Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,40
mouth twitched. “If I’m around my family—if we’re together when I’m with them—I don’t want to hurt you.”
“You could tell them the truth.”
She stared. “That isn’t an option.”
“Why not?”
“Is this an interrogation?”
Sitting there on the other side of the table, she’d never seemed more distant. It was worse than before they’d touched. Before she’d shuddered beneath him, soft and delicate against his rough-hewn edges, but so full of longing it was as though she didn’t notice how delicate she was. The way she’d strained against him, wanting more of him, his touch and his roughness, and brought out a roughness in him he hadn’t known existed.
She’d made herself vulnerable to him. Taken that open heart he’d laid out for her and opened hers in exchange. And they were right back where they started.
Only worse, because now he was acting like that moment of vulnerability meant he got to tell her what to do.
“Delphine, I—”
“I said I don’t want to hurt you.” She stabbed her fork into a bite of lasagna, then put it down. Stood up, her eyes burning into his. “Don’t hurt me in return.”
She grabbed her plate and stalked round-shouldered into the bedroom.
Hardwick groaned.
That could have gone better, he thought.
His griffin shrugged its wings. He sighed, propping his head on one hand.
It was right.
Could have gone better? Really? For either of them, given who they were?
Later that night, he knocked on the bedroom door.
“Delphine?”
She wasn’t asleep. When he opened the door, she sat up against the bed’s headboard and tipped her head back. Her honey-colored eyes shone in the light from his side of the door.
“I shouldn’t have said any of that,” he said. “I told myself I’d let you be. Before, when I hadn’t told you that I was your mate. Being your mate doesn’t give me the right to tell you what to do.”
“Doesn’t give me the right not to be judged by you for it, either.” She gave a weak smile.
“I can’t judge you. I don’t know what you’ve been through.”
“And I won’t tell you.” Her smile became a grimace. “I guess we’re at an impasse. And it doesn’t matter anyway, does it? If we’re stuck here?”
He gazed at her. At the hope in her eyes.
“No,” he said. “Not if we’re stuck here.”
“Spend the night with me?”
He lay down on the bed beside her, holding her close and thanking the stars that she couldn’t sense the turmoil in his heart.
Tomorrow was Christmas Eve. The blizzard showed no signs of blowing itself out. For the next few days, it was just going to be the two of them, together.
Maybe that would be time enough for one of them to back down.
His griffin shook its wings and he sighed.
You’re right, he told it. Maybe that’ll be time enough for me to back down.
He hadn’t lied to her. He wouldn’t tell her what to do or force her to let him meet her family if she didn’t want that.
But she was still unhappy. And everything he was wanted to save her from that.
Chapter Nineteen
Delphine
She had a plan. She could stay with Hardwick, out here, by themselves, and they could find their way together through the strange, magical, discomforting thing between them. Without the person she was in the outside world interfering.
That was the plan. Then, on their third day together—Christmas Eve—the roof came down.
The creaking had grown louder all night. In the morning, before she was awake enough to remember the difference between what she wanted to do and what she told herself she should be doing, Delphine made her way to the kitchen to stoke the stove and put on the kettle for more terrible coffee.
Scones, she thought absently, then after caffeine. Even if it is terrible caffeine.
She knew herself well enough to know that she was in the sort of mood where one spilled spoonful of flour or dropped piece of butter would send her into childish tears. It wasn’t just the lack of sleep. It was something under her skin. Restless, unhappy energy. Ready to snap.
Nothing had ever gotten to her like this before. Not her boss’s blindness to the fact that he’d employed a non-shifter. Not the way she’d become so successful at blending into the background at her own family events that these days, nobody even asked if she wanted to join them on the wing. Not even her family’s snide remarks about her mother.
She couldn’t let herself explode now. The thought of Hardwick seeing her lose it—
Hardwick. Her surly, exhausted rescuer, whose