The Heir (Belvedere #1)

Chapter 1

Xavier

Heavy is the head that wears the crown, or so the saying goes.

But as heir to my father’s title, I feel no weight. I feel no burden. On the contrary, I’m a chalice whose form has been carved, hewn, for the better part of nine hundred years. It’s the perfect metaphor for the moment when I will assume my terminally ill father’s title.

Because I know I will pour forth from my cup for the rest of my life.

‘Arse.’ My brother’s voice cuts into my musings with all the subtlety of a bull in a china shop.

Given the ominously delicate crash of china shattering on limestone tiles that accompanies his schoolboy curse and the knowledge that our estate, Belvedere, is home to the UK’s finest collection of Sèvres porcelain, I suspect the analogy is on point.

Let’s be clear: Benedict is far from a schoolboy—in biological age, if not in etiquette. Sixteen months may separate our births—our mother took her duties to produce an heir and a spare seriously—but there are aeons between us in terms of the lenses through which we view the world.

I tear myself away from the view of our magnificent aviary that this conservatory affords us and round on him. ‘For fuck’s sake, Ben. Why the hell you have to use the Sèvres for your coffee, I have no clue. Use the fucking Royal Doulton.’

He stands, all six foot three of him, an ungainly lout surveying the damage with little more than his customary ill-judged amusement.

‘The handle gave out. The whole thing broke right off.’

‘Because it’s old. And delicate. And priceless. We’re supposed to steward this stuff, not wreck it. There’ll be nothing left for my son to inherit at this rate.’

He gives the clinically amputated porcelain handle in his hand a final glance, shrugs, and chucks it into the limestone-edged jungle of luxuriant ferns whose masses make this room so magnificently Victorian.

‘You do realise that to spawn an heir you’ll have to actually bone Slinky at some point, don’t you? ’

I baulk at the needless vulgarity. My brother did not walk away from his elite education with a modicum of class. ‘Don’t call her that. She’s Selena to you. And an illegitimate heir is the last thing this family needs. I’ll concern myself with producing an heir when we’re married.’

He winks. ‘Well, that’s only six months away. And practice makes perfect.’

‘I’m amazed you don’t have that tattooed around your dick.’

Dammit. Mere proximity to Ben has me plummeting to his level.

‘I’m amazed you can even find your dick, let alone operate it. You should take it to the shooting range more often.’

‘Your concern is touching, but I do all right for myself. I’m just subtle about it, unlike you.’

It’s true. I do all right. And it’s also the truth that I keep my sex life under wraps so tight it’s virtually mummified.

When you’ve been promised to a high-profile society beauty since infancy, it doesn’t offer many options to flaunt relationships, but it hasn’t shackled my ability to seek release in other ways.

In other bodies. It would be the height of disrespect to Selena to advertise that in any way, though.

‘Oh, Alchemy is as subtle as it gets. It’s very discreet, so don’t you worry. You know you just have to say the word, and I’ll propose you. You’d be in like a shot, bro.’

Like me, Benedict attended Eton and Edinburgh, yet he speaks like a frat boy. At least, he speaks to me like a frat boy because he knows it gets my back up.

‘I don’t need to get my end away in some grubby little sex club, thank you.’

I really don’t.

He spatters the space with a goose’s honk of laughter. He’s extraordinarily self-possessed. I suppose when you fuck as many women as Ben does, it can recalibrate one’s sense of one’s own worth to exalted levels far beyond what is seemly.

‘It’s not grubby. Or little. Au contraire, it’s spacious and elegant and sexy and perfect for my purposes.’

I would never admit it aloud, but I’m not much better than my brother. I score my clandestine fucks when and where I need them. It’s just that there’s something so bleakly sordid about institutionalising one’s sex life, you know?

‘I’m thrilled for you. Now, please leave me alone.

’ I turn away from him towards the great glass doors and survey the view to the aviary and beyond.

It’s the beginning of October, and the lawns are parched from a dry summer, but the vista still inspires awe and delight, which is, naturally, its entire purpose.

Not for the first time, I give silent thanks to Walter de Vere, the eighth Duke of Oxford, who acted the most nouveau riche of the lot of us—my dear brother aside—and had the original splendid but apparently dark-as-fuck baroque palace razed to the ground three-quarters of the way through the nineteenth century.

In the ensuing decade, he hired a French architect and oversaw the construction of the current manor, which is heavily inspired by the great chateaux of the Loire Valley, with its ostentatiously angled roofs and jutting pavilions and indulgent window treatments.

When the miracles of Victorian heating are at your service, you see, you can support far grander windows than those poor late Stuarts could.

And so, instead of poky windows and dreary rooms, we have French doors punctuating all the main reception rooms, allowing our revellers to spill out onto the velvet lawns at every soirée we throw.

My brother, regrettably, has not taken the hint, ignoring the damp detritus of coffee and china on the limestone and stepping right up beside me.

‘Speaking of Alchemy.’

‘We really weren’t.’

‘I thought inviting a few of their—shall we say—hosts might spice things up a little at the party.’

If I were a cartoon dog, my ears would prick up and my hackles would rise. ‘What party?’

‘Your thirtieth, of course.’

‘I’ve already celebrated my thirtieth.’

‘You had a boring-as-fuck supper at The Goring, of all places, for us, Flora, and Ma and Pa, and your delightful fiancée. That’s not a party.

That’s a fucking retirement dinner. I mean, have some self-respect.

Nothing says I had three good decades and now I give up like supper at The Goring with your parents. ’

I remain silent in my disapproval.

‘But…’ He singsongs it, then trails off.

I sigh, and it seems he takes it as permission to continue.

‘But when Ma and Pa head off, we have a chance to make it up to you and put this old girl through her paces.’ He gesticulates around the conservatory.

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Absolutely yes.’ He sighs and turns to face me, clamping a hand to my shoulder.

‘Look, mate. I don’t want to be a Debbie Downer, but it’s far more likely than not that within the next few months Pa will be dead, and within the next six you’ll be married off to a woman you have no earthly clue how to handle, and—’

I shake off his grip. I have zero issue with either his prognosis for our father or for my spring wedding, which are both bang-on, despite the last-ditch trip to the Swiss Alps that Pa and Ma have coming up.

I do, however, have a major issue with his infuriating and constant belief that he’s the only one of us who knows how to use his dick.

‘Hang on a sec. Firstly, don’t speak about Selena as if she’s a dairy cow, and secondly, I will be perfectly capable of “handling” my wife.’

I don’t believe that last part for a moment. My fiancée may be a beauty for the ages, but there’s no chemistry between us. Zero. I’m not sure it’s even feasible to have chemistry with Selena. It would be like having a spark with a glacier: chemically impossible.

Ben rolls his eyes. No you won’t, mate. ‘You’re far too polite to get around that ice-queen shell.

You two will pussyfoot around each other, and you’ll probably have sex precisely twice, through a hole in the sheet, to produce the heir and the spare.

It’s a shame, because where you see a fortress, I see a hell of a challenge.

I bet, once you warmed her up, she’d be fucking fire. ’

I press my lips together in abject disapproval of the salacious and objectifying way my brother is speaking about my fiancée, an exceptional woman who is executing her duty to her family, just as I am executing my duty to mine.

‘Why don’t you marry her then, if you fancy yourself such a seducer?’

That makes him laugh. ‘Nice try, bro. I’m entirely satisfied with my lifestyle.’

Of course he is. It’s feckless and hedonistic and utterly devoid of any sort of duty or purpose, beyond his job as the estate’s Business Development Manager. I use the term job in the most tenuous way.

It’s far more gratifying to turn and look out at the aviary than at his smug, carefree face, so I do.

He sighs behind me. ‘I’m sorry. Look—I know you have a lot on your mind. I know you must feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders.’

‘The difference between us is that I bear that weight gladly.’ I don’t spit the words out. I say them as fact, which they are.

‘I know you do, Save.’ He puts a hand on my shoulder again, but it’s less aggressive this time, more empathetic, even if the old nickname is meant to sting.

Xavier. Saviour. Save. Always dutiful. Always serving.

‘And I’m grateful, honestly. I’m always grateful.

I wouldn’t be here at all if it wasn’t for you. You know that.’

He’s alluding to the thing we don’t talk about. The thing we never allude to. I make some indeterminate noise of warning, and he sighs.

‘Look. I just think a party would do you good. Let your hair down. Get hammered. Remind yourself that you’re not an old fart yet, even if you act like it most of the time. I’ll sort it out for you. Leave all the details to me.’

While a large part of me suspects this party is far more for Ben’s gratification than for mine, I find I have a lump in my throat. It’s not often that he expresses his relief, his gratitude, that the buck stops with me. That my sacrifices will ensure his liberty.

Besides, I suspect he’s right.

It would be good for me to let my hair down.

I’ve put this marriage, this dynastic union between two powerful families, off for as long as I can. But with Pa not long for this world, I can only drag my feet for so much longer. An evening away from it all would do me good.

I trudge over to the bed of ferns, side-stepping the shitshow on the tiles, and fish the severed handle out of the lustrous foliage.

‘It isn’t a fucking bin, and these aren’t just ferns, you know.

Some of them are believed to be the same plants that the eighth Duke planted.

Have a little respect, and try to remember that everything in this damned place depends on our careful stewardship for survival. Everything.’

Poor Walter de Vere and his wife Annabel would turn in their graves if they could see the dismissively cruel way my brother treats their legacy.

They, like many of their peers, were ardently struck down with the same Pteridomania—that’s Fern Fever to you and me—and the beautiful specimens at Belvedere were one of the myriad ways in which their new home became the ultimate status symbol.

Their care and cultivation are beautifully documented by Annabel in her leather-bound gardening diaries, all of which reside safely behind glass in the library.

‘Got it,’ my brother says in a studiedly agreeable tone. I suspect he’d rip the piss out of me if he wasn’t desperate to get me on board with his little social proposal. ‘And the party?’

‘Fine. But no sex workers, you hear me? And for fuck’s sake, make sure the staff have locked up the Sèvres before anyone shows up.’

I’m still scrutinising the shorn edges of the china handle when he saunters off, whistling to himself with the lack of fucks that only a second-born son has to give.