Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,20
Delphine’s rental.
They could deal with that when they got to it.
Delphine followed him out, wrapped up in his winter coat and gloves over her own jacket. Her own scarf and hat looked incongruous next to his clothing; his stuff was heavy and dark, thick wool half-felted with age and wear, while hers were dainty, pale blue with matching snowflake patterns.
She pushed her hands deep into his pockets and he hoped like hell he hadn’t left an old handkerchief or worse in there.
Hardwick rolled his shoulders back. “How much experience do you have flying?”
It wasn’t meant as a challenge. Delphine clearly took it as one, anyway. She gave him a long, hard sideways look.
“…None being flown around by someone else,” she said carefully, and it was the truth.
“Can’t say I have much experience flying anyone else around, myself.”
“How did you get me up here yesterday?”
“Grabbed you in my claws.”
She went slightly pale. “Let’s try something else,” she suggested. “Sometimes when my family’s all together, we—uh, my brothers and cousins—will shift mid-air and practice landing on each other’s backs. To mess up each other’s flying. And they take the younger kids for rides, sometimes…”
“But not you?”
Her expression jerked strangely. “We didn’t spend a lot of time with the family when I was big enough that my parents would have let me, and not yet the age where I… where… most Belgraves start being able to shift for themselves.” Her shoulders hunched.
That’s a story with a lot missing, Hardwick thought.
But it was more of a story than he’d expected. And more truth than he’d expected, too.
“We can try that,” he said out loud. “You on my shoulders?”
Delphine nodded, but didn’t make any move. He sighed. “I know some shifters don’t care about this sort of thing, but I’d prefer it if you turned around.”
“Oh!” Delphine spun around. “I’m sorry, I thought—”
“What?” Hardwick pulled off his shirt. The air was dry and still, but even with that and his natural shifter hardiness, he only had a few minutes before the cold started to get to him. “Belgraves are all nudists, or something?”
It wouldn’t be unusual. Plenty of shifters had lower boundaries around nudity than humans did. Hardwick was the same, when the person he was being ass naked in front of wasn’t his mate.
“Belgraves have jumped on the discovery that you can shift and take your clothes with you, actually.” Her voice sparkled with amusement.
“You’re shitting me.”
“No, it’s definitely a thing. They like to compete over how many expensive accessories they can bring with them without dissolving into a pile of sparks. One of my brothers has destroyed three phones in the last year messing it up.”
“You’ll have to tell me more about it—” Hardwick stopped himself. “Never mind.”
Because after he dropped her off, there weren’t going to be any opportunities for either of them to tell the other anything.
He checked to make sure she was still looking away, got ready to shuck off his pants and boots, and concentrated on his griffin. Just as he was about to shift, Delphine held up a hand.
“Wait!”
He cursed silently, held onto his pants, and waited.
Delphine didn’t turn around. “I won’t… be able to communicate with you when you’re in your griffin form,” she admitted.
“You can still talk to me. I’m the one who’ll have trouble making myself heard.”
The damned connection. It pricked at him, urging him to close the distance between them. He couldn’t let himself do that physically.
But that wasn’t the only option. She’d told him something of herself that she might not have intended, if she didn’t know he’d be able to tell she was lying. He could return the gesture.
“Talking isn’t the only way to communicate,” he said. “My griffin doesn’t talk at all, and we get on fine.”
“It doesn’t talk at all?” Delphine’s eyebrows disappeared under her woolly hat. “I didn’t know that was possible.”
Hardwick shrugged. “Some people don’t, so why not our animals? And like I said, we don’t need words to get the message across. It uses sign language, I guess.”
She spun around. “Does that mean you can see—”
He could sure as hell see the effort it took her to cut herself off. And the shame that tightened her face, pushing away the sudden, bright interest that had lit her up from the inside.
His jaw hardened. She never got to ask questions like this, did she? If she spent all her time pretending she already was a shifter and therefore knew all about it.
“Go on,” he urged her gently.
She looked