Chapter Twenty-Four #2
“I’m not effective for him as security detail anymore, Connor,” Beauchamp stated flatly.
“I haven’t been for a while now. I let the walls down.
Things got too personal between us. That’s why he reacted the way he did when I started arranging the handover.
He didn’t trust me to be doing it for the right reasons, because the reasons had stopped being right some time ago.
” Beauchamp’s hands had gone white against the metal where he gripped the footrail of the bed tightly.
“I’ve lost his trust. The best thing I can do for him now is take myself out of the running.
I’ll ring Captain Wallis tonight. Get David down from Hereford.
The team can be installed by Wednesday.”
“Hang on, mate. That’s a massive overreaction. He needs you here, Beauchamp. He’s just been hit by a car. He doesn’t need you handing him over to a stranger.”
“I’m a danger to him if I stay. He doesn’t listen to me anymore.
He didn’t tonight. He won’t tomorrow. The whole point of having me around is that he listens to me and likes me enough to tolerate my constant presence.
Now that it’s clear he won’t, I’m a liability.
I’m a man taking a salary for a job I can no longer do. ”
“He doesn’t listen to anyone, Beauchamp. That’s not on you. That’s just his default setting! He’s wired to ignore instructions.”
“He listens to you.” Beauchamp’s mouth had pulled into the saddest half-smile Connor had ever seen on a man’s face.
“He cares about what you say, and he trusts you. He goes to you when he can’t bear to be in his own head, and you bring him back from it.
I’ve seen it. He came down to your flat this morning and he came back upstairs straightened out. You’re the man he needs.”
Beauchamp dragged a hand down his face from forehead to jaw, and held it there over his mouth. When he lowered it, he straightened against the foot rail and his shoulders went back into the line Connor had watched him hold for hours at a time.
“There are things you’ll need to know. About managing him.”
“Beauchamp, mate —”
“He forgets to eat when he’s upset. Properly forgets.
He’ll go thirty hours without a meal and not register it, and then he’ll fall apart over a tin of sardines because his blood sugar’s on the floor.
You have to put food in front of him. Not ask him what he wants.
Put it down where he can reach it, and don’t make a thing of it, or he’ll refuse it on principle.
“He cries in the garden. He thinks no one can see him from the upstairs, but the kitchen window has a clear sight line down to the wrought-iron chair on the left of the flagstones. He goes down there in his robe with a glass of wine he doesn’t drink, and he just cries.
Don’t go down there to ask him what’s wrong.
You just have to let him get it out. All you have to do is light that candle of his so that when he comes back up to the flat, it’s properly filled the drawing room with its smell. ”
Connor sat down slowly on the chair on his side of the bed. Vidal’s breathing carried on between them.
“The thermostat in the flat is always set to twenty-four. You’ll think that’s mad, because it is mad by English standards, and the heating bill last month was four hundred and eighty pounds, but you don’t drop it.
You don’t open windows. He gets cold the way some people get hungry.
It changes his mood before he’s noticed. ”
“All right.”
“He won’t ask for help. Not once. He’ll work his way around it with a piece of theatre, and if you don’t try to hear beyond the drama, you’ll miss it.
The big productions are usually him being fine.
The small ones, where he goes very quiet and starts being elaborately polite, are when he needs you.
Watch for the politeness. If he’s not trying to get a rise out of me, that’s when I pay attention. ”
Beauchamp’s voice had gone hoarse and he still wasn’t slowing down.
“The dog’s the barometer. Mercè eats when he eats.
If she stops eating, he’s stopped eating, and you have to fix both of them.
He’ll be embarrassed about the broken arm.
About the fact that he was wandering about Mayfair in his pyjamas.
Don’t make him explain why he went out. He won’t have a good reason, and he’ll feel it’s beneath him to admit there wasn’t one. ”
“Beauchamp.” Connor reached across the bed and gripped Beauchamp by the arm. “You’re not going anywhere tonight. You don’t have to give me this handover.”
Beauchamp looked at him.
“You can ring David in the morning if you still want to. I’ll not stand in the way of that. But you’re staying in this room until that one wakes up, because if he opens his eyes and you’re not the first thing he sees, I’m telling you now, he’ll do himself a worse injury than the car managed.”
Beauchamp’s mouth opened again, but Connor cut him off before whatever fresh act of self-removal he’d lined up could escape it.
“I’ve heard you, Beauchamp. I’ve heard every word. Now I need you to sit down.”
Beauchamp sat down. The chair caught him at the back of the knees and he went into it without grace. He looked at the side of Vidal’s face on the pillow, at the gauze taped over the graze, at the dark fan of his hair across the white cotton, and he didn’t look away.
Connor turned Beauchamp’s instructions for the care and feeding of Vidal over in his mind.
The garden crying. The lighting of the candle. The danger in Vidal’s silences.
Not one item on that list was the kind of thing you’d pick up from just doing your job.
You picked it up from watching a man for the pleasure of watching him, and from keeping what you’d seen in a place inside yourself.
Connor had been fucking Vidal for the better part of two months.
He had been making him laugh in his kitchen, spooning him in bed, and driving him to Sunday lunch at his mother’s.
He hadn’t noticed that Vidal went down to cry in the garden or developed soothing strategies for him in response.
The poor bastard was in love with Vidal. Had been for weeks, by the look of it. Possibly since the cupcakes for Adelina, which was the photograph that had stopped Connor cold the first time Vidal had shown it to him, though he couldn’t name why it had bothered him at the time.
Connor waited for the sense of competitiveness to arrive, but it never did. What came instead was a feeling of dismay on Beauchamp’s behalf. The poor fucker had no idea. He was going to walk himself out of Vidal’s flat, and out of his life, in the belief that he was doing the professional thing.
Connor settled back into his own chair on the other side of the bed and stretched his legs out. He folded his hands across his stomach and watched the slow rise and fall of Vidal’s chest under the blanket.
He’d come into this room thinking he had one man to mind tonight, when he actually had two. He’d sit with the pair of them until morning, then.