He was explaining his name to a half-naked Canadian cyclist.
“Bicester,” Barnaby said, for the second time. “Like the town.”
The cyclist stared at him. His legs looked inhumanly muscular, as though someone had inflated his thighs with a bicycle pump. He was wearing cycling shorts and absolutely nothing else, and Barnaby was working extremely hard to maintain eye contact.
“Biss-ter,” Barnaby repeated more slowly. “Not Bi-chess-ter. Not Bitchster. Bicester.”
“Right,” said the cyclist. “And the first bit?”
“Fitznorman.”
“Fitznorman-Bicester.”
“Yes.”
The cyclist considered this for a moment, then said, “That’s a lot of name, mate,” and walked away. His name was Dan Wolf.
Barnaby picked up his hand weights, three kilograms each, which were shamefully, pathetically light compared to what the rest of the room was grunting and straining over, and began his prescribed set of lateral raises. His training programme had been designed by his coach. It was all about upper-body maintenance, nothing heavy, everything calibrated to keep his riding muscles engaged without adding bulk that would throw off his balance in the saddle.
Three kilograms. He might as well have been lifting a pair of tangerines.
A group of boxers had migrated into the far corner and were doing something with kettlebells that involved a great deal of grunting and a small but meaningful amount of congratulatory arse-slapping, all done while maintaining eye contact and hollering out earnest hype statements.
Barnaby watched this out of the corner of his eye, fascinated and horrified in equal measure. The slaps were firm, companionable, delivered with an open palm to the meat of the glute, and received without comment. It appeared to be a system of positive reinforcement. Like clicker training, but for enormous men.
He should leave. He should absolutely leave before the arse-slapping escalated, or before one of them caught him staring. More importantly, he had to go before his own body visibly betrayed him through his sensible gym shorts.
He thought of James’s letter.
Get fucked,his sovereign had written. An actual command, from his actual King, delivered on Buckingham Palace stationery. Barnaby had read it four times on the flight over, once more in the taxi, and then hidden it in the false bottom of his trunk, which was where he kept things that couldn’t exist in public.
He wondered if the instruction carried constitutional weight. Whether he was now, technically, parliamentarily bound to the cause. It wasn’t something one could just raise with the Lord Chamberlain.Excuse me, sir, His Majesty has issued me a direct order regarding my sexual activity. Am I obliged to comply?
No. Best not.
Barnaby completed his lateral raises, set the weights down, and moved to the shoulder press. Three kilograms, again. His arms moved through the repetitions mindlessly. He’d been doing the same for the last six years. Nobody was going to slap his arse in congratulation over these. Nobody was going to slap his arse at all. He was going to complete his programme, return to his room, review his dressage test for the fourteenth time, and fall asleep to the sound of someone in the corridor having a much more interesting evening.
A hand pressed against the small of his back.
Barnaby’s spine went rigid. The hand was warm and enormous. Then it moved south and gave him one firm, companionable pat, squarely on his right arse cheek.
Barnaby turned, his mouth agape at the unexpected touching.
Lex Murphy was standing behind him in shorts and nothing else. There was nothing between his skin and the recycled gymnasium air but a thin sheen of sweat and a cologne-adjacent deodorant that hit Barnaby with the force of a clean right hookto the jaw. He smelt like something aggressively masculine and vaguely chemical. Like he’d doused himself in a deodorant that was probably calledTITANIUM THUNDERorWOLF SURGE.
“All right, Barns?”
“It’s Barnaby.”
“Right, well.” Lex crossed his arms over his chest, his bare, obscenely sculpted chest, and grinned. “We’re mates now, so I don’t need to say the full thing every night. You’ve got a proper long name. Like a little princeling.”
Barnaby’s jaw tightened. “I’m a marquess.”
Lex’s mouth twitched. “A what?”
“A marquess. Well…It’s a courtesy title, really. I don’t hold it in my own right. My father is the Duke of Chatham, so I hold the subsidiary title of Marquess of Ashworth until—”
“Mate, I literally do not know what any of those words mean.”
