Chapter Thirty-Four
The door of Princess Caroline’s home office hit the wall behind it with a loud bang, and every head in the room came up at once and turned towards the sound.
A press secretary at the long table stopped mid-sentence on her telephone. Vidal stood in the doorway in his camel overcoat, sling pressed to his ribs, and held the room in his thrall.
Beauchamp came through the connecting door from the ante-room with a highlighter capped in his teeth and a sheet of paper held up to the afternoon light, scanning a paragraph as he walked. He took the highlighter out of his mouth, looked up, and stopped.
“Sir.” His brows drew together as he took in Vidal’s breathless state, and the way that his chest was heaving. As though he’d just run through the corridors of Clarence House. “What’s happened?”
“I need to talk to you.”
Beauchamp’s eyes went past him to the open door, and to the secretaries who had not, between them, breathed freely since Vidal’s unexpected appearance. He came across the room in four steady strides, set the paper face-down on the nearest desk, and lowered his voice.
“With respect, sir. I’m on duty. The Princess is leaving for the College of Music at six, and I’ll be accompanying her today. I can’t have this conversation now.”
“Beauchamp —”
“And, sir, with the greatest respect, I no longer answer to you in any capacity.” His words came out flat. “But I’m very glad to see you well. If you’d like to ring the office tomorrow, I’m sure we can find a time to talk. Was there something I might have failed to hand over to Captain Wallis?”
Vidal had been preparing for almost any version of this except Beauchamp’s careful politeness.
“I am not here as your principal. I am here as Mr Vidal Montcada.”
Beauchamp’s jaw set. The door at the far end of the room opened, and Princess Caroline came through it in pearls and a navy dress.
Her auburn hair was pinned at the nape, and she had a pair of reading glasses pushed up onto her head.
She took in the tableau in a single sweep: Beauchamp with his hackles raised, Vidal in his camel overcoat, and the secretaries who had now given up any pretence of work, and the corner of her mouth twitched.
“Beauchamp.”
“Ma’am.”
“Go and talk to Mr Montcada. Use the small meeting room at the end of the corridor. I can manage on my own tonight.”
“Ma’am, I —”
“Go on.”
She crossed back to the door at an unhurried pace, paused beside Vidal long enough to lay a gloved hand against his good shoulder, and kissed him once on the cheek.
“Be kind to him, darling. He’s been miserable.” She was through the door before Vidal could answer.
Beauchamp turned without a word and walked the length of the corridor at a pace that Vidal had to lengthen his stride to match, sling jolting against his ribs as he went.
The small meeting room was at the far end, and Beauchamp held the door open and waited for Vidal to pass through it, his face set. The door clicked shut behind them.
“Three weeks, Mr Montcada.” Beauchamp’s voice came out low and clipped.
“I have been in this office three weeks. I’m still learning the names of the housekeeping staff.
I am still working out which printer eats which type of paper, and you’ve just come storming through reception and made a spectacle of me in front of every secretary on the floor. ”
“Beauchamp —”
“Now there is not a person on this corridor who will not spend the rest of the evening speculating about why a foreign principal turned up at Clarence House asking for me.” His hands had clenched so tightly that his knuckles had gone white.
“You have embarrassed me. I don’t know how to be plainer about it than that. ”
“Someone has to make a scene,” Vidal snapped, “because you will not. I have come to take what I want, Beauchamp, because you have demonstrated, with great thoroughness, that you cannot be relied upon to take anything for yourself.”
Beauchamp’s jaw set harder. He didn’t speak.
“You are the most frustratingly noble man I have ever met. Do you know that? You are self-sacrificing to the point of it being a clinical condition. You have spent three months in my flat noticing every thing about me, caring for me, and you have not once, in all that time, taken the slightest risk on your own behalf. You handed me over to Wallis with a binder. And even worse, you handed me to Connor, Beauchamp. You stood at the foot of my hospital bed and recited my care instructions to another man as though you were briefing the one who had taken the prize!”
Beauchamp flinched back at the mention of Connor.
“You like me. Don’t you dare stand there and tell me otherwise, because the entire point of you is that you do not lie, and every signpost in the last three months has pointed in the same direction.
You like me, and you have decided, with great English self-congratulation, that the dignified thing to do is to walk away from it without a word. ”
Beauchamp’s mouth had gone into a flat line.
“You were with him, Vidal. From the second week of my posting. You weren’t handed over to anybody.
You chose him, and I had the good manners to step aside without making it a problem, because I knew I didn’t have a chance.
” Beauchamp ran a hand through his hair.
“I’m not flash. I’m not fun. I’m a thirty-six-year-old career military man with seven identical grey suits who watches canal-boating documentaries on his nights off.
I loved a man for eighteen years who was theatrical and clever and the centre of every room we walked into, and I watched him eventually come to the conclusion that I wasn’t enough to hold his attention.
I’m very familiar with the shape of that ending, and I had no intention of walking myself into a second go at it with you. ”
“It is over with Connor.”
Beauchamp’s eyes did not leave his face.
“It is over, Beauchamp. He is a man I intend to keep close for the rest of my life, because I do not throw away people who have loved me well, and Connor has loved me very well indeed. But he is not what I need now. He never was. He was what I reached for because you would not let me reach for you.”
Beauchamp kept his eyes on a point just past Vidal’s left shoulder, and his expression did not give an inch.
“So I am going to tell you what is going to happen now, Major, and I would like you to listen.” Vidal drew a long breath.
“I am Mr Vidal Montcada. There is no sir any more, and there is no Serene Highness. And I would like you, Mr Hendrix Riff Beauchamp, to know that I want a perfectly ordinary life with you. That is all. That is everything. Now stop being such a damned Englishman and take what you want, Beauchamp. For once in your stoic, long-suffering, self-effacing life take it.”
Beauchamp looked at him from across the small meeting room. His hand was still in his trouser pocket. He did not speak.
Vidal waited.
He had just delivered the speech of his life. The line about wanting an ordinary life with Beauchamp landed exactly where he had meant it to, and even now, in the quiet of the meeting room, he could feel it had the weight of a thing said well.
“Well?”
Beauchamp said nothing.
“Beauchamp. I have just told you that I want a perfectly ordinary life with you. The most mundane day we shared in our flat beats the wildest week I ever had in Magaluf. I have come here in a sling, with my arm still sore. The least you can do is say something.”
Beauchamp stayed resolutely silent, staring at Vidal.
Vidal stomped his foot against the carpet.
His camel overcoat flared open at the knee with the force of it.
He had fully envisioned this moment culminating in being swept off his feet and kissed breathless, and the reality of being left standing in the part with no one to play it against was galling.
Beauchamp’s eyes went down and then very rapidly back up.
“Vidal.”
“What.”
“Please tell me you have pants on under that coat.”
Vidal’s mouth came up at the corner without any input from him. He shifted his weight, let the coat fall back into place, and tipped his chin up.
“Come and find out.”
Beauchamp let out a short laugh through his nose, and the careful military line of his shoulders gave up an inch.
Vidal took two steps forward across the rug, stopped a foot short of Beauchamp, and held there.
He did not close the last of the distance. The coat hung open, and he watched Beauchamp work it out.
Beauchamp’s gaze dropped to the open front of the coat and stayed there, travelled back up the bare line of Vidal’s throat to the gold crucifix in the hollow of it, and finally found his mouth.
His tongue came out and wet his bottom lip. His hand lifted from his side, hesitated, and then he crossed the foot of carpet and slid his palm under the open front of the coat against the bare skin of Vidal’s waist.
Beauchamp shook his head, like he was trying to dislodge intrusive thoughts from his mind, but he kept his hand in place. “This is insanity…” he muttered. Then Beauchamp bent his head and kissed him.
The kiss was careful and unshowy, conducted with enormous attention to the sling between them.
Beauchamp’s free hand cupped the side of Vidal’s jaw to keep them at an angle that would not jolt the arm.
His mouth was warm, lips slightly dry, and he tasted of tea.
He kissed Vidal as though he were handling someone who might come apart in his hands if he jostled him.
Vidal made an impatient noise into Beauchamp’s mouth, slid his good hand up the back of Beauchamp’s neck into his hair, and rolled his hips forward against the front of Beauchamp’s trousers in one unambiguous movement.
“Vidal, mind your arm…” Beauchamp chided.
And there it was. Beauchamp had a hard cock pressed against Vidal’s hip and was still, in the same breath, fussing about the sling. Vidal felt certainty settle inside him. Yes. This one. He is the one.
His coat had fallen open the rest of the way.
The silk of his boxers was a thin and entirely inadequate barrier between Vidal’s cock, which had come up hard against his belly somewhere in the last thirty seconds, and the front of Beauchamp’s trousers, which were a sensible grey wool, Sandhurst-cut and concealed an interesting development of their own.
Beauchamp’s hand at his waist tightened. The other came up off Vidal’s jaw, slid round to the small of his back, and held him there against him.
“Christ. Vidal.”
“Mm.”
Vidal rolled his hips again, slower, and watched the colour come up Beauchamp’s throat above the collar of his shirt.
The wool of the trousers dragged against the silk of his boxers in a way that had Vidal’s breath catching short.
He shifted his weight, slid his good hand down from the back of Beauchamp’s neck to the front of his shirt, and fisted it in the cotton there to keep him in place.
He ground forward against the front of his trousers in a long deliberate motion that pressed the line of Beauchamp’s cock, and the full length of his own through the layers between them.
Beauchamp forgot all about gentility. His mouth on Vidal’s was open and hot, and his hand had slid down inside the waistband of Vidal’s boxers until he was holding him by the bare skin of his arse, pulling him in tight, kneading it in time with the slow filthy rolls of Vidal’s hips.
Beauchamp’s cock was a hard ridge against Vidal’s, and every stroke of one against the other dragged an involuntary sound out of Vidal that he made no attempt to hold back.
“Beauchamp. Look at me,” Vidal urged.
Beauchamp lifted his head off Vidal’s neck. His pupils had blown wide. There was a flush high on his cheekbones, and his mouth was wet. His hair had come undone at the side from where Vidal’s hand had been in it.
Vidal rolled his hips against him one more time, hard and slow, and watched Beauchamp’s eyes go soft.
The wool at the front of Beauchamp’s trousers went hot and wet against the silk. His body seized against him and his forehead dropped to Vidal’s good shoulder as he came in his trousers in the small meeting room at the end of the corridor at Clarence House.
Vidal held him through it, and he realised somewhere underneath his triumph, that he was smiling so hard that his face hurt.
Beauchamp lifted his head off Vidal’s shoulder eventually. The flush had gone all the way down past his collar. He looked, Vidal noted with great pleasure, deeply and comprehensively ruined.
Vidal tipped his face up, kissed Beauchamp once on the mouth, and gave him his very best smile.
“I knew you wanted me, Beauchamp.”
Beauchamp opened his eyes. He took in the state of Vidal, with his hand still inside Vidal’s boxers and the front of his own trousers in a state that was going to require a great deal of explaining to whichever batman handled his laundry. Then he let out a laugh against Vidal’s mouth.
He eased his hand out of Vidal’s boxers, and he set it instead at the small of his back, respectably over the silk.
“Vidal.”
“Mm?”
“That was —” Beauchamp’s eyes slid sideways to the closed door, then to a point on the carpet between their shoes. “That was conduct unbecoming.”
“No. Resist the urge towards self-flagellation that you are so prone to, Hendrix Riff Beauchamp. You are going to stand here holding me, and you will let us enjoy each other.”
Beauchamp dropped his head and pressed his mouth, briefly, to the top of Vidal’s hair.
“Don’t worry, Beauchamp.” Vidal turned his face up against the warm cotton of Beauchamp’s collar. “James and I have done worse in the throne room at Buckingham Palace.”
Beauchamp’s hand stopped moving against Vidal’s back.
For one delicious moment, Vidal had the entire stilled and gobsmacked attention of the Major.
Then Beauchamp lifted his head and looked down at him, and Vidal could see him running this new piece of intelligence against three months of prior data.
“Define worse,” the Major demanded.
Vidal smiled up at him, and did not.