Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,46

He was helping, but she was picking up his hints and running with them.

It couldn’t always be like this, he realized. Most of the time she must be running blind, with no one to provide translation for her. What would that mean?

She must come off as absent-minded as best. Uncaring at worst. She would talk over other people, ignore their questions, seem like she was more interested in the sound of her own voice than anyone else’s opinions.

And that was the lie she’d happily built her life around?

Delphine wasn’t arrogant, or unfeeling. She was observant, and kind. He’d seen that over the last few days. Even when she’d doubted her own feelings. Even when she’d figured out he was hiding the truth of their connection from her. She’d gotten to the bottom of his problem, his hurt, before trying to get anything for herself—even the truth.

Hardwick barely noticed the three full-grown dragons that landed in a semi-circle around the two of them. His attention was all on the winged lion shifters that thudded to the ground further uphill.

They were solid, stocky creatures. Like tanks with wings, he thought. Golden-haired as Delphine, with wings ranging from pure white to gold-speckled and autumn-toned. Her family.

The people she was so afraid of knowing the truth, she’d twisted her whole life around lying to them.

His griffin’s hackles rose.

What had they done, to make her think that was the only way she could live?

Chapter Twenty-One

Delphine

Uncle Martin. Aunt Grizelda. Several cousins: Brutus, Livia, and Pebbles. And her own brothers, wirier than the others, but still close enough to the classic Belgrave template that they’d never had any trouble fitting in.

Delphine resisted the urge to move closer to Hardwick. Except—was that the right thing to do? If he was her mate, and everyone was surely about to find out that particular fact, then maybe it would be natural for her to move closer to him. But how? Casually? Territorially?

She tried to remember how some of her cousins had acted when they brought their mates to family vacations for the first time. Pebbles had met her mate, a stunning bird of paradise, three years before. She had brought him home for Christmas that year. Delphine had spent most of the holiday in the kitchen, but she remembered how Pebbles had shown Pascal off. She’d practically glowed with happiness, preening and sticking to Pascal’s side as though she couldn’t bear to be apart from him. And even though a bird of paradise wasn’t exactly the sort of shifter the olds had expected to match with a Belgrave, she’d been so proud of him.

Delphine was proud of Hardwick, too. Wasn’t she? He was a griffin, for God’s sake. No one could complain about that.

But no matter how hard she tried to pull on a mask of satisfied pride and smugness, what she really was, was terrified. Terrified that this was the moment that everything she’d worked so hard for was about to collapse. Terrified that her family would know what she really was.

Terrified that she was going to hurt Hardwick, badly.

Terrified that the deeper truth they had both been avoiding was not that they were mates, but that they were impossible. That she’d spent most of her life painstakingly transforming herself into something that was so opposite to what Hardwick needed that they could never be together.

Her chest tightened. No, that can’t be possible. There had to be a way out, a way to fix this, a way to make everything okay again.

Something itched against the back of her mind. Just what she needed: someone trying to speak to her telepathically. Which had been fine when it was Cole—it wasn’t hard to guess what teenaged boy who’d been snowed into his secret bunker overnight would try to say to get himself out of trouble, and even if the distracted-older-family-friend act hadn’t worked, Hardwick had been amazing, translating for her.

She didn’t even know who was trying to speak to her. It could have been anybody.

Delaying would only make things worse. She had to make a choice.

Delphine leaned against Hardwick and raised her eyebrows at Cole. “Too late to run now,” she said. Cole hung his head and her mind itched again. She gave him a sympathetic smile, assuming that was what he was after, then took Hardwick’s hand and looked up at him.

“Too late for us, too,” she said. “Are you ready to meet my family?”

“Are you?” he replied in an undertone.

She kept her smile fixed on her face. “I don’t