“That’s an uneven comparison, my son! The men who built our line did so in a different century, when these things could be carried by a great house and absorbed into its history. We are nolonger a great house, my boy. You are Mr Vidal Montcada now, and Mr Vidal Montcada cannot afford to be photographed in the company of a man whose brother has been the subject of three Serious Crime Directorate inquiries.”
“He is named in the asset registers of two of his brother’s companies, Vidal. He is not a passive bystander. The report is very clear on that point. I’m not asking you to abandon him as a friend completely. Accept the Knightsbridge flat’s keys when I have them couriered to you on Tuesday, and place a little distance between you and a man who, however charming you find him, is going to cost you a great deal more than he gives you in the long run.”
“He has never asked me for a single thing, Pare.”
“For now, Vidal.”
The kitchen had gone quiet around him. He could hear only his father’s voice telling him, in the gentlest possible terms, to put aside the one man in this country who had laid claim to him without conditions.
“I am not going to do that. Pare. But I love you very much, and I am going to ring you back when I am calmer so that I don’t say anything that I will regret.” He ended the call.
The mobile sailed across the kitchen in a high arc that struck the wall above a cupboard and bounced onto the parquet, where it skittered to a halt against the leg of a chair. The screen had gone black and shattered completely. Mercè, who had been asleep under the table, came up onto all four legs and barked once, sharply.
“It is all right,amor. It is all right.”
He was breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth in the slow measured pattern Beauchamp had once shown him after a bad call from Geneva, which he was furious to be using now.
He left the broth on the hob. He left Mercè under the table with her ears flattened, and the mobile in pieces against the chair leg. He went down the corridor in his stockinged feet and out of the flat, taking the stairs two at a time, hand on the banister to steady himself on the turns.
Chapter Thirty-One
Connoropened the door in his joggers and a faded T-shirt, a tissue balled in one hand, and Vidal pushed past him without a word. He went down the hall to the kitchen, came back when he realised he had nowhere in particular to be going, and stopped in the middle of the sitting room with his good hand braced flat against his sternum.
“Sweetheart.”
“Shut the door, Connor.”
The door clicked shut. Connor came up the hall behind him, slower than he usually moved, and stopped a foot short of him.
“What’s happened?”
“Pare rang. He has read me a dossier on your family dealings, Connor, in his most reasonable voice. He’s asked me to accept the keys to a flat in Knightsbridge so that I may place some distance between you and me, and be exposed toa better class of neighbour.”
Connor reached out for him, but Vidal turned away before he could be touched. “Come here, love,” he urged.
“No.”
“Come here.”
Connor turned him by the good shoulder. He let himself be drawn in against the warm cotton of the T-shirt, and he stood there with his sling between them and his good hand fisted at the small of Connor’s back, and he did not cry, because his anger had brought him past tears.
“Talk to me.”
“I have been betrayed, Connor.”
Connor’s hand stilled where it was working a slow circle between his shoulder blades.
“Beauchamp has taken one last parting shot.” The name felt like acid in his mouth, though his voice came out level. His good hand had gone into a fist against Connor’s back.
“That doesn’t sound like Beauchamp at all. That bloke spent the better part of a fortnight handing you over to Wallis with a bow on top. He’s not the type to fire something off on his way out the door. Whatever’s happened, you’ll be reading it wrong.”
“He has passed my father a dossier on your family.”
Vidal felt the breath go out of Connor in a long exhale. Connor kept his arm exactly where it was, his hand flat between Vidal’s shoulder blades, and after a moment he pressed his lips to the crown of Vidal’s head. “Ah. So I’ve been deemed inappropriate.”
Vidal pulled back far enough to take Connor’s face in his good hand, and kissed him with the full force of someone who’d decided to make a stand on the matter. Connor’s mouth was warm and slightly chapped at the corner from the cold he’d been ignoring, and Vidal kissed him until they were both breathless.
“He has done this on purpose, Connor. He has waited until he was safely out of the flat, and then he has gone to my father with a piece of paper as though he were doing the family a service. He could not bear that I had chosen this. He couldn’tbear that I had a life he was no longer the centre of. So he has crept off to Pare with his neat little dossier. He’s dressed it up as concern for my welfare, when in fact it is the small mean revenge of a man who has lost his place in the household and could not endure being replaced.”
