Chapter Eight
Now
Tristan was halfway through a bowl of overnight oats on his terrace when his Google alert pinged.
He’d set the alert for King James III a year ago and had never bothered to switch it off.
Mostly it pulled up nothing more interesting than a Royal Mint coin release or a Commonwealth photocall, and he’d skim it, feel the old, useless desire to see James, and move on.
He thumbed it open while reaching for his espresso.
It took him a second to make sense of the image.
James, in a charcoal waistcoat, holding a courgette.
The photo had been taken from a low angle, so the courgette ended up looking huge, ridged, and like it was emerging from his crotch at a forty-five-degree upward angle, his hand wrapped loosely around the stem.
Tristan laughed so hard he choked on his espresso. He set his cup down, coughed into his elbow, and scrolled up to the headline.
KING JAMES III OUTED IN LEAKED VOICEMAIL: “YOUR PERFECT ARSE, YOUR MOUTH, YOUR C-CK”
Someone at the Mail Online had paired the two without comment, and Tristan sat on his terrace in Calabasas with the morning sun on his back and tried to hold both halves of the page in his head at once.
So James had finally been caught. The poor bastard.
One of his toff friends had talked, then.
Or maybe James had taken the risk with someone outside the inner circle the way he had with Tristan, and that someone had chosen to cash in, the way Tristan himself had been tempted to, in those first weeks, before James became someone he’d wanted to protect rather than profit from.
The Sun had reproduced the call in full, and Tristan started reading.
I’ll think of you while I do it. That time in the groundsman’s cottage in Windsor, when I couldn’t even wait for you to get your pants off. Your perfect arse, your mouth, your cock —
He read the lines again and again as they bumped up against the memory he took out on his loneliest nights. Groundsman’s cottage at Windsor. Couldn’t wait for you to get your pants off…
James was talking about him. About that Sunday in Windsor.
James had collected him from his flat in an unmarked Range Rover and driven the two of them out to Windsor himself with no aides or protection officers, just him in a Barbour and a flat cap pulled low over his face.
He’d promised Tristan a beautiful private walk of the Home Park grounds. The forecast, he’d said, was all clear.
They’d been twenty minutes from the car when the sky opened.
James laughed, grabbed Tristan’s hand, and made him run.
They reached the groundsman’s cottage at the top of the long meadow, but not before they were soaked through.
Luckily, James had a key. The door swung in onto a stone-floored room that smelled of woodsmoke and engine oil.
Tristan stood dripping on the mat, laughing at him.
“Your weather forecast is fucked, Your Majesty.”
James pulled the wet flat cap off and dropped it on a chair. He was shivering, his shirt glued to his ribs, rainwater running down the back of his neck. He took two strides and bent Tristan over the small pine table by the window so that it squeaked in protest beneath their combined weight.
He didn’t even bother to let Tristan undress properly. He simply shoved Tristan’s jeans down past his hips, and dragged his briefs to mid-thigh. Tristan heard him spit into his palm, then James was inside him without taking a second to work him open.
It wasn’t romantic. James fucked him still partly in his wet clothes, with one hand splayed flat between Tristan’s shoulder blades, his breath wrecked against the back of Tristan’s neck.
Tristan came with his cock untouched, gripping the far edge of the table. He came hard, on the thought that he’d taken the most disciplined man he’d ever met, the most powerful man in the country, and made him lose control.
James’s number was still saved under John McTavish, the burner alias they’d used during the months they were together, and Tristan had never deleted it. He just hadn’t got around to it, really. He called it now.
He walked to the railing as he listened to the number ring out, already composing the voicemail he’d leave when the line rolled through.
It would be light and deniable, something along the lines of hey, thinking of you, hope you’re holding up.
Just a polite gesture. Not Tristan reaching across six months of silence because a leaked voicemail had reminded him of just how fucking good they’d been together.
The line connected.
“Tristan.”
Tristan had heard his name said like that, pressed into his shoulder as James drove into him, and hearing it now closed a fist round his ribs.
“Tristan, listen to me,” James went on. “Of course you’ve heard about everything. I need you to know that they’ll not get your name out of me, Tris. Or anyone else palace-adjacent. There’s no chance of it at all.”
“James,” Tristan jumped in. “James, how are you? Is everyone being awful?”
“Surprisingly, no.” He sounded faintly puzzled to be saying so.
“There’s the usual lot bleating on about the death of family values, naturally.
The Mail’s having a field day, and I’ve been called unflattering things on GB News.
But otherwise, the discourse has been rather good.
Genuine. There’s a lot of people asking why, in this day and age, I’d ever felt the need to hide it in the first place. ”
Tristan snorted. “This, James. This right here is exactly why the fuck you hid for so long.”
“It was a stupid fucking mistake.” James laughed. “I’d had three whiskies, and my fingers got ahead of me. I meant to ring you. I rang a Thomas Wells instead, who used to work the foaling barn at Balmoral.”
Tristan leaned back against the railing. “James. I never got your message.”
“No,” James said. “You didn’t. I lasted three weeks after you ended things, Tris.
I sat on the floor of that dressing room, waiting for you to ring me back.
Then I gave up and went down the corridor to her room.
That was when I knew there was no hope of you.
” James went quiet. “Except you’d never even heard the message. ”
“No,” Tristan said. “I hadn’t.”
If the voicemail had reached him that night, he’d have heard James cry, and he didn’t know if he could have stayed away. Would he have got on the next flight to Heathrow?
“On an entirely separate note, we need to talk about Better Half.”
Tristan laughed. “Oh, fuck off.”
“Vidal organised a viewing party for us. He brought marshmallows to throw at the screen any time you come on.”
“Of course he did. He never did like me.”
“Your teeth were the real scene-stealer, but I thought you looked very good in the apron, Tristan.”
“The only reason I made it through that scene with my dignity intact is that wardrobe handed me a modesty sock. That set was freezing.”
“Mm. The shrinkage would have been quite bad, I imagine.”
“James.”
“Genuine question. Did the apron’s design account for it? Was there padding? Some small structural undergirding?”
“I’m hanging up.”
“You’re not.”
Tristan was laughing properly now. He could see them in his head: the five of them at Bash and Lex’s stupidly expensive flat, Vidal holding court, James pretending to be unmoved while Tristan’s sex scene played out on TV.
“You were very good, Tris.”
“And Vidal?” Tristan asked. “What was his verdict, once he was done with all the criticism?”
“He said you reminded him of a very pretty young man he once knew in Sitges. The young man was a strong proponent of unitards and had the same bushy eyebrows as you.”
Tristan’s hand went to his left eyebrow, his thumb smoothing the arch. “My eyebrows aren’t bushy. I have them threaded every six weeks, James.”
“Tris. Your eyebrows are immaculately maintained. He was reaching for the only complimentary thing he could find that didn’t compromise his moral position. The unitard man in Sitges was almost certainly the love of his life. Before he found Beauchamp, of course.”
“Okay,” Tristan said. “Walk me through everything. From the top. I want Bash’s worst, and I want Vidal’s worst, and then I’ll give them points on brutality.”
“Bash didn’t really land any hits. He was busy pretending Vidal’s crudités were beneath him.”
“Bullshit. Barnaby always has something passive-aggressive to say. It’s the stick up his ass that does it. Can’t believe Lex still hasn’t managed to dislodge it.”
“All right then. He commented that you were perfectly cast. He felt the production had identified, with rather impressive precision, the ceiling of what you could be asked to do.” James paused.
“He said it quite mildly, while you were acting out your most committed orgasm of the episode. Then he reached for a crisp.”
“Fuck.”
“Yes.”
“James. I’m going to be thinking about that for the rest of my fucking life.”
“It was rather magnificent. Vidal stood up and clapped, and Lex nearly choked himself laughing.”
Tristan slid down the railing until he was sitting on the warm tiles, the mobile pressed against his ear. “Okay,” he said. “Thanks for that. I needed to hear it. Now give me the rest of it.”