Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,25

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 between 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