goofy grin off my face. If the driver had been serious, maybe this wasn’t going to be an utter disaster. Familiars often had similar personalities to their mages, after all.
I stood after a moment, inclining my head to the, um, Beryl. Was she a maid? Housekeeper? Personal assistant? “Sorry. Can’t resist a dog.”
Me, the man who hadn’t wanted a dog.
Yeah, yeah, so I’m good at lying to myself. In my defense, Beez’s dog really was kind of a mess. Plus, dogs are a little like kids: a lot cuter when you only have to play with them, but don’t have to take responsibility for their care and feeding. I hoped foxy would eat his dinner when I wasn’t there to eat with him, a twinge of guilt blooming in my stomach.
Beryl wasn’t stiff or scowling; in fact, she was smiling at me. “His name is Rufus, and he’s a glutton for attention.”
“I bet he gets a ton of it. He’s adorable,” I answered, then cringed internally. Adorable? Had that really been the best thing I could come up with?
She nodded, though, and opened a huge set of double doors to one side of the foyer, revealing a dining room that should have been in fiction. Maybe it had been; it looked just like one of those tables in the movies where the rich couple sits at opposite ends and can hardly hear each other to have a conversation over breakfast.
Contrary to any image I’d been holding in my head, my grandmother was not wearing a ball gown or dripping with diamonds. The only piece of jewelry she had on was an ancient looking gold locket. Not even a wedding ring, even though I knew she’d been married for fifty or so years until her husband’s death the year before. It had been a major local news story, the death of an important McKinley.
Her hair was thick and silver-gray, and she was wearing a sensible pantsuit, in black, which sounded forbidding but somehow wasn’t.
She looked . . . like a grandmother. Especially when she smiled at me. “Sage. It’s so good to finally meet you. I wasn’t sure you would come.” I opened my mouth to respond, but what was I supposed to call her? And how did I answer? I had considered not going. Just telling the driver to turn around and go home. “You can call me Iris for now, if you’d like.”
For now? Was she going to change her mind and make me call her Your Ladyship later on? “Um, Mrs.—Iri—ma’am.”
I held out my hand like we were going to shake. She took it with both of hers and held on, a bemused smile on her face. “You look just like my brother Andrew. Hair in the usual family black, but his would never behave either. Like it wants to curl, but not quite. And his green eyes, and that cute little button nose. Goodness, you even sound like him.”
“Is that good?”
She leaned in a little, whispering conspiratorially, “He was my favorite brother. The only one of them who was worth a damn. Of course, that meant he died in a dressage accident when he was in his twenties.”
I wanted to ask what a dressage accident was, but didn’t want to look as uneducated as I was. I made a mental note to look it up later. “I’m very sorry,” I said instead.
“Oh, don’t be. It was sixty years ago now. I might miss him, but I’ve had a little time to deal with it.” She motioned to the table, where two places were set on opposite sides. Unlike in the movies, they were the near sides, not the distant opposite ends. “Shall we eat? I didn’t leave you any time between work and now, so you must be famished.”
And I was, so I followed her to the table, pulling out a chair for her, then rounding the end to sit opposite her. I could at least pretend to have good manners, a little. I was concerned with the number of forks next to my plate, but I could probably figure it out. From the outside in, right?
The knife was a bigger concern. By rote, I picked it up with two fingers and set it as far from me as I could. Then I realized that was probably both weird and ill-mannered. I glanced back at her, but she wasn’t even looking at me, focused on smoothing a napkin across her lap.
Thank fuck.
I didn’t expect to make the