“I know you don’t believe that of Beauchamp, sweetheart.”
Vidal shook his head adamantly. “It iscowardly, Connor. To go behind a man’s back to hisfather, of all people, the one person in the world whose opinion I am constitutionally incapable of dismissing. He has known that. He has used it against me and done this under the guise ofprofessionalism, when what it actually is is jealousy.”
Connor gave Vidal a sad, twisted smile that sat uneasily on his mouth. He drew Vidal back in against him, settled Vidal’s head under his chin, and held him there. His fingers moved into his dark hair, sweeping it back from his nape in one slow pass.
“Listen to me, Vidal. I need you to stop, and I need you to really think about this. Beauchamp would never do this to you. He’d not do it to me, either, much as he had every reason to want me out of the picture. He’s a good chap, and we both know this.”
Connor cupped Vidal’s chin in his hand, tipped his face up until Vidal had no choice but to look at him. “You want to be angry at him because that’s easier on you than missing him.”
Vidal’s face crumpled. His good hand came up and struck Connor in the centre of his chest. It was a weak, badly aimed punch that landed and did nothing at all. He hit him a second time with no more force, until Connor caught his wrist and crushed him against him.
“You arewrongabout him.” Vidal’s voice came out muffled against Connor’s collarbone. “You are wrong, and you are being charitable in the way that the English are always charitable, which is to say, with no actual feeling for what is happening underneath. You think because the man wears a suit and sayssirthat he is incapable of cruelty. In actuality, he is an Englishman of the worst kind, who does the cruel thing in a register so polite that you cannot evencomplainabout it afterwards without seeming hysterical.”
“Vidal — ”
“The problem is that you are a man who says what he means. You think becauseyouwould not do this, thenhewould not do this. But he is not you, Connor! He is an entirely different species of man. One who has been schooled in the art of elegant betrayal through officer training at Sandhurst!”
“Vidal — ”
“And you are standing there, defending him, when he has gone behind my back to myfather!”
“Will you shut up a minute, you fucking heartbreaker.” Connor threw his head back and groaned at the ceiling. “God, this fucking sucks bollocks. You make me fucking laugh, Vidal. You fuck like you’ve got no shame. No fucking shame, mate, not a shred of it.” He lowered his chin. His eyes had gone tight at the corners. “And here I am, on the wrong end of a Sunday afternoon, about to talk you into the bloke you actually want.”
Connor took in a bracing breath. “Beauchamp didn’t write your dad that report. He wouldn’t hurt you that way. I know it because the night you got hit by that car, I sat with him at the foot of your hospital bed for an hour, and he reeled off the full bloody manual on the proper care and feeding of you. I don’t think he stopped for a full fucking hour. A bloke doesn’t notice the kind of shit Beauchamp noticed unless he’s absolutelygonefor someone. He’s not noticing because he’s a good security officer: he’s noticing because he can’thelpit. He’s been watching you for the joy of it.”
Vidal didn’t want to hear another word of it. He pushed up onto the balls of his feet, slid his good hand round the back of Connor’s neck, and went in to kiss him quiet.
Connor turned his face away.
It was the gentlest refusal Vidal had ever been handed. Connor’s hand cupped Vidal’s jaw, and his mouth landed instead in the centre of Vidal’s forehead.
“I’ve enjoyed every bit of you, Your Serene Highness. But the fact that you’re more upset about thinking Beauchamp did something like this, than you are about your father not approving of me, says it all.”
Pare had read him the dossier, and Vidal had not taken in a word of it. He had not weighed what his father was asking him to do. He had not stopped to consider what he would say in reply. Every thought in his head had been trained on Beauchamp from the first sentence.
“Oh,Connor.”
Connor’s mouth had pulled into a wry shape. “Yeah.”
A great undignified noise came out of Vidal before he could stop it.
He cried for the unfairness of what he had done to this man. Connor, who had handed him a linen handkerchief in the garden on the worst night of his life and asked nothing of him in return. Who’d taught him how a pawnbroker priced a knackered PlayStation, and who’d made him laugh while he was fucking him.
Vidal could see, with a terrible clarity, the shape of the life Connor had been offering him. The Sunday lunches in Bow with Mrs Evans’s sherry-heavy trifle, and the spoiled indulgence of his whims. The house somewhere in a postcode Pare would not have approved of, and a bed in which Vidal would have been thoroughly and uncomplicatedly adored for the rest of his natural life.
Prince Vidal of Cardona could have lived that life and called himself a fortunate man.
Mr Vidal Montcada, it turned out, could not.
ThatVidal needed the man who had drafted the cohabitation protocols at three in the morning and then refused to amend a single clause when Vidal had laid his hand on his chest and tried it on, and who scolded him when he was being unreasonable.
Two ways of being loved, laid out in front of him, and only one of them required him to grow up.
“Connor, I’m so sorry.”
“I know you are, sweetheart.”
“I have used you appallingly.”
