Chapter Thirty-One
Connor opened the door in his joggers and a faded T-shirt, a tissue balled in one hand, and Vidal pushed past him without a word.
He went down the hall to the kitchen, came back when he realised he had nowhere in particular to be going, and stopped in the middle of the sitting room with his good hand braced flat against his sternum.
“Sweetheart.”
“Shut the door, Connor.”
The door clicked shut. Connor came up the hall behind him, slower than he usually moved, and stopped a foot short of him.
“What’s happened?”
“Pare rang. He has read me a dossier on your family dealings, Connor, in his most reasonable voice. He’s asked me to accept the keys to a flat in Knightsbridge so that I may place some distance between you and me, and be exposed to a better class of neighbour.”
Connor reached out for him, but Vidal turned away before he could be touched. “Come here, love,” he urged.
“No.”
“Come here.”
Connor turned him by the good shoulder. He let himself be drawn in against the warm cotton of the T-shirt, and he stood there with his sling between them and his good hand fisted at the small of Connor’s back, and he did not cry, because his anger had brought him past tears.
“Talk to me.”
“I have been betrayed, Connor.”
Connor’s hand stilled where it was working a slow circle between his shoulder blades.
“Beauchamp has taken one last parting shot.” The name felt like acid in his mouth, though his voice came out level. His good hand had gone into a fist against Connor’s back.
“That doesn’t sound like Beauchamp at all. That bloke spent the better part of a fortnight handing you over to Wallis with a bow on top. He’s not the type to fire something off on his way out the door. Whatever’s happened, you’ll be reading it wrong.”
“He has passed my father a dossier on your family.”
Vidal felt the breath go out of Connor in a long exhale. Connor kept his arm exactly where it was, his hand flat between Vidal’s shoulder blades, and after a moment he pressed his lips to the crown of Vidal’s head. “Ah. So I’ve been deemed inappropriate.”
Vidal pulled back far enough to take Connor’s face in his good hand, and kissed him with the full force of someone who’d decided to make a stand on the matter.
Connor’s mouth was warm and slightly chapped at the corner from the cold he’d been ignoring, and Vidal kissed him until they were both breathless.
“He has done this on purpose, Connor. He has waited until he was safely out of the flat, and then he has gone to my father with a piece of paper as though he were doing the family a service. He could not bear that I had chosen this. He couldn’t bear that I had a life he was no longer the centre of.
So he has crept off to Pare with his neat little dossier.
He’s dressed it up as concern for my welfare, when in fact it is the small mean revenge of a man who has lost his place in the household and could not endure being replaced. ”
“I know you don’t believe that of Beauchamp, sweetheart.”
Vidal shook his head adamantly. “It is cowardly, Connor. To go behind a man’s back to his father, of all people, the one person in the world whose opinion I am constitutionally incapable of dismissing.
He has known that. He has used it against me and done this under the guise of professionalism, when what it actually is is jealousy. ”
Connor gave Vidal a sad, twisted smile that sat uneasily on his mouth. He drew Vidal back in against him, settled Vidal’s head under his chin, and held him there. His fingers moved into his dark hair, sweeping it back from his nape in one slow pass.
“Listen to me, Vidal. I need you to stop, and I need you to really think about this. Beauchamp would never do this to you. He’d not do it to me, either, much as he had every reason to want me out of the picture. He’s a good chap, and we both know this.”
Connor cupped Vidal’s chin in his hand, tipped his face up until Vidal had no choice but to look at him. “You want to be angry at him because that’s easier on you than missing him.”
Vidal’s face crumpled. His good hand came up and struck Connor in the centre of his chest. It was a weak, badly aimed punch that landed and did nothing at all. He hit him a second time with no more force, until Connor caught his wrist and crushed him against him.
“You are wrong about him.” Vidal’s voice came out muffled against Connor’s collarbone.
“You are wrong, and you are being charitable in the way that the English are always charitable, which is to say, with no actual feeling for what is happening underneath. You think because the man wears a suit and says sir that he is incapable of cruelty. In actuality, he is an Englishman of the worst kind, who does the cruel thing in a register so polite that you cannot even complain about it afterwards without seeming hysterical.”
“Vidal — ”
“The problem is that you are a man who says what he means. You think because you would not do this, then he would not do this. But he is not you, Connor! He is an entirely different species of man. One who has been schooled in the art of elegant betrayal through officer training at Sandhurst!”
“Vidal — ”
“And you are standing there, defending him, when he has gone behind my back to my father!”
“Will you shut up a minute, you fucking heartbreaker.” Connor threw his head back and groaned at the ceiling.
“God, this fucking sucks bollocks. You make me fucking laugh, Vidal. You fuck like you’ve got no shame.
No fucking shame, mate, not a shred of it.
” He lowered his chin. His eyes had gone tight at the corners.
“And here I am, on the wrong end of a Sunday afternoon, about to talk you into the bloke you actually want.”
Connor took in a bracing breath. “Beauchamp didn’t write your dad that report.
He wouldn’t hurt you that way. I know it because the night you got hit by that car, I sat with him at the foot of your hospital bed for an hour, and he reeled off the full bloody manual on the proper care and feeding of you.
I don’t think he stopped for a full fucking hour.
A bloke doesn’t notice the kind of shit Beauchamp noticed unless he’s absolutely gone for someone.
He’s not noticing because he’s a good security officer: he’s noticing because he can’t help it.
He’s been watching you for the joy of it. ”
Vidal didn’t want to hear another word of it. He pushed up onto the balls of his feet, slid his good hand round the back of Connor’s neck, and went in to kiss him quiet.
Connor turned his face away.
It was the gentlest refusal Vidal had ever been handed. Connor’s hand cupped Vidal’s jaw, and his mouth landed instead in the centre of Vidal’s forehead.
“I’ve enjoyed every bit of you, Your Serene Highness. But the fact that you’re more upset about thinking Beauchamp did something like this, than you are about your father not approving of me, says it all.”
Pare had read him the dossier, and Vidal had not taken in a word of it. He had not weighed what his father was asking him to do. He had not stopped to consider what he would say in reply. Every thought in his head had been trained on Beauchamp from the first sentence.
“Oh, Connor.”
Connor’s mouth had pulled into a wry shape. “Yeah.”
A great undignified noise came out of Vidal before he could stop it.
He cried for the unfairness of what he had done to this man.
Connor, who had handed him a linen handkerchief in the garden on the worst night of his life and asked nothing of him in return.
Who’d taught him how a pawnbroker priced a knackered PlayStation, and who’d made him laugh while he was fucking him.
Vidal could see, with a terrible clarity, the shape of the life Connor had been offering him.
The Sunday lunches in Bow with Mrs Evans’s sherry-heavy trifle, and the spoiled indulgence of his whims. The house somewhere in a postcode Pare would not have approved of, and a bed in which Vidal would have been thoroughly and uncomplicatedly adored for the rest of his natural life.
Prince Vidal of Cardona could have lived that life and called himself a fortunate man.
Mr Vidal Montcada, it turned out, could not.
That Vidal needed the man who had drafted the cohabitation protocols at three in the morning and then refused to amend a single clause when Vidal had laid his hand on his chest and tried it on, and who scolded him when he was being unreasonable.
Two ways of being loved, laid out in front of him, and only one of them required him to grow up.
“Connor, I’m so sorry.”
“I know you are, sweetheart.”
“I have used you appallingly.”
“You haven’t used me at all. I had a lovely time. I knew what I was about, the whole way through. You don’t owe me an apology for any of it.” Connor’s hand had not stopped moving against the back of his head. “But I think we ought to revisit our terms, sweetheart.”
Vidal lifted his face off the wet patch he had made on the front of Connor’s shirt.
“Are we still having fun, Vidal?”
“Yes, my friend. We are still having fun.” Vidal’s eyes were full. His mouth had pulled into a smile. “But I think… I think I might be looking for a boyfriend.”
Connor closed his eyes for a beat. When he opened them again, the smile he gave Vidal was sad, but sincere. “Yeah, sweetheart. I thought you might be.” He kissed Vidal once more on the forehead and let him go.