James picked up his tea. He held the cup in both hands, his thumbs resting on the rim, and looked at Lex with the direct, steady attention that the Crown deployed when it was making a decision of state. “Good,” James said. “Bring it when you come down to Highgrove. The footpaths are murder in October.”
The words landed and Barnaby swallowed.
Highgrove in October.When, notif. As though it were already in the diary.
Barnaby looked at James. His eyes were hot. James returned his gaze without a twinkle in his eye, or any performance at all. This was just the face of a man who was telling him that Lex Murphy was welcome, as though it were the most ordinary thing in the world.
Barnaby breathed. Lex’s arm was warm behind his shoulders.
Everyone he loved had said yes to Lex.
His heart had said yes in a common room in Tokyo, watching this man eat squid ink crisps out of spite. His head had said yes on a walk across his father’s parkland.
But his body, which had seized and locked and refused to let Lex inside him in any of the ways that mattered — his body was still the limiter. The one door that hadn’t opened. The one yes he couldn’t give.
He leaned into Lex’s side. Lex’s arm came down from the back of the sofa and settled across his shoulders, heavy and warm. Barnaby pressed his face into the curve of Lex’s neck and breathed him in.
Lex’s mouth pressed against his temple. “All right, Barns?”
“Yes,” Barnaby said. He closed his eyes. “I’m fine.”
He wasn’t. Because the distance between where he was and where he wanted to be had never felt so precisely, agonisingly narrow.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Thepretence of separate rooms hadn’t survived. Lex’s bag had been carried upstairs by the same housekeeper who’d turned down the bed, and she’d put it on the luggage rack in Barnaby’s room without comment.
He’d spent the morning on a horse. This was Barnaby’s doing. Barnaby had led him out to the yard at nine o’clock in a pair of borrowed jodhpurs that were too tight across the thighs and too short in the leg, making him look like a children’s TV presenter from the seventies.
The horse was called Clover. She was a stocky bay mare with kind eyes and a temperament that Barnaby described as “bombproof; we need to make sure your neck stays intact for your fight with Morozov.” Barnaby stood in the centre of the schooling ring with his arms folded, calling instructions and clearly enjoying himself enormously.
“Heels down, Lex. Heelsdown. You’re gripping with your knees. Stop gripping with your knees.”
“I’m on a horse, Barns. Gripping’s the only thing keeping me alive.”
“Gripping destabilises your seat. Relax your thigh. Let your weight drop through your heel.”
Lex had let his weight drop through his heel. Clover had plodded on, unbothered, her ears flicking back occasionally to check whether the large man on her back had any intention of doing anything interesting. He did not. He was concentrating on not dying.
By the end of the hour, Barnaby had conceded that Lex’s rising trot was “not actively dangerous,” which was the most fulsome praise he’d ever received from a Fitznorman-Bicester that didn’t involve an orgasm.
Lunch was a picnic near the stables. Mrs Farrow had packed a hamper with cold roast chicken, a wedge of cheddar wrapped in waxed paper, crusty bread, and a jar of chutney that Barnaby said was from the estate’s own orchard. They sat on a blanket in the grass with their backs against the paddock fence, eating with their hands, and Lex watched Barnaby tear bread apart with his long fingers.
Florence lay between them, her nose resting on her paws, twitching in her sleep. The afternoon sun was warm on Lex’s face. Barnaby talked about Meridian’s dressage scores, a hedge that needed replanting, a fox that had been getting into the hen run. Lex listened. He had opinions on none of it, and yet wanted to hear every word, because these things mattered to Barns.
They walked after lunch. Across the parkland, through the copse the Duke’s grandfather had planted, along the brook that had flooded in 2014, and up through the western fields where the Herefords stood in their loose, placid cluster near the water trough.
Barnaby’s trajectory adjusted. It was just a subtle drift to the right, away from the fence line, a course correction that looked casual if you didn’t know him.
Lex stopped walking. He leaned on the fence. The nearest Hereford raised her head from the trough and regarded him with wet-eyed indifference. “Come here, Barns.”
“I’m perfectly fine where I am.”
“She’s not going to charge you. Look at her. She’s half asleep.”
“Cows are deceptively fast. I’ve told you this. It’s well documented.”
“You ride a horse over solid fences at thirty miles an hour, and you’re scared of a cow standing still.” Lex held out his hand to Barnaby.
