Christmas Griffin - Zoe Chant Page 0,61

and ushered Delphine and Hardwick grandly into their abandoned seats. Hardwick held Delphine’s chair for her and got a grandmotherly smirk for his troubles.

“Good morning, Grandmother, Grandfather,” Delphine said. “Did you sleep well?”

Alastair sniffed. “Hrm! You’d think this place has rats in the walls, the amount of noise there was this morning.”

“I’m sure they do their best,” Angela said. To the untrained ear, it probably sounded like she was trying to smooth over troubled waters, not insult their hosts. The lie skated across the backs of Hardwick’s eyeballs. “And I do hope you’re feeling better today, Mr...”

“Jameson. Hardwick Jameson.”

“Of course.” Her grandmother’s eyes went distant, and given what Delphine had told him, he guessed she was sifting through her memories for any noteworthy Jamesons. Noteworthy, in Angela Belgrave’s book, meaning with a pedigree going back at least five hundred years and ideally an ancestor who had been immortalized in local folklore somewhere across the globe.

Good luck to her, Hardwick thought. If the Jamesons made a name for themselves doing anything, it would be keeping to themselves—and that was the sort of thing where if you became known for it, you weren’t very good at it.

“I was terribly sorry to hear you were ill. I had hoped we could have proper introductions last night.”

“Well, no time like the present.” He slid into the chair next to Delphine and took her hand under the table. Her fingers were stiff.

“Indeed.” Angela took a delicate sip of iced water and fell silent as one of the hotel staff came around and took their breakfast orders. Hardwick was impressed. She didn’t even speak telepathically, that was how determined she was not to talk in front of the ‘help.’

Delphine’s grandfather took up the conversation once the waitstaff had moved away.

“Now, what it is you do, Hardwick?”

Hardwick started to explain his job and where he worked, but the old man talked over him.

“No, no, not your employment. My God!” He leaned forwards. “I’m not interested in your job. What do you do? We Belgraves, we winged lion shifters, we’re all about family. If I look into your soul, Hardwick—and you don’t mind if I do?”

Hardwick shrugged and held Mr. Belgrave’s eye. He got a glimpse of the other man’s lion—stern, stubborn, and boastfully proud—and his own griffin peered out through his eyes, allowing itself to be seen.

Alastair leaned back and slapped the table, a satisfied smirk on his lips.

“Well, that tells me what you are. But being one of the gifted ones doesn’t set you apart from the crowd these days. It’s what you do with it that counts. Take our family, for example. Winged lion shifters. What does that tell you?”

“Just what it says on the tin, sir.”

Mr. Belgrave slapped the table again. “Did you hear that, Angela? Just what it says on the tin! That is exactly what I’m talking about, m’boy. Modern shifters don’t pay enough attention to the important things. Nothing about intention. Nothing about why we are the way we are.”

Save me, Hardwick thought, fixing a noncommittal, neutral look on his face. He’d encountered shifters like this before. Mostly when they were trying to explain that they’d robbed someone, or smashed something, or both, as a result of their unique shifter nature. They always seemed to think that because he was a shifter too, he’d let them off. As though animal instincts were something to proud of, let alone an excuse.

“That why,” Mr. Belgrave went on, “is what separates shifters like us from the normal type.”

Well, that was a new direction, at least. An exciting new distillation of a perspective he already disliked.

But this was Delphine’s family, and he was there for her, not to let his own biases show.

He could put up with some shifter posturing, for her sake.

“So, what is your why, Mr. Belgrave?”

“Family. That’s the why of the Belgraves. It’s all about family. You were talking with my girl Grizelda last night, weren’t you? She understands it. Our son Dominic did, too, before he passed.”

Delphine stiffened. Hardwick touched the back of his hand to her arm. “My father,” she explained quickly.

“Passed when the twins were babies and Delphine here was only a girl herself, poor thing,” her grandmother added. “Such a shame that he didn’t live long enough to see her greater form. That was just before your lioness emerged, wasn’t it, dear?”

Delphine looked stricken. She very carefully did not look at Hardwick, though she squeezed his hand. “Just after,” she said quietly.

It wouldn’t have mattered if she’d whispered