Chapter Three
The Waitrose on Mount Street had failed him on the chocolate front, and Beauchamp was already playing out the conversation he was undoubtedly about to have with Vidal as he came back up the stairs with a bag in each hand.
Major, this is not chocolate.
It’s chocolate, sir.
It is confectionery, Major. There is a difference.
This is seventy-two per cent cacao. I asked for eighty.
EIGHTY, Beauchamp. Below seventy-five it is a sweet for children, and I am not a child, I am a man in EXILE.
If I am to be denied my country I will at the very least be permitted the correct cacao percentage in my afternoon indulgence!
He was so deep into the imagined exchange that he almost missed the voice coming through the slightly open drawing-room door. He registered, in order: Vidal ranting at full volume in English, and then a second voice responding at a lower, more measured register.
He pushed the door the rest of the way open with his hip, the bags swinging, and stepped into the drawing room on the tail end of whatever Vidal had been saying about Strasbourg.
His Majesty the King of the United Kingdom was sitting on the sofa in plain jeans and a jumper with Mercè asleep across his thighs, absently stroking her small pink and grey mottled ribs. He caught Beauchamp’s eye across the room and gave him a private half-smile.
Vidal was pacing the rug in front of the window, talking with both hands, whilst entirely naked.
A white towel was slung around his neck, and he was dragging one end of it through his wet hair as he moved.
Otherwise, there was nothing on him but the gold crucifix in the hollow of his throat and a tan line that stopped, uncompromisingly, at his hip.
His cock bobbed with every wild flourish of his hand, like a conductor’s baton.
“—and the thing that the Europeans will not admit, James, that they will never admit, is that the entire apparatus at Strasbourg is designed to — BEAUCHAMP!”
Vidal pivoted without breaking stride, his cock flopping heavily with the movement, and beamed at him.
Beauchamp’s eyes went to it before his brain caught up, and then snapped away to a point on the far wall with parade-ground discipline.
Vidal, entirely unaware of Beauchamp’s reaction, gave his hair a fresh and enthusiastic rub with the towel.
“James, look who has returned to us, bearing GIFTS. This man has been to the shops for my chocolate, do you understand what this means, he is a lifesaver, he is a darling. He is the reason I have not yet thrown myself off the balcony in protest at the English weather!”
Beauchamp’s hands opened, and both grocery bags hit the parquet at once.
There was the clink of a jar of olives meeting wood.
A glass bottle of Vidal’s Fonte di Foiano broke with a crisp pop and began to seep across the parquet in a slow gold tide, pooling around a tin of anchovies, a bar of chocolate, and one lemon.
“Your Majesty,” Beauchamp said to the rug at his feet, “I beg your pardon for the interruption.”
The King waved his hand in a dismissive gesture. “Nothing to apologise about, Beauchamp. We weren’t talking about anything important.”
“The oil, Beauchamp, the OIL!”
Vidal crossed the room and dropped into a crouch beside the wreckage with the towel still round his neck. He began gathering the larger shards of glass with his bare fingers, tutting at each one.
“This is Fonte di Foiano, Beauchamp, do you understand? You have sent it to meet its maker on a parquet floor in Mayfair, and that is tragic. It is the saddest thing to happen in this flat since I arrived in it, and I arrived in it weeping!”
He shifted his weight to reach a further shard, and the movement put his arse in profile. It was smooth, and tanned. A perfect handful. Beauchamp’s gaze caught on the curve of it, and it didn’t take long at all for his body to betray him.
The tug came low in his groin, insistent and entirely unwelcome.
His cock, which had spent the last eleven months since Julian left behaving like an animal that had just learned about hurt, had decided that the sight of a naked Cardonan prince crouching in a pool of Tuscan olive oil was the precise set of circumstances under which it was prepared to return to active service.
Oh, Christ, Beauchamp thought. No. Absolutely not. Stand down.
His cock refused to stand down.
He fixed his eyes on a point somewhere above Vidal’s left shoulder and ran the arithmetic: the number of paces to the kitchen door, viability of a court-martial defence based on the involuntary physiological response of a Household Division officer to a head of state’s naked houseguest.
On the sofa, James made a sound that seemed suspiciously like a smothered laugh. “Vidal, darling, come here.”
“Un moment, James—”
“Now, please. Leave the glass. I have to go, and you know how Mercè gets with goodbyes.”
Vidal rose in one fluid motion. When he drew close enough, James caught the towel at Vidal’s neck, and dragged it down over his shoulders and his hips, tucking it closed.
“There. Now you’re decent. Come and take your dog. I have to meet the Bishop of London at four and I can’t turn up to that with Chinese Crested hair on my jumper. It sends the wrong message about the Church of England.”
Vidal went to him, still talking, clutching the towel at his waist. James’s eyes stayed on him and didn’t flick over to Beauchamp once.
Beauchamp took his cue.
“Your Majesty. Sir. I’ll — the oil. I’ll fetch a cloth.”
“Take your time, Major.”
Beauchamp turned on his heel, crossed the hall, and let himself out through the service door at the back of the kitchen into the stairwell. He made it as far as the first landing before he had to stop, brace one hand flat against the wall, and press his forehead to the cold plaster beside it.
For eleven months, he’d lived like a monk, with no energy to even look at another man. His body had held the line, and now it was going to mutiny in his second week of a posting with an exiled prince.
Somewhere above him, muffled through a closed door and three floors of Georgian plasterwork, he could hear Vidal starting up again in Catalan, and the low rumble of his King laughing.
Beauchamp pushed himself off the wall, checked the front of his trousers, and started down the next flight of stairs towards the garden, desperate to get some fresh air away from Vidal.