by Chant, Zoe
And all the time she’d been hiding herself. Being Delphine-the-terrible-sister rather than Delphine-the... whatever she really was.
The dining room was set up the same way it had been the evening before, with all the tables that would normally be arranged separately for different groups to eat alone pushed together into one long table. There was a red table runner running the length of the mega-tablecloth, decorated with wreaths of pine and holly and dotted with tealight candles in cute holders. The candlelight glinted on champagne glasses and water carafes and the round belly of the bottle of port Delphine had bought for her grandfather, which was sitting in pride of place in front of her grandparents.
The seating arrangement was so familiar it might have been a snapshot from any Christmas of her childhood. Her grandmother and grandfather were seated at the head of the table, with her other relatives arrayed down either side according to how much her grandparents wanted to lecture them, peer at them, or test their knowledge of Belgrave family history. Once upon a time, Delphine had thought that her grandparents ordered the family meals based purely on most to least liked, top to bottom of the table. Favored aunts and uncles at the top, sneered-upon relations at the bottom. But it wasn’t that simple. The bottom of the table was as coveted as the top of the table. It was the middle that was the dead zone. Hemmed in on either side by loud conversation, unable to focus on anything without someone passing a dish over your plate or spilling gravy in your drink—that was where the least favored Belgraves were banished to. Including Delphine’s family.
She’d always had mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, it was horrible. She hated that ever since Delphine’s father had died, her mother had been so obviously excluded. On the other, it meant they paid less attention to her little corner of the family as a whole. And she was despicably grateful for that.
Delphine took a deep breath and wrapped her arm through Hardwick’s. “Let’s sit with my folks,” she said. “It shouldn’t be as bad as last night.”
She checked his face warily. Did wishful thinking count as a lie?
“And we can keep an eye on your brothers,” he murmured back, closing his hand over hers reassuringly.
His comfort gave her the strength to stride into the room and greet the people she walked past. To her relief, the seats closest to the head of the table were already filled. She nodded to a couple of spare seats further down, sitting opposite her brothers. Far enough from the head of the table that they wouldn’t have to be part of any conversations up there, but not so far that her grandmother would peer down and demand to know what they were doing so far away. Her brothers waved her over.
Before they could sit down, however, her grandfather’s voice cut through the hum of conversation.
“Is that Delphine? Come down here and tell me what you’ve been doing with yourself, girl.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
Hardwick
Hardwick sensed rather than saw Delphine’s shoulders go up. Because they didn’t move. Because she’d been dealing with these people all her life, and must have learned long ago not to let her true feeling show.
He had braced himself as they entered the breakfast room, but there was no need. He felt stronger than he had the night before. Stronger than he had in months. Something Delphine had said—
Her words came back to him, wrapping around him like her embrace.
I want to protect you.
Nobody had ever wanted to protect him. Not since his parents passed. His gift, and the pain it brought with it, had been his alone to bear. He had thought that if he ever found his mate, it would be his job to be the sole provider, the protector, the one who defended her against every danger the world had to offer. The thought that she would want to protect him, too, had never occurred to him. And now the knowledge that Delphine wanted to look after him, to care for him, formed a shield around his heart. His griffin was content, despite the conversation around them.
Because the Belgraves were sure as hell playing the same social bullshit games they’d been on the night before.
Everyone had slept terribly or had some complaint or other about the hotel’s heating, cooling, the service of their staff, the noise from the street outside. It was all lies, and it all washed off his shield like water off a duck’s back. His griffin pecked half-heartedly at a few of them, and there was a dull ache in his head like something was getting through, but it was nowhere near the agony that had spiked through his skull the previous evening.
He remembered their conversation about his griffin’s sign language. She’d said it must make it harder to lie, but wasn’t that what she was doing right now? It didn’t make his head hurt, but it—
His griffin narrowed its eyes at him.
Of course. This wasn’t lying. It was self-defense.
Delphine gave him the strength to be here. In return, he would do whatever he could to get them through this day without her being hurt.
By anyone. Including her brothers.
Hardwick eyed each of Delphine’s relatives as they made their way to the head of the table. He nodded, and smiled, and muttered ‘Good morning’ and ‘Merry Christmas’ whenever anyone met his deceptively mild gaze.
Her aunts and uncles wouldn’t be out of place at a country club, he thought. At least not the sort he’d encountered while he was on the job. Wealthy, well-groomed, and completely assured of their own importance. Did they have country clubs in England? he wondered.
The younger generation looked to be going the same way. All polished, military-grade self-esteem. But…
His gaze lingered on one of Delphine’s cousins and her mate. Pebbles, he wanted to say her name was, though what the hell sort of Flintstones name was that? And her mate—something else beginning with P. The bird of paradise shifter.
Something niggled at the back of his mind. If he’d been at work, he would have followed it to its source, figured out what connection his subconscious was trying to make while his conscious mind was dreaming of painkillers and icepacks.
But he wasn’t at work. It was Christmas morning, he was on holiday, and right now his top priority was looking after his mate.
He stuck close to Delphine as she made her way to the head of the table. Anders and Vance tried to tag along behind them, but their grandmother waved the two of them away with an “I’ve seen enough of you two already. Go sit with your cousins.”
She waved Grizelda and Michael away, too 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 it. It hurt all the same. Worse than before, as though the few minutes they’d spent together when she wasn’t lying about herself had weakened his defenses. Even the background conversation thudded more heavily against his mind.
“—of course, we’re so excited—”
The same as the night before. Worse than the night before.
“—invited all the best shifter families to her First Flight, our darling Livia simply wouldn’t have it any other way—”
“—really, it was a blessing in disguise. I’m afraid that the Eastern dragons simply aren’t all they’re cracked up to be—”
Lie upon lie. Shifters who claimed that family was the most important thing, then spent all the time they had together faking it. Most of them hated being here. The sheer volume of lies about how happy they were that the family was all together was proof of that. Cousin Livia wasn’t interested in the ‘best shifter families,’ whoever they were. And Hardwick wouldn’t have been surprised if the Eastern dragons had seen right through Grizelda Belgrave’s bullshit and decided to have none of it.
These were the people Delphine was so desperate to keep on board?
He forced himself to focus on what she was saying, and not let himself be drawn into the lesser blows to the skull from the rest of the table.
“...So, he did know about my lioness,” Delphine said, glancing at Hardwick with a barely-there I’m-sorry look before smiling peacefully at her grandmother. “I was so happy to be able to tell him before he passed.”
“We know.” Mrs. Belgrave’s smile out-beatified Delphine’s like the sun outshines a lightning bug. “But it is good to hear you tell the story, dear. Goodness knows it’s the one bright point in that whole sad affair.”
“And the boys,” her husband added. It sounded like an old bit of patter.
“And the boys, of course. Belgraves through and through.”
Hardwick took that as his cue to check what the boys were up to. He’d hoped to find them deep in another trivial argument, like the day before, or—damn. His brain put two and two together. The night before, in the lead-up to his breakdown, the twins had been causing a ruckus. Hardwick had put it down to teenage dumbassery, but they’d only started throwing candles when the all-knowing Grizelda had started talking about...
Shit.
He glared at them both and sent them a silent warning. They glared back. Not a good sign, he thought, even as he begrudgingly respected them for daring it.
After all, though, who was he? Some interloper who barely knew the first thing about the Belgrave family history. Who, to their eyes, must be encouraging their sister to keep hiding behind her pretense at being something she wasn’t. A pretense that clearly made her miserable. They had to have seen how unhappy she was, back in the hotel room.
Just like it was obvious to anyone with half a brain that she was tense now, too. And the twins, candle-tossing or not, had at least half a brain between them.
How long until their Belgrave family-above-all instincts won out and they tried to protect her from her grandparents’ assumptions about who she was?
Hardwick’s griffin clacked its beak nervously. He realized at the same moment that his head was aching less. He’d managed to tune out the rest of the table—as a result of his focus on Delphine?
But that wasn’t why his griffin was nervous. Mr. and Mrs. Belgrave weren’t lying. They really believed that Delphine’s lioness emerging had helped her and the rest of the family deal with the pain of losing their son. That it balanced the scales, somehow.
Even more unsettled, his griffin wrapped itself around the bright glow of the mate bond, whipping its tail.
“So.” Mr. Belgrave turned back to Hardwick. “Now that you understand what I’m asking, what do you say? What is a griffin’s why?”
And Hardwick, bristling, went as much on the offense as he could manage without betraying his mate.
“Funny thing, you asking me about my why. I was going to say the concept had never occurred to me, but I realize it has. I’ve been living it for years without ever putting it into words.” He thought about the last ten years: the decisions he’d made. The wins. All the work he’d achieved. “I’m all about helping people. My gift, as you put it, lets me do that. I use it to keep people safe.”
“So that’s what griffins are about, is it?”
“It’s what this griffin is about.”
Mrs. Belgrave gave a tinkling laugh.
The doors to the dining room opened, and several members of the hotel staff came in wheeling trolleys of food. Mrs. Belgrave pinched her lips in ostentatiously. *I was beginning to wonder where our breakfast was! Honestly, they call this service?*
Hardwick called it damn good service. They’d only made their orders a few minutes before, and the dishes looked freshly cooked, not like they’d been sitting under a warmer slowly drying out.
His stomach rumbled as the server set a plate of crispy bacon and mounds of scrambled eggs in front of him. Even the greens on the side looked fresh. Nothing like the pre-cooked, re-heated rubbish he’d been planning to dine on the whole holiday.
“This looks better than those enchiladas,” he said to Delphine.
“Significantly better. The coffee’s nicer, too.”
“You mean it’s actually drinkable?”
She smiled, and just before she turned away to accept her own plate of food, her smile changed. It became a little less amused, and a little more honest. A pocket of realness between the two of them, amidst all her family’s insincerity.
Then she replied to something her grandmother said, and it changed again, back into the pleasant, utterly insincere expression that she wore around all of her older relatives. Hardwick frowned.
“Keeping people safe. Well, I’m sure there are worse things to dedicate your soul to,” Mr. Belgrave joked. He waved a fork at Hardwick. “Almost a shame you’re paired with Delphine, though. Belgraves don’t need saving as a rule.”
A vision of Delphine out cold in the snow flashed into Hardwick’s mind, and his griffin’s crest rose angrily. “That so?”
At the other end of the table, a pocket of silence fell. If Hardwick hadn’t been keeping an ear on the twins, he wouldn’t have noticed it.
“We keep to tradition with many things, but the whole damsel in distress thing is so passé,” Mrs. Belgrave said. “A true lioness would never let herself get into a situation where she was reliant on anyone else.”
Her eyes flicked down the table. Hardwick didn’t see who she was looking at, but Delphine went tense.
“No, we’re all about the saving, aren’t we, Grandmother? Oh,” she added. “And the family, Grandfather. I can’t forget that.”
“I guess that makes saving family the ultimate twofer.” Hardwick was struggling to keep his temper under control. They would have left her. They wouldn’t have even bothered to look for her. She could have died out there, and her family would have been here, laughing and congratulating themselves on how powerful and family-oriented they were. “Seems like a hard bet if your family members never need to be saved.”