Page 140 of Claim

Her mouth fell open.

But she then kissed us both on the cheek and left us with a bottle of wine and the quiet of the place settling for the night. We finished the wine, talked about nothing and everything, then headed up to the room that was ours. Closed the door. Cause, yeah…we fucked. Or I reckon Tristan would prefer I called it “making love” now. Whatever. We knew how to do it all the ways. Quietly, too.

And sometimes, those close times, where we held our breaths through it, they’d sorta become my favourite.

Who fucking knew, right?

* * * *

By nine the next day the place was chaos.

Tables dragged out onto the patchy lawn. Folding chairs borrowed from somewhere. Balloons tied to the fence posts in pastel colours that didn’t belong to any world I’d grown up in. The smell of cut grass and charcoal already in the air.

By lunchtime, the troops started arriving.

A bunch of mums and their kids from Keeley’s group. All squeals and presents and wet wipes. Then Lennon. With Amara and the boys in tow. The twins burst through the cottage, shouting for Maisie before their coats were even off, while Lennon headed straight for the garden to take up position beside me at the barbecue as if it had always been our post. Not so much a barbecue as a fuck off outside grill Tristan had insisted on. Came with a drinks cooler as well.

His money, I s’pose.

“Smells decent.” Lennon lifted the lid and gave the grill a critical once-over, the way his foreman checked his brickwork.

“Don’t start.” I nudged him aside and handed over the tongs. “When you’re expected to host people raised on caviar, sausages suddenly matter.”

He snorted. “Razor Slade, cooking for the elite. Never thought I’d see the day.”

“Richie,” I corrected without looking up.

Lennon smiled. “Richie.”

Not long after came Marcus and Eloise, carrying the now toddling Arthur. Eloise took him out to the garden where the kids were running riot, balloons bobbing against the fence and toys scattered across the grass. Tristan set up a drinks table with an efficiency he applied to everything, then drifted over to stand with Marcus. The two of them fell into conversation immediately. About work or politics or whatever it was men in their world discussed.

Henry arrived next. Dr Redmayne. And with him—Zara. They were back together. Properly. Apparently, because Tristan’s choice in partner hadn’t brought the entire upper-class establishment crashing down around them, Henry had decided he could survive dating Zara after all. At least that was Tristan’s version of events. I didn’t fully understand the hierarchy of it all. She looked just as polished and well-bred as the rest of them to me. But apparently there were levels. Expectations. Lines you weren’t meant to cross.

Considering I’d bulldozed straight through most of them just by existing in Tristan’s life, I figured the system could cope.

Henry wandered over, Zara having been swept away by Eloise and Amelia toward the drinks.

“Rich.” He eyed the grill as if it might bite him. “You know how to work that?”

“Henry.” I shook his hand. “It’s a barbecue. Not brain surgery.”

“Oh, brain surgery is significantly easier.” He took a swig of beer.

“You’d know.”

“How to operate on a brain, absolutely. Operate that? No, thank you.”

“We all have our individual skills.”

“Couldn’t have just gone for a coals, no?”

“Top of the range. You know Tristan.”

“I do. Unfortunately.”

Henry Redmayne was halfway through surgical training now, which sounded both impressive and absolutely fucking exhausting from what Tristan had said. And Zara, apparently, was setting her sights on politics. Running the country one day, if you believed her ambition. To me that sounded like a dangerous combination. A surgeon and a future prime minister in one relationship.

Power couple shit.