Vidal’s hips had begun to lift to meet Connor’s hand. The silk of his robe slid against his thighs with every shift. Everything else, the cold iron at his back, a siren somewhere on the far side of Mayfair, had gone distant and unimportant. There was only Connor’s hand, and the solid chest his cheek was pressed into.
Connor shortened his strokes, working the head of his cock with a tighter grip. Vidal shuddered against him. “You’re so quiet, love. Didn’t expect that.” Connor’s voice was rough around the edges. “S’nice, though. Just you breathing. I can hear how wet you are.”
The heat began to gather low in Vidal’s belly. Connor’s free hand came up and cupped the side of Vidal’s face, holding him more closely against his chest as he increased the pace of his hand.
He came into Connor’s fist with a long shudder that travelled the whole length of him. His breath left him all at once, and his forehead pressed hard into Connor as the last of his orgasm was wrung out of him by Connor’s patient, unhurried hand.
Connor pressed a kiss to his temple, soft and sweet, and held it there for a moment, his mouth warm against Vidal’s damp skin. Then he lifted his hand away and wiped his palm clean on the handkerchief he’d reclaimed from Vidal.
“There you go, sweetheart.” His thumb brushed against Vidal’s cheekbone. “Better?”
Vidal nodded against his chest and closed his eyes. Connor settled him in closer without a word. His hand came to rest at the back of Vidal’s neck, his thumb stroking along Vidal’s hairline, and he did not seem in any hurry at all to have him move.
Chapter Seven
Theyhad got as far as the corner of Mount Street and South Audley when Mercè, who had been trotting at Vidal’s heel on stiff determined legs, sat down on the pavement and declined to take another step.
Vidal stopped mid-sentence. He had been halfway through a theory about the decline of the British strawberry, which had started over a smoothie he’d bought somewhere near the Bayswater Road, and he abandoned it without ceremony to crouch down in his camel overcoat and peer at his dog.
“Mercè, mi amor.What is this? Have we given up?”
Mercè declined to meet his eye.
“Major.” Vidal straightened and turned to him with both palms spread in appeal. “She has walked the full circuit. It is further than she has gone in a month. We cannot ask for more.”
“No, sir.”
“You will carry her.”
It was not a question. Beauchamp bent, scooped the dog up with both hands, and settled her against the front of his jacketwhere she fitted neatly into the hollow between his lapel and his shoulder. She sighed once, with great feeling, and closed her eyes.
“Good.” Vidal fell into step beside him, close enough that the sleeve of his coat brushed Beauchamp’s at every second pace. “Now. Where was I? The strawberries, Beauchamp. The strawberries are acrimeagainst the concept of the fruit. They look very fine, I will give them that, they are uniform and red and gleaming in their little plastic punnets, but when you put one in your mouth it is like eating a piece of damp cotton wool that has been shown a photograph of a strawberry.”
Beauchamp made an affirmative sound at the back of his throat and walked. He was committing several protocol breaches every thirty seconds of this journey, but at least he’d rejected the offer of a smoothie. He couldn’t walk around with his hands occupied, because then who’d carry Mercè?
He was walking a principal through a public thoroughfare without a secondary officer in line of sight. Protocol specified that he walk behind and to the left of Vidal, but at the top of Mount Street Vidal had taken his elbow, steered him into the configuration he wanted, and declined to let go until Beauchamp was level with him. He was also carrying a Chinese Crested in his left arm in full view of Grosvenor Square, which was not a specific prohibition in the manual but was, he felt, implicit in the spirit of the thing.
“— and the tomatoes, Beauchamp, do not even start me on the tomatoes, because we have agreed that I am not to be started on the tomatoes before teatime on a weekday, but thestrawberriesare the thin end of a very grave wedge, and one day when you are old and I am older we shall look back on this period as the moment when —”
Beauchamp’s mobile buzzed against his ribs.
He shifted Mercè into the crook of his right arm and fished the handset out with his left. The screen read DAD. Underneath it, three words:EMERGENCY CALL NOW.
His father’s last EMERGENCY had concerned a discrepancy in the colour of the eggs being laid by his Oxfordshire chickens. Hunter had spent forty minutes on the mobile unpicking his own failures in avian husbandry, at the end of which Beauchamp had been required to point out that two of the hens were the sort that laid white eggs, which Hunter had bought from a woman at a farmers’ market in 2019 on the recommendation of a session drummer who had once toured with Fleetwood Mac.
The EMERGENCY before that had been a wasp in the house.
But there was also the possibility of a true emergency here. After all, his father was now sixty-six and living alone in a converted barn with three flights of stairs, exposed oak beams, and no close neighbours. One day, that EMERGENCY might involve a broken hip following a fall.
He thumbed the green ‘ACCEPT’ button.
“Dad? What’s wrong?”
Beside him, Vidal’s head turned sharply. Beauchamp saw, in his peripheral vision, the man’s dark eyes go soft.
“Hendrix,” said his father, warm as anything. “Darling boy. Are you eating?”
“Dad…”
