“I just…don’t understand why you care. What I think.”

The bed shifted as he rolled over, and I was suddenly very conscious how close we were. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Well, because you’re this…incredible lawyer-slash-swimwear-model guy—”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, metaphorically. I mean, not the lawyer bit. That is your actual job. Fuck. Look, I’m just saying, you’re conventionally successful and conventionally attractive. And you’re a good person. And I’m…not.”

“You’re not a bad person, partly because there are no bad people and partly—”

“Wait. What about, like, murderers?”

“The vast majority of murderers murder one person and either regret it for the rest of their lives or have a reason for doing it that you would probably sympathise with. The first thing you learn as a criminal barrister is bad things are not the exclusive province of bad people.”

I guess it was some kind of masochistic penance for having called him cheesy earlier, but I heard myself telling him, “You’re hot when you’re being idealistic.”

“I’m hot all the time, Lucien. As you’ve just observed, I look like a swimwear model.”

Fuck. No. Help. Now he was making me laugh.

“Speaking of which,” he went on, “you surely can’t doubt your own…” He wriggled nervously and I wished I could see the expression on his face, because lost-for-words Oliver was one of my favourite Olivers. “Appeal?”

“You’d be amazed what I can doubt.” This right here was why you had sex. So you were too tired to randomly tell people personal shit at three in the morning. “Besides, when all you see of yourself is what the tabloids show you, it’s hard to believe in anything else.”

I felt the faintest stirring of air close to my face, as if he’d reached out to me but thought better of it. “You’re beautiful, Lucien. I’ve always thought so. Like an early self-portrait of Robert Mapplethorpe. Um”—I practically heard him blush—“not the one with the bullwhip in his anus, obviously.”

I wasn’t sure, but I thought Oliver Blackwood had just called me beautiful. I had to be gracious and calm and mature. “Pro tip: When you’re complimenting someone, avoid the word ‘anus.’”

He chuckled. “Duly noted. Now, seriously, go to sleep. We both have work in the morning.”

“You’ve met Alex. Consciousness is barely a requirement in my office.”

“Is there some reason you’re intent on keeping me awake?”

“N-no… I don’t know.” He was right. I was being weird. Why was I being weird? “Do you really think I’m beautiful?”

“At this very moment, I think you’re annoying. But, in general, yes.”

“I haven’t even said thank you for getting me away from those reporters.”

He sighed, his breath warm under the duvet we shared. “I’ll take your silence as gratitude.”

“Sorry… I…um…sorry.”

I turned onto my side. Then onto my other side. Then onto my back. Before flipping to the side I’d tried to begin with.

“Lucien.” Oliver’s voice rumbled through the dark. “Come here.”

“What? Why? Come where?”

“Never mind. I’m here.” Then Oliver folded himself around me, all strong arms and smooth skin and the thud of his heart against my back. “You’re okay.”

I lay still, my body not sure whether it wanted to run screaming for the door or just sort of…melt everywhere. “Um, what’s going on?”

“You’re going to sleep.”

There was no way that was happening. This was too much. It was far too much.

Except, as it turned out, he was right, and it wasn’t, and I was.

Chapter 20

“So,” I said to Alex the next morning, “I’m really sorry that I was such a dick last night.”

He gazed at me expectantly. “And?”

“Well, um, I should have been nicer to you.”

“And?”

“And…” Wow, he was seriously committed to holding this over me. “…I’m a bad friend and a terrible coworker?”

“Oh.” He frowned. “I’m afraid to say that I just don’t get it at all. I mean, the one about going to Wales wasn’t funny, but at least it made sense.”

“It wasn’t a joke, Alex. I was trying to apologise for last night. I thought maybe my use of the words ‘sorry’ and ‘last night’ might have clued you in.”

“In that case, think nothing of it, old boy. And, honestly, it’s my fault. I should have said something at the time. Because we skipped the fish course, you should have skipped the fish fork.”

I gave up. “Okay. Great. Glad we cleared the air. Sorry again about the fish fork.”

“Happens to the best of us. Why, once at high table I had a moment of mental abstraction and tried to use a salad fork to eat cooked vegetables. And everyone had a jolly good laugh at my expense.”

“Gosh. Yes. The mental image alone is hilarious.”

“Isn’t it? I mean the tines are completely the wrong length.”

“The tines,” I offered, with a confidence my history with Alex did not at all support, “they are a-changin’.”

He gave me a blank look. “I suppose so. That’s why you swap forks between courses.”

Back at my desk, I ran through what was becoming a slightly depressing morning ritual: drink coffee, worry about alienating more donors, check scandal sheets. As it turned out, I was barely in them, and not just because I was mostly hidden against Oliver’s body. Pretty much every article was about Miffy—what she was wearing, where she was going, when she and Alex might be getting married. Oliver and I were blissfully relegated to the “also withs” although some enterprising intern had managed to unearth the designer of Oliver’s coat. And you knew it was the right kind of press coverage when people wrote more about what you were wearing than what you were doing. I even got a glancing mention in Horse & Hound, despite being neither.

This just left me to deal with the endless stream of unnecessary crises that always afflicted the Beetle Drive, like the time Rhys Jones Bowen told me the venue was double-booked because he’d got the Royal Ambassadors Hotel Marylebone mixed up with the LaserQuest he was trying to arrange for his friend’s stag-do. Or the time the printed invitations went missing and we thought they’d got lost in the post, but it turned out Alex had just been using the box as a footstool for three months. And let’s not forget when Dr. Fairclough briefly cancelled the entire event because she decided that the term beetle was insufficiently scientifically rigorous, and backed down only when we reminded her that it wasn’t actually in the official name of the event.