Chapter Twenty-Five
Back then
There were men in James’s Order of the Bedchamber who treated the whole arrangement as a service rendered to the Crown. They were dutiful and always faintly reverent whenever they turned up in James’s private rooms, and James had retired most of them.
Adrian held no such reverence for James, having grown up half a step outside the inner circle.
He’d known James for even longer than Barnaby and Vidal had, but his parents’ decision to send him to Harrow rather than Eton had kept James from getting as attached to him as he was to his Eton set.
When they were seven, Adrian had once goaded James into eating a dirt pie the two of them had spent a whole afternoon making in the kitchen garden, and James had obliged.
Since then, their relationship had evolved. Adrian was working himself on James’s cock with his back turned to him, knees planted either side of James’s hips, knowing that this was James’s favourite position because of the view it gave him.
James lay against the pillows and let him do all the work.
There was no sense interrupting a man in his element, and the view was worth the surrender of control.
Adrian was utterly shameless. He arched his back, giving James a perfect view of the flex of his thighs as he rose and dropped, the slick drag of James’s cock disappearing into him on every fall.
James got both hands on Adrian’s arse and spread him with his thumbs, framing the place where they were joined, and watched himself sink into Adrian to the root.
“Tell me how it looks,” Adrian breathed, arching deeper into his hands.
“Obscene.” James landed a sharp smack on one arse cheek and watched his handprint flush up pink, then pressed his thumb into the middle of it to watch the colour blanch and then deepen again. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“Haven’t been ashamed of anything since 2014.”
James came up off the pillows then, chest against Adrian’s back, and kissed the round of his shoulder and the warm nape of his neck while Adrian kept up his unhurried rhythm and made a low, contented sound.
It didn’t take James long after that. He held Adrian down by the hips, pushed up into him, and came with his face buried between his shoulder blades, breathing him in.
Then he saw to Adrian properly. He eased him off and laid him out, taking him in hand.
He knew this body well by now, the strength of the grip that Adrian wanted on his cock, the spot just under the head that undid him.
He worked him slow and thoroughly, kissing him through it, his thumb sliding in the slick at the tip, until Adrian arched up off the bed and his come spilled hot onto James’s hand.
Afterwards James gathered him in and slung an arm over him, in no hurry to let the afternoon resume. Adrian allowed it for just long enough to catch his breath, before he started to extract himself from James’s grasp.
“Can’t linger, I’m afraid.” He found his trousers on the floor and stepped into them. “I’m due back. There’s a man coming in at two who wants to drain a marsh and put up executive flats, and I’d rather not walk into the meeting still smelling of you.”
“Cancel it.”
“Some of us have to work for a living.” Adrian did up his shirt.
James pulled on his robe and saw him out, a thing he did for almost no one. Adrian clapped him on the shoulder, told him to ring him when he was up for another round, and left.
James’s apartment went quiet around him. There was a full red box waiting in the study for his attention. It was an admin day, the morning given over to engagements and the afternoon left clear for paperwork, and he had plenty to work on.
But instead of getting stuck into it, he returned to the bedroom and dropped onto his sex-mussed bed.
His mobile had worked its way under a pillow. He dug it out and opened Tristan’s thread. That morning he’d been walked round a rehoming centre in Tower Hamlets, while the rota press got their fill of the King among the city’s unwanted dogs.
Tristan had fed him the closer the night before, and James had delivered it word for word: a solemn tribute to the staff’s tireless work, capped off by his declaration that this place was, beyond all doubt, the city’s finest example of paws-itive civil action.
He’d landed it on paws, exactly as briefed.
It landed, he typed. There was a knockout count of one: a volunteer, felled, recovering on a crate as I left. You ought to be ashamed of that pun, and I ought to be ashamed of how well I sold it.
He set the mobile on his chest. He was not waiting for a reply. He was lying on his own bed in the middle of a working afternoon with the red box going unattended one room away, just resting.
His mobile buzzed against his sternum.
The satisfaction it gave him was out of all proportion to a text from his sister’s fake boyfriend. He read the message.
nice one. glad it landed.
James read it twice and waited for more to come, because historically, there was always more.
With Tristan a landed pun was only ever the opening bid.
There should have been another accusation that the Crown had done all the heavy lifting again, a row that’d wander off into unrelated topics and carry them into the evening.
Nothing followed.
The man was busy learning to play somebody’s husband on camera; he was entitled to an afternoon of peace. James got up, wandered over to his study, and sat himself in front of the red box.
Three submissions and most of a Cabinet Office memo in, he gave up and reached for his mobile again.
How’s the prep coming along? He kept it light. You must be buried in it by now.
The wait ran longer this time.
yeah. getting there. all good.
James read the text again. He should leave Tristan alone. Clearly the man wasn’t in the mood to play like they usually did. But still, James pressed the call button next to Tristan’s name.
He’d never done this before. The texts were easy. They stayed within the confines of their pun game, and he got to compose himself between lines and bin the drafts that gave too much away or that he suspected wouldn’t land well. An in-the-moment call left him no wiggle room.
Tristan picked up on the third ring, before James could lose his nerve and hang up. “Hey, you.”
“How’s the glamorous actor’s life treating you?”
The laugh that answered was hollow, half a beat late.
“Oh, you know. I’m living the dream.” He let the silence stretch. “We blocked a scene this morning. Ben gets drugged at one of Jay’s dinners, and Jay lets some of his buddies have a turn with him while he’s under.” The next one was shorter. “Big episode for me.”
James set down the paper he’d been holding. “That sounds pretty heavy, Tris.”
“Nah. Easiest day’s work there is. I just lie there with my eyes shut, snoring a bit, while Aaron writhes around on top of me and Birrell and our intimacy coordinator watch.”
“Tristan. I say this with the deepest affection, and I’d ask you not to take it as an attack on your acting. But you are talking absolute shit, and I can tell.”
A choked little laugh came down the line.
“You’re not doing well,” James said, the teasing gone out of him. “And rightly so. It’s difficult material you’ve taken on, for the sake of your art.”
“I don’t know why it’s getting to me,” Tristan admitted.
“Everyone’s being so good about it, James.
The whole crew. Birrell most of all. He talks me through every beat before we run it, and breaks the second I want him to.
There’s nothing for me to be rattled about.
It’s just acting. People do far harder things in front of a camera and don’t make a meal of it.
” He was gathering speed now, reaching for the next stick to beat himself with.
“So either I just have to accept that I’m too soft to handle dark material, or I’m a worse actor than I ever—”
“Tristan. I am going to do what Caroline would do, were she here and not marooned in the Netherlands on my behalf, standing in at the wedding of a fourth cousin twice removed.” James shifted the mobile to his other ear.
“She’s having a wretched time of it. They’ve put her in clogs for some function or other, and she’s sent me four texts about it this morning alone. She’s not coping.”
That earned a proper laugh out of Tristan, and James heard the rustling sound of him settling down against something soft.
“Will you honour me with your presence at Windsor this weekend?” James asked. “We’ll tramp about in the fresh air, and I’ll show you our herd of deer. They’re lovely things.”
“Deer?” Tristan asked, and James heard the wind-up. “Would you say, James, that of all the livestock at Windsor, they’re the ones you hold the deer-est?”
And there it was. James sat still and listened to that pun, of the type he’d been delivering for months now, and finally got a sense of what he sounded like to people outside their game. “Fuck, Tristan. That’s awful.”
“It really is.” He sounded like himself again. “Do you see now that the fact you’re King is the only thing that gets you the laughs?”
James didn’t mind being the butt of the joke, as long as it lifted Tristan out of his funk. “No. I still think it’s my delivery that leads to your ‘jokes’ being so well received. Now, Windsor. Can I count you in?”
“Yeah, okay. Why not? It’ll be fun.”
“Good man. I’ll have Benton see to the details.”
James hung up and set his mobile down on his desk. Then he pulled the Cabinet Office memo to him, found his place three-quarters down the page, and managed to read it to the end.