Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,30

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