Chapter Twenty-Three #2
“Why is Tristan here at all?” James asked bluntly.
“If Tristan’s a willing third in whatever this is, then I’ll not say another word, Caroline.
You’re grown adults. God knows plenty of our ancestors have done worse than have a ménage à trois.
But if you’ve brought him in blind — if he’s spent all these months being trotted out as your plus one with no notion he’s only here because of some strange game with Benton, then that’s a cruelty I’d never have thought you capable of. ”
James jabbed a finger towards the living room, where the snoring was escalating to new heights.
“Tristan is a decent man,” James declared.
“Yes, he’s American, and yes, he came up through the Disney Channel, which has left him with that off-putting manic edge to his smile.
But he’s been nothing but good to you and me, and you’ve been making an absolute fool of him?
I adore you. You know that I do. But this is beneath you both, and I can’t understand how the pair of you could do this to Tristan. ”
Caroline let him finish. She was in no hurry.
“I’m so glad to hear you like him,” she said.
“It makes the next part of this conversation easier for me. Because that upstanding, thoroughly wronged man you’ve just delivered that speech for was fully in on it, James.
Right from the start he was my willing social decoy. ”
“Caroline! Why? Why would you invent a fake relationship when you could have just told me you’d fallen for my Private Secretary? I’m your brother. I’d have moved the whole bloody world for you without you needing to get a third party involved.”
Caroline’s lips compressed into a thin, quivering line.
He’d seen that exact expression before: in the royal box at the last Royal Variety Show, while a comedian did four minutes on James’s habit of widening his eyes to feign comprehension of things he’d stopped following by the second sentence.
In his defence, the habit was a coping mechanism. James spent much of his life talking to the world’s foremost authority on things like the social structure of the badger, or the breeding habits of the freshwater pearl mussel.
The Princess Royal was not permitted to weep with laughter at her own brother being filleted in front of two thousand people, so she had sat through the entirety of it, holding it in.
What had nearly finished her was the comedian’s reconstruction of James gazing earnestly at a Nobel laureate in physics and offering that we were all, when it came down to it, simply dark matter.
“Just to be clear, James. It’s this,” Caroline managed to say.
“This reaction was precisely what I was trying to steer clear of with Tristan’s help.
And it’s been a relief in ways I didn’t see coming.
It’s been so tiresome being sat next to whoever the host’s decided I ought to marry, every single dinner.
The second everyone clocked me as Tristan’s, the circus stopped. My social life’s improved no end.”
“I’m thrilled for you,” James said flatly.
“Truly. It’s been keeping me up nights, the thought of you trapped beside whichever forgettable second son of an Earl the host had earmarked for you over the fish course.
I’m so glad the elaborate deception of your own brother has lifted the standard of your dinner conversation. ”
Caroline didn’t rise to it, and left Benton to break the quiet instead.
“Sir.” He folded his hands before him. “I owe you an apology, and I’d rather give it now, before it gets lost in the rest of this.
I’ve deceived you every working day for the better part of a year.
I knew exactly what I was doing, and I did it anyway.
I’m sorry for the deception. But I’m not sorry for the reason for it. I’m very fond of the Princess Royal.”
“I think we’re past the formal titles, Benton,” James said. “Your shoes are sitting beside her bed. I rather doubt you call her ‘the Princess Royal’ once the door’s shut.”
Benton went on like he hadn’t heard James.
“I’ve a full transition strategy drafted.
I’ll train up a successor on your diary over the next six to twelve months, so my move into the private sector leaves no operational gap.
Once that’s settled, and I’ve been out of royal service for half a year, we soft-launch.
There’ll be nothing scandalous for the press to seize on at all.
” Benton almost smiled. “I’ll have a copy of the CarTon Plan in your secure inbox by tomorrow. ”
Now it was James pressing his lips into a thin line. “CarTon?”
“Caroline and Benton. It follows the established precedent of—”
“Yes, Benton, I know what a basic portmanteau is.” James pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose.
“Like BLEX. BLEX sounds like a man bringing something up into a sink. But at least it has character. You’ve had nine months of runway, and all you’ve produced is CarTon. It’s so aggressively mundane—”
“It’s perfect,” Benton said, interrupting James for the first time in all their years together.
“The mundanity is the point of it, Sir. Like yourself, Caroline has been a headline since the day she was born. I want to give her something so dull and ordinary from the outside that nobody bothers to look at it twice.” His eyes found Caroline.
“But from the inside, Sir, the two of us get to carve out something of our own.”
James had no answer to that, the dullest and most romantic thing he’d heard Benton say in years.
Caroline gave up on her composure entirely. The smile that broke loose was one James never saw her wear in public. She crossed the kitchen to Benton, took his jaw in both hands, and kissed him full on the mouth.
James shut his eyes against the sight of it. “Fine. CarTon stays.” He opened one eye. They were still kissing.
James groaned and hauled himself out of his chair, because there was no remaining in a room that had curdled this thoroughly into romance.
He left the pair of them to it and made for the bedroom Clarence House always kept aired for him, detouring once to drag the slipped throw back up over Tristan, who slept through the lot of it.