush that had spread across her face once she was awake. She hadn’t moved at all; her limbs had hung limply when he picked her up. If it hadn’t been for the way she kept muttering words under her breath, he might have thought he was too late.
Hardwick’s griffin swiped at him. He bent his head, acknowledging its disgust.
Because of course it wasn’t just her murmuring that had reassured him she was alive. It was the way the closer he got to her, the worse the pain got. A hammer against his skull, beating harder with each whispered word.
Almost everything she said hurt. When it didn’t, his griffin was so suspicious for her next lie that it was hardly a respite; even if she set the hammer down, there was a strange, constant ache. He would have put it down to his griffin’s end-of-year exhaustion, but there was something more to it than that.
He’d never met someone so sick with lies.
His griffin hissed and ground its beak. Hardwick groaned.
I know, I know. How am I any better?
He hadn’t lied.
But he hadn’t told the truth, either. Not the bit of it that mattered.
Somehow, in the midst of the ache in his head and his heart, he must have fallen asleep, because eventually he woke up.
Delphine was already up. Her footsteps were light, but sure—until he stirred. She spun around.
“Good morning.” Her voice was low, with no trace of the surprise her feet had betrayed. “I thought I’d get breakfast on, since you cooked last night.”
“Breakfast?” His mouth was moving ahead of his mind, echoing Delphine’s words before he’d managed to put thought to them. He shook his head.
His brain was still lagging, but this time it was his eyes that snuck ahead.
Delphine was standing at the iron stove, her hair pulled back in a single thick, untidy braid and her cheeks flushed. Her arms were dusted with flour and there were white handprints on her front.
She followed his gaze down to the floury handprints and patted at them uselessly. “I didn’t see an apron.”
“I’m surprised you found flour.”
Her eyebrows both rose. “In the pantry? I thought it must be yours. Perhaps the last person to stay here left it. Flour, baking powder, cheese, and butter. Just the basics, but…” She trailed off.
It took Hardwick a moment to realize he was expected to pick up the conversation. “You can blame me for the cheese. The rest must have been left over from a previous tenant, like you said.”
He left unsaid that his idea of ‘just the basics’ was the contents of the frozen meal section at his local corner store.
“You’re to blame for the cheese, huh? A man after my own h—”
She broke off suddenly. The color that flashed across her face now wasn’t the lively warmth that had tugged at his memories again and again as he waited to fall asleep. It was a deep, strangled red.
“I—er—” Her eyes caught on his, like a fish to a lure.
He half-rose. Something inside him was rising to a crescendo, a wave about to break.
Then she looked away. “Cheese scones,” she said, her shoulders rising. “Or—you probably call them biscuits. Cheese biscuits. These old coal-fired ovens can be tricky to get the hang of, but my grandmother has one quite like this. She always let me practice cooking on it.”
Something skittered just beneath the surface of her words, close enough to a lie to scratch claws behind his eyes.
My grandmother has one—True.
She always let me practice cooking on it—Something there, an itch that his griffin couldn’t let go.
She always let me—
That was it? The lie was that her grandmother let her use the oven? What was the alternative, that Delphine had barged in and taken over the kitchen?
Hardwick shook his head.
He washed up and changed his clothes, and by the time he ran out of excuses not to go back into the main room, the whole cabin was filling with