A Mate for Christmas Collection 2 by Chant Zoe

Author:Chant, Zoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: anonymous
Published: 2023-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

2

Hardwick

Hardwick Jameson always planned ahead. Which was why when he arrived in Pine Valley and, instead of the half-abandoned ghost town his friend and ex-colleague Jackson Gilles had sold him on, had found a bustling tourist village full to the brim of locals, visitors and—he shuddered at the memory— Christmas cheer, he had a back-up plan ready to go.

An old hunting cabin in the middle of nowhere. The perfect place to spend Christmas by himself.

He winced as he remembered the few minutes he’d spent in town before he turned his car around and drove further up the mountain. It had been an automatic response.

A defensive response, he corrected himself, and sighed. There was no point him being here if he was going to lie to himself. And even white lies hurt this time of the year. Papering over his problems by tempering his words wasn’t going to help.

The hunting cabin was a rustic affair. The largest room acted as mixed kitchen, dining and lounge, with an ancient iron stove. To one side was a smaller bedroom and to the other, the bathroom and laundry. There was a smaller shack on the far side of the clearing, which he’d assumed was normally used for hanging meat, and had decided to use as an extra-cold storage during his stay.

He’d lit a fire in the large iron stove when he arrived and had been pleased to discover that it warmed the whole place well enough. He could have coped with the cold, but this trip wasn’t meant to be some sort of tortuous penance. It was a retreat. Recovery.

Hardwick made himself a cup of instant coffee and sank down into the worn sofa. From here, he could have looked out the window to the small clearing around the cabin and, beyond that, the ring of trees just lit up by the light coming from the house.

Instead, he looked inside himself.

Hardwick was a griffin shifter. When he was in human form, his inner griffin lived in what Hardwick could only describe as his soul. Not that he would have described it that way to anyone, if anyone had asked. Lying was one thing, but some things were private.

His soul was the same as it had always been. He thought of it like a room inside his head. A nest, maybe. Reassuringly stable.

If he closed his eyes, he could see his griffin there. Some shifters could hear their inner animals, he knew, but his griffin was silent. It made its thoughts known through gestures—a sort of personal sign language, Hardwick called it. Gestures and feelings.

Mostly, the feeling was pain.

There was a reason Hardwick spent the end of each year alone. His griffin couldn’t talk, but it didn’t need to when it came to what it did best: sniffing out lies. Its senses were so finely attuned that it could tell when someone was lying from up to twenty feet. In the new year, when Hardwick returned to work refreshed, the lies would feel like a buzz at the back of his head, or a tight muscle in his neck.

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