“Fine.”
“And the dressage scores from the last—”
“Fine.”
James set his toast down. He folded his hands on the table. “Lex,” James said, turning. His voice shifted, warming to a register that was conversational and easy. “How’s the youth programme, going? I’ve been reading the quarterly reports, and the Barking facility’s retention numbers are extraordinary. What are you doing differently from the standard —”
Lex sat up straighter. He set his mug down and started talking about the gym, about the kids, about the new mentorship framework they’d built with the King’s Trust funding, and Barnaby could see him responding to the attention the way anyone responded to the King’s attention. James listened. He asked follow-up questions that proved he’d read the reports properly, not just skimmed them, and his body was angled towards Lex.
It was masterful. It was also a performance Barnaby had watched James give a thousand times to a thousand people who didn’t know they were being set up for a charm offensive, and watching him give it to Lex made Barnaby’s jaw tighten.
“James.”
The name landed in the middle of one of Lex’s sentences. Lex stopped talking. James turned.
“Lex is a guest in my family’s house,” Barnaby said. His voice was level and cold. “You’re interrogating him at breakfast.”
“I’m having a conversation with him.”
“You’re cross-examining him on programme metrics over toast and marmalade. He didn’t come here for a performance review.”
Lex’s gaze moved between them. He opened his mouth. “It’s fine, Barns. We were just—”
“You were being interrogated,” Barnaby said, without looking at him. “He does it beautifully. It’s his greatest talent. But you don’t have to answer to him in my house.”
James’s hazel eyes were steady on Barnaby’s face. He didn’t flinch or pull rank. He just sat there, holding the hit, and said nothing.
? ? ?
Thehouse emptied in stages. His mother left first, kissing Barnaby on the cheek and telling him there was cold chicken in the larder if he wanted lunch. Then Lex, Perry, and his father departed for the village, which apparently required the same kind of elaborate preparation that wouldaccompany a crossing of the Cairngorms, rather than just walking a mile down a lane to buy the Saturday papers.
Lex had hesitated in the doorway. “Coming, Barns?”
“I’ll stay. I want to do some reading, and we’ll go on our own walk with Florence later.”
Florence, who was asleep under the breakfast table, twitched one ear in acknowledgement of her name and resumed her nap. Lex’s gaze jumped between Barnaby and James, clearly nervous about leaving the two of them alone together.
“Go,” Barnaby said. “Perry wants to show you the pub.”
Barnaby took his book to the sun room at the back of the house. The light was cool and even, the sofa was deep enough to disappear into, and nobody came in here except Barnaby and Florence. He stretched out with his stockinged feet on the arm, opened his novel, a Patrick O’Brian he’d been meaning to reread since Cambridge, and let the quiet of the house settle around him.
Florence padded in after ten minutes and collapsed at his feet with a groan that suggested the walk from the dining room had cost her dearly. He managed to get through three pages before James appeared in the doorway.
Barnaby didn’t look up. He heard James cross the room, felt the sofa dip under his weight, and registered that James had sat not in the armchair opposite, not at the far end of the sofa, but directly beside him, close enough that his hip pressed against Barnaby’s thigh.
Barnaby turned a page without acknowledging this encroachment into his personal space.
“Barnaby.” James’s voice was quiet and stripped of performance. “I like him. I like him with you.”
“No, you don’t.” Barnaby kept his eyes on the page, even though the words had stopped meaning anything. “If you did, you would let me have him to myself.” He turned the next pagewith enough force to crease the corner. “Instead, you pull your little stunt. You put us under scrutiny and feed the BLEX fire. Joint ambassadorships, announced with clever little tongue-in-cheek comments through the King’s Trust socials.” He closed the book on his thumb and looked at James. “I would have expected something like that from Vidal. But not from you.”
James was quiet for a long time. He was sitting with his hands in his lap, his shoulders dropped. He looked, for a moment, like the boy who’d sat on Barnaby’s bed at Eton and told him his father had had another heart attack.
“I hadn’t thought about it like that,” James said.
“You hadn’t thought.” Barnaby heard the ice in his own voice and didn’t soften it. “The King of the United Kingdom, who thinks about everything, who runs every decision through three advisors and a private secretary before he orders his lunch, hadn’t thought about what it would mean to formally, publicly, institutionally pair me with a man on Palace letterhead.”
James rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I was excited. That’s the truth of it, and I know it’s not good enough, but it’s the truth. I saw the two of you at the reception. You were feeding him canapés, Barnaby, you were putting food in his mouth and your face was—” He stopped. “I just wanted to give you a reason to stay close to each other. You have to admit that the two of you don’t exactly run in the same logical circles. Without something structural, you’d have drifted. A boxer from Barking and the Marquess of Ashworth don’t share a social calendar.”
