Page 111 of Read My Lips

Richard turned away from the mirror, finally looking at me. “I never meant for the audio to get out.” Something softened his expression. It almost looked like remorse. “It was supposed to be anonymous enough no one got pinned with it – a talking point I could use to segue into publicly coming out before the wedding. I swear I deleted the sound.”

“Bullshit.” People like him walked over everyone. He might have been taller than me and richer than me, and five times more handsome than me, but right now, I couldn’t see how anyone found him attractive at all.

“It’s not, unfortunately. Don’t know what I’m doing with computers. I’m only useful in the middle of a muddy field.”

Lazy, Sev had said. Only tick-boxed on the upload. All that tracked with a guy who outsourced uploading his own vlog entries.

“And why ruin someone’s career yourself when you can pay to have it done for you, right?”

Richard’s lips pinched thin. “I’d never intentionally hurt Simon.”

We eyeballed each other. As if I had a chance at breaking him.

But, stepping back, Richard shook his head and plucked a paper towel from the pristine ivory pile on the ledge behind the taps. He made a show of drying his hands.

“I’ve offered him a job,” he muttered. “He’s sorted, even without Mapp and Green, if he wants to be. You’re making a fuss about nothing. You know, I was stupid enough to think you might understand.”

“You’re unhinged, mate. Why would I understand any of this?”

He took aim with the scrunched up paper towel, tossing it into the wicker waste basket in a clear, easy arc. “Because you also appear to have a weakness for badly thought-through plans. And,” his voice dropped, “you’re just as stealth as me.”

My teeth gritted, jaw tense.

“I’m nothing like you.” But my certainty wobbled.

People made assumptions about the way I looked. It didn’t mean I wanted them to. With Simon, in the middle of all the lies, I’d let myself be honest. No more going along with what other people wanted just to keep the peace.

“Aren’t you?” Richard eyeballed me again.

“No.”

Whatever he’d deluded himself into thinking, we were different. He only cared about keeping his privileges intact. And between him and Simon it sounded like they had that all tied in a bow.

“Look,” Richard said, “whatever you think of me, if it didn’t come out before the wedding and Temp got a chance to say she knew – that it was all okay between us – I’d have to shut up about it forever, or Temp would get painted as perpetually the foolish woman, too weak to leave her cheating husband, which is whole lot of rot we could both do without.”

“Why are you even getting married then?” I didn’t care about his poor little rich boy sob story.

“Because I love her more than I’ve ever loved anyone, and she’s having our daughter, and if we don’t abide by the social lay of the land and legally and financially entwine, it all gets rather complicated with the titles and the questions and the inheritance.”

“Oh give over. It’s not Pride and fucking Prejudice.”

“No. It’s not. It’s the entire world thinking they have a right to comment on our wedding venue and our guest list and our private lives. The whole thing’s a circus, and it’s swallowing us whole.”

That, right there, was the most human I’d ever heard Richard be. This was why Simon chose to do what he did. This man with everything had got himself more trapped than I had ever been.

“Temp hates it,” Richard continued. “We’ve been turning into cardboard cutouts of ourselves ever since the bloody engagement. And I thought – I thought if we could just shake things up a bit... Then the footage turned up at the end of the interview reel, and it seemed like fate. Before you two swanned in with this ridiculous plan to get me out of my own mess. And now I’m sitting in my favourite restaurant with one of my favourite people swearing blind he was with you instead of me, because if I don’t go along with the idiocy, all four of us are trashed.”

“Don’t blame me,” I muttered. “You dumped Simon in it without warning him. We didn’t have a choice.”

“It wasn’t supposed to touch him,” Richard shot back. “Genius plan by the way. We would have been absolutely fine if you hadn’t barged in.”

“All three of you?” How dare he blame me when it was his fault?

Richard exhaled. “Yes.”

“And what if Simon doesn’t want that?”

The dickhead actually rolled his eyes. “Aren’t you supposed to let him speak for himself?”