Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,9

She had enough to go on.

She smiled. “Don’t worry,” she said. “Your secret’s safe with me. All of us Belgraves are shifters, too.”

Chapter Six

Hardwick

Hardwick flinched.

The lie cracked against his temple like a fist. Delphine stared at him, cool and collected. No sign on her face that she’d just lied to him.

His griffin screeched unhappiness. He schooled his face to careful neutrality, turning his flinch into a natural pulling-away.

“That so?” he asked, mildly. He was asking for it, he knew, but—

“Yes,” Delphine said, her English accent not giving anything away. “We’re all winged lion shifters.”

Ouch.

“I see.”

She licked her lips—a sudden betrayal of nervousness, or another calculated move? Hardwick felt himself slipping into work mode. This woman, his mate, was lying to him. Why? What was she hiding?

His griffin hitched its wings, a small, anxious movement that gave away more than Hardwick wanted to admit to himself.

He answered its silent question.

I know she’s meant to be mine. But I can’t—don’t you feel that? It’s like she’s wrapped so many lies around herself that it hurts even when she’s not talking.

It clacked its beak softly.

Of course I want to help her—just let me figure this out. I have to think—damn it!

He stood up. Delphine’s eyes stayed glued to his, and he turned away, unreasonably unsettled. “I’ll get that ice,” he muttered, and stalked away.

Icy wind tugged at his hair as he grabbed a tea towel and the pick from beside the front door and headed out to the out-building he was using as an extra freezer.

Whoever had last rented the place had the same idea; the block of ice he hacked chunks off looked like something out of Little House on the Prairie. Simpler than an ice machine, though.

He wrapped a few shards of ice in the towel and paused, staring back at the cabin.

He’d felt the moment his griffin recognized the woman as his mate. He’d felt it when he first saw her, face-down and unconscious in the snow. A cold hand had gripped his heart and not let go. Not when he raced to her side and found the pulse in her neck. Not when she’d murmured half-formed words as he lifted her from the snow. Not when he’d brought her back up to the cabin and wrapped her in blankets, warm beside the fire, and found the lump on the back of her head.

Not even when she woke up.

He could see it now. Even with his eyes open, staring at the cabin, he could see the moment she’d woken up fully from the restless half-consciousness he’d found her in.

It was as though the sun had come down to Earth for a vacation. Her hair was honey-bright, her skin glowing with golden health as she lost the last of the snow’s chill. Beneath expressive half-moon eyebrows a few shades darker than her hair, her eyes were a compelling mix of brown and sparkling citrine. And when she’d looked at him—

She was older than he’d initially guessed, he thought now. She’d looked younger when she was sleeping, and still for a moment after she woke up. Then something else had settled over her features. A sharpness that added age and exhaustion to her in a way that made his heart clench further under its icy coating.

He knew that look. He’d seen it enough times, on the other side of an interview room. It was the look of someone trying to twist a situation to their own benefit.

So, it didn’t matter what he’d felt, when he was saving her life, or afterwards. It didn’t matter that the icy fist around his heart had melted the moment her golden eyes met his. That his heart had reached out for her. Or that his griffin had unfurled its wings and raised its head, gazing at her without the same painful suspicion that he greeted all strangers with.

How naïve.

He ran through her lies in his head.

All of us Belgraves are shifters, too.

We’re all winged lion shifters.

She was a Belgrave. No lie there. Which meant either Belgraves were some other sort of shifter than winged lions… or not all of them were.

She hadn’t responded when he tried to communicate with her telepathically.

All this suggested that she was a non-shifter from a shifter family—but why lie about something like that? It happened. Sometimes shifters were born from non-shifter families, and sometimes non-shifters were born from shifter families. It might have something to do with genetics. He didn’t know that anyone had done research into it. It was just