Christmas Griffin: A Mate for Christmas #5 by Chant Zoe

Author:Chant, Zoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780473557232
Published: 2020-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

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.

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