Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,19

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 conversation 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