Chapter Thirty-Nine
Back then
The marquee on the south lawn at Chatham House held five hundred and twenty people who loved Barnaby and Lex, and now James stood at the head of it, a glass in his hand, all of them turned towards him.
A few hours earlier he’d stood in the Fitznorman-Bicester parish church and watched Barnaby lean into Lex for their first married kiss, looking small and treasured in Lex’s massive arms. James’s throat had tightened without warning, and his breath had caught at the sight of it.
Only Benton had noticed at the time, and squeezed his arm.
James tapped the side of his glass, and the attendees quietened.
“When word first got round,” he began, straight-faced, “that a boxer and a horse-mad marquess intended to marry, there were, I’m afraid, a great many neigh-sayers.” A few groans met his opening while the rest of his audience dissolved into laughter.
James raised his glass towards the top table, where Lex had an enormous arm slung around his husband’s neck. “And I put it to this room that no boxer in the history of the sport has ever punched further above his weight than the lad from Barking who somehow talked a marquess up the aisle.”
Lex threw his head back and roared, while beside him Barnaby achieved an incandescent shade of pink that began at his left ear and worked inwards.
James paused to let the laughter crest, and as it did, his eyes found Tristan. English seating conventions had scattered couples the length of the marquee, which left Caroline’s plus-one, gorgeous in white tie, stranded halfway down the room beside a vicar.
Tristan shook his head, just barely, and James read the warning in it: don’t bring up the text where Barnaby waxed poetic about Lex’s lovely big cock.
James smiled innocently.
“Now,” James said, turning back to the room at large, “a while ago I received a text from Barnaby that told me, in terms I found deeply moving, that he was in this for keeps.” He let the beat land. “It was a one a.m. series of texts, so make of that what you will.”
Laughter rippled through the guests. At the top table, Barnaby’s champagne flute had stalled halfway to his mouth.
“James.” Barnaby set the glass down carefully. He was already half out of his chair and lunging towards James. “Don’t.”
Lex, still wiping tears from the punching-above-his-weight line, hooked an arm around Barnaby’s waist and pulled him down onto his lap. Barnaby landed with an outraged noise.
James glanced at Perry, who was already at the laptop beside the projector screen. The screencap appeared on the white canvas behind him, Barnaby’s text blown up to four feet tall in a grey iMessage bubble, and a wave of delighted murmuring swept the marquee as the guests craned forward to read it.
James had committed every word to memory in preparation for this speech. Beneath the fury and the one a.m. syntax, it was one of the most nakedly romantic things he’d ever seen Barnaby produce.
“For context,” James said, “Lex was in S?o Paulo for a title fight. The opponent was a Brazilian heavyweight named Felipe Rodrigues.”
“Rodrigues was fifteen and three,” Lex supplied from beneath Barnaby.
“Thank you, Lex. Yes, he was fifteen and three.” James turned to the screen.
“Barnaby was watching the fight at home, alone, at one in the morning, and felt compelled to share his feelings with me, in real time. I shall read it as he wrote it, with every missing comma and full stop preserved for posterity.”
“James I cannot watch this any more that Brazilian has hit Lex nine times in the ribs in the last round and the commentator keeps calling it body work as though it is a spa treatment and not a man battering MY boyfriend with his fists. I swear to God if he catches Lex with another uppercut I am getting on a plane. I don’t care that I can’t box.
I will go over there and I will hit him myself. ”
The crowd was already losing it. Barnaby had stopped struggling in Lex’s lap and gone very still.
James waited for the laughter to settle before continuing.
“He’s bleeding above his eye now James. Above HIS LEFT EYE.
That is my favourite eye of the two. It’s the one that I wake up to every morning.
I want Lex to win and I know he will because he is the best fighter in the world and I am not saying that because I love him I am saying it because it is statistically demonstrable but I need him back in one piece James.
I need him home and I need him whole and if that man touches his face again I am going to do something that will make the front pages. ”
“Jams. Jams. I need you to get on the phone with whatever General is available and get me access to a super secret spy plane that can break the sound barrier. I need to go to Brazil immediately. Please, Jams.”
James folded his reading glasses and looked at Barnaby, who was staring at the ceiling to avoid having to meet anyone’s eyes.
“I pointed out, in my reply, that Felipe Rodrigues has several stone on Barnaby and a professional record that suggests he wouldn’t be troubled by an Olympic gold-medal-winning eventer with strong feelings. And Barnaby’s response was ‘I don’t care. Lex is mine.’”
The audience erupted into cheers and awws.
Lex buried his face in Barnaby’s neck, and Barnaby’s hand came up to rest in his husband’s hair, holding him there.
James lifted his glass to the couple.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, and waited until the room had quietened enough to hear him.
“Let’s raise our glasses to Barnaby and Lex, and put the heavyweights of the world on notice that the new Mr Murphy, or Murphy-Fitznorman-Bicester, or whatever you two have decided to call yourselves, is not to be trifled with when it comes to his man. ”
Five hundred and twenty people rose to their feet and toasted BLEX.
? ? ?
James held off until the band had struck up their first set, then reached for his mobile.
Go into the house. The morning room, east corridor, second door on the left.
He pocketed his mobile, and tracked the sent message’s trajectory across the marquee.
Tristan was mid-conversation with the vicar when his hand moved to his jacket pocket.
He read the screen below the edge of the table, his eyes coming up to find James’s across sixty feet of white linen and candlelight.
James left his glass on the nearest table, murmured to the Duchess about needing a moment, and moved along the canvas wall towards the exit at an unhurried pace. Nobody stopped him. The trick was never to look as though you were going somewhere interesting.
The south lawn stretched away towards the ha-ha, silver in the moonlight.
James let himself into the house through a side entrance and walked the east corridor to the morning room.
It was a small, wood-panelled space that the Fitznorman-Bicesters used as an overflow sitting room, furnished with a pair of sofas, a drinks cabinet, and a fireplace that somebody had banked low for the evening.
The curtains were drawn, and a single lamp burned on the side table.
Through the walls, the sound of the band was muffled to a warm, thumping pulse so that the bass beat of the song came up through the floorboards.
He stood by the fireplace, loosened his white tie, and waited for Tristan.
A few minutes passed before Tristan slipped in and pulled the door shut behind him, leaning against it, a hand still on the handle. His bow tie was undone, hanging around his collar, and his fine hair had started to escape its careful coif.
James smiled at him and opened his arms. Out in the marquee, the band had finished the uptempo track that had been rattling the glassware for the last five minutes, and the opening bars of a slower tune reached them. Tristan laughed at the timing of it.
“That speech,” Tristan said, crossing the room. “It was perfect.” He stopped in front of James, close enough that James could smell champagne on his breath.
James accepted the compliment as his due. “I made Lex cry, and that was all I really wanted. Now come here so you can make my night even better.”
Tristan stepped into his space, and James’s arms closed around him. Tristan’s forehead dropped to his shoulder, his hands gripping the back of James’s waistcoat.
James pressed his cheek to Tristan’s temple and began to move them into a slow dance. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other in time with the muffled song, and Tristan followed his lead.
“I made Bash cry too,” James murmured against his hair.
“I saw.” Tristan’s laugh vibrated through him. Tristan’s arms tightened, and his palm traced down James’s spine.
James turned them in a slow circle, guiding Tristan with the flat of his hand between his shoulder blades. The firelight lit the side of Tristan’s face each time they came round, painting his cheekbone in amber.
“I wanted to dance with you out there,” James said.
Tristan looked up. His eyes were a far darker blue in the low light. “I know.”
“Five hundred and twenty people toasting love, and I’m texting you to meet me in the morning room for a sneaky moment.”
“James…”
“You saw their first dance too, Tris. Lex picked Bash up off the ground during the second verse. Lifted him clean off his feet. And Bash just let him adore him, and baby him into kisses, in front of everyone.” His thumb moved against the soft skin behind Tristan’s ear.
“And I thought, one day. That’s all. Just — one day. We’ll have that.”
Tristan’s body went still against his.
“I’ve been talking to Cecil,” James said.
“Not in any formal capacity. Just…sounding him out and getting this on his radar. He thinks a preparation programme could be drawn up inside six months. They’ll get you up to speed on protocol, constitutional briefings, the wardrobe guidance, all of the basics.
We’d aim for a soft launch next spring. Nothing dramatic.
Just a sighting together. Eventually a confirmation, and then we let the machine do what it does and ride it out. ”
Tristan said nothing. His weight had shifted back, away from him, and James felt it through the hand he had on his back.
“Caroline will be thrilled,” James went on, turning them past the fireplace, where the banked coals threw light across the panelling.
“She and Benton have been sitting on their hands for a year now waiting for a window. If we go first, every front page in the country will be too busy losing its collective mind over the King’s American boyfriend to care that the Princess Royal’s been shagging her brother’s Private Secretary.
” He smiled into Tristan’s hair. “We’d be doing them a favour, really. ”
The song changed. James adjusted their pace without thinking, because it didn’t matter what the band played, only that he had Tristan in his arms, and that he now had a working plan to keep him there.
“I’ll get Benton to start putting meetings with Cecil into your diary,” James said.
He kissed Tristan’s temple and felt the pulse beneath the skin, quicker than it should have been for a man swaying gently in a warm room.
“I promise you, Tris, we’ll make this as painless as possible.
You won’t believe how much of it’s already been mapped.
Benton has an entire schedule laid out.”
Tristan’s hands loosened on his waistcoat. James eased away just enough to look at him. Tristan’s face was angled away, his gaze fixed on the drawn curtains.
“Tris?” James leaned in, smiling.
“No, James.”
The words were quiet and very even, delivered to the curtains rather than to him. James let out a short laugh, because Tristan’s deadpan timing had always been immaculate. He tipped Tristan’s chin up with two fingers and tried again.
Tristan’s hands came off James’s waistcoat and dropped to his sides as he took a full step back, and the distance he’d just made opened like a wound.