He rolled onto his side, scooped Mercè into one enormous hand, and gathered her against his chest. “Hello, gorgeous,” hesaid to her, in an accent that Vidal placed instantly as coming from the other side of London. The one he’d never set foot in. “Look at the state of you. Who did this to your hair, eh?”
Mercè, the traitor, shut her eyes and pressed her face into his palm. The man got to his feet with Mercè still cradled against him.
The men Vidal knew were lean and considered, polished by personal trainers into shapes that flattered tailoring. This man was not just neat and trim. His chest was broad and slabbed with muscle, his abs cut in stark relief. The waistband of his shorts sat low on his hips, and what filled the front of them was, on close inspection, a more than adequate extension to the building it was housed in.
There were two strange round knots on the tops of his shoulders, where the deltoid met the trapezius. They were risen mounds of muscle Vidal had never seen on a body before and he wanted, very badly, to put a finger on them and press down.
He crossed the grass and held Mercè out. “She’s yours, I think.”
“Mine,” Vidal agreed, and accepted her without taking his eyes off the rest of him.
“I’m Connor.”
The hand that came towards him was damp with sweat. Vidal took it, and did not wipe his palm afterwards on the silk of his robe. “Vidal.” He let the syllables sit on his tongue the way he liked them. “Vidal Montcada y Sackville. But Vidal will do, between the two of us.” He settled into one of the rusting chairs, arranged Mercè across his knee, and tipped his head at the other.
“Vye-dal.” Connor tested it once, the two flat English syllables landing nothing like the soft CatalanVee-dahlhe had answered to since the cradle. Vidal, who had once corrected a Pope on this exact point, considered Connor’s bare shoulders,and stayed quiet. Connor tipped his chin towards the upper windows of the building. “You’ve just moved into the top floor, yeah?”
“I have.”
“And how are you liking England?”
“It is my second home, you understand. I went to school here from the age of thirteen. I should be entirely accustomed to it by now, and yet —” He lifted his shoulders in an expansive shrug. “It never fails to astonish me. The English are a people of immense and committed peculiarity, Connor. Truly. Only yesterday, for example, I had a minor domestic incident which has confirmed for me, again, that you Anglos are not built as the rest of us on the continent are built.”
Connor folded himself onto the chair beside him. Their knees, when he settled, ended up turned towards each other, just touching. Vidal noted this, declined to adjust, and went on. “I have a man who looks after me. A Major Beauchamp. He is a Sandhurst alum, and is in the Household Division, the works. You know the type.”
“I do.”
“Yesterday, my Major walked into my drawing room while I was…how shall I put this delicately, for the benefit of your East London sensibilities? Entirely naked, hair dripping wet from the shower, holding forth to my friend about the European Parliament in Strasbourg.” He paused to examine Connor’s mouth, which had gone very still. “And do you know what he did, Connor? My Major? He went rigid. He went the colour of bad veal and dropped an entire bottle of Fonte di Foiano on the parquet. He has been unable to look me in the eye ever since!”
“That’s rough.”
“It isabsurd. It is the most British thing I have ever seen, and I have been watching the British be British for thirteen years. Why can you not be more continental in your attitudes, Connor,the lot of you? The frigidity of the weather here does not mean that you have to take that on as a personality trait! Nakedness isfun. Nakedness is good and natural.”
Connor laughed and leaned a fraction closer over the gap between their chairs. His knee pressed harder against Vidal’s so that he felt the heat of it through the silk.
“Go on then. Get your kit off, and I’ll take a look.” His blue gaze didn’t waver. Most men, in Vidal’s experience, propositioned with either too much swagger or too little. Connor had found a clean middle that suggested a great deal of practice.
“Connor.” He laid one hand flat over his heart, and the other on Connor’s bare forearm, which was warm and slightly damp. “That is a kind offer. Averykind offer. Truly, in another life, a life in which I had woken up this morning in my own bed, in my own country, I would have said yes before you finished the sentence, and we would be upstairs already, learning the shapes of each other.”
“But?”
“But my life is in a state of flux. And I cannot, in good conscience, take on any more complicating factors than I have already been issued. I am doing you a kindness.”
“Yeah?” Connor’s mouth was curving upward already. “What sort of flux are we talking about?”
“I am, Connor, a deposed prince. The third son of the sovereign house of a small Mediterranean principality that you have very probably never heard of, and which, until a fortnight ago, was quietly minding its own ancient business on a cliff above an extremely blue sea.” He lifted one hand in a flourish, the silk sleeve falling back from his wrist. “Then a man with an obscene moustache and a PowerPoint presentation persuaded fifty-three per cent of my countrymen that eight hundred years of Montcada sovereignty was enough, and now he is sitting in my father’s study, probably with his boots on the desk.”
Connor’s mouth dropped open, but he didn’t interrupt.
“My father is in Geneva. My mother is in Wiltshire, with the horses, which is where the Sackvilles go when they are upset and would prefer not to discuss it. My brothers are scattered. And the rest of the world, Connor…the rest of the world has decided that what happened to my family isdemocracy, and that democracy is to be respected. The European Union sent my father a letter acknowledging the transition. That is all they had to say.”
Vidal lifted his chin, found his smile, and put it back on. “So when I tell you, Connor, that my life is in a state offlux, I am being, as the English say, understated.”
Connor laughed, loud and unrestrained. It made Vidal want to answer it in kind, but he kept his expression stern.
“Connor,” Vidal said evenly. “Is my pain funny to you?”
“That’s a hell of a chat-up let down, mate. ‘No thanks, some bloke with a moustache has nicked my family’s country.’ You can’t just spring that on a bloke.”
