Royal Indiscretion, chapter 13 (Patreon)

Yves led Doug through the kennel tack room to a vehicle shed on the far side. Three Arctic Cat ATVs and a John Deere Gator were crowded together, but if Yves chose the Gator, the two of them would be trapped together in a small space, and the enclosed cab would allow conversation. So instead he went for ATV keys. “Nick’s boots are there.” Yves pointed to a bin near the garage door.

“I hope we’re the same size.”

“They’re pullovers. Just shove your foot in there, shoe and all, and let’s get out of here.” The idea of reporters closing in was enough to drive Yves nearly feral. He already had his own wall of shame in most of the paper’s head offices; he didn’t need to any more. And while he had done nothing in particular to shame himself, his connections with Rudy were enough to cast aspersions on Yves’s character. Again. No doubt the duke had already thrown Rudy to the savage wolves and possibly had his arrested for auto theft.

Luckily, Doug moved quickly, and Yves pointed to one of the Arctic Cats. Doug threw his leg over and held his hand out for the key. Yves tossed it over before going for the shed door.

“Don’t you have a garage door opener?” Doug asked. “Or helmets?”

“No to both,” Yves said. Right now he would like a helmet for its ability to disguise him as much as anything, but Nick didn’t keep them. In winter when he rode the Cats, he wanted something warmer on his head, and he never drove the ATVs at full speed or in dangerous conditions. 

Doug got off his Cat. “Then go. Get some distance between you and the reporters. I’ll slow them down.”

Yves frowned, but Doug grabbed his arm and propelled him toward the ATV he had chosen.

“Get out of here,” Doug said louder, and Yves took him up on his offer. He turned the ATV on and gave it as much petrol as he dared. The machine roared to life and in the space of a few seconds, Yves was tearing down the path toward the sheep pasture. That was the hilliest part of the estate and it led to the ocean. 

When Yves got off to unlatch the pasture gate, he spotted Doug leaning against his ATV talking to two reporters. He looked at ease as he projected a lazy aura. Yves quickly turned away before either of the reporters got a good angle for a photograph. If the press was stirring up any dirt, that was arguably more Doug’s fault than Yves’s; however, he suffered none of the consequences. He gave Rudy the means to reach the castle. He attended with him. He had been the subject of a photograph that had put Lady Anne in a difficult spot. Yet he had some natural charm that allowed him to lean on the ATV, showing off his beautiful body and looking utterly at ease.

Yves hated him.

Latching the gate behind him, Yves aimed his ATV for the sheep fields and hills and clumps of trees that marked this northern land. When Yves had been on drugs, he’d hated this place, but now it was his refuge and he did not want to share it with an American who had no understanding of the court politics or policies that circumscribed Yves’s life. He could take his ATV any place he liked, and if he got lost, Nick could treat it like a search and rescue practice for Dod and Schoonheid. They needed a challenge, so Yves hoped Doug got good and lost.

The sun was already rising despite the early hour, and Yves lost himself in the beauty of the land. Clouds drifted across the sky, leaving islands of shadow that swallowed entire hills, making the verdant grass appear almost blue green. The wind was brisk on Yves’s face, and as long as he drove his ATV across the hills, nothing matter. Sometimes Yves felt like the land gave him a high that could compete with drugs. If he drove an ATV or rode a horse fast enough, he could live in the moment and the rest of the world vanished. 

Yves had covered miles before an odd echo in the engine made him turn briefly. Forty or fifty yards behind him, Doug followed, an inane smile on his face, and the illusion of privacy and peace shattered. Yves revved his engine faster and took the next hill at a dangerous speed given that he didn’t wear enough safety equipment to weather a crash. He expected Doug to fall back, but he followed, that same look of thoughtless joy on his face.

Yves could not believe that his first impression of Doug had focused on the man’s physical beauty because there was nothing attractive about cluelessness. Yves drove through a patch of red helleborine, the tires ripping through the delicate pink wild flowers. However, the cliffs approached, and Yves didn’t have any way to actually escape Doug so he steered toward the ruins of a shell keep castle that stood guard on the top of a cliff. 

The round structure stood seven meters tall with the broken remains of a guard house that stood even taller. However, it was a fraction of the size of any other castle in the country. Some exiled English engineer or soldier had talked one of Yves ancestors into building the poor orphan far from any of the other shell keep castles in England and Wales. At the time it had been built, the technology was already obsolete as England had already turned to stone keeps.

Overall, the structure was not terribly impressive. This was a functional building intended to hold off invaders. Yves stopped his ATV in the shadow of the thick wall and wondered if Doug had a fear of heights. If so, Yves still had some hope if the old stairs were still in good enough shape to climb. Yves was fairly sure soldiers in World War II had built the rickety and steep stairs in order to access the wall walk at the top of the structure. But where the stones had lasted a millennia, a few decades had reduced the castle’s most recent renovation to an unstable death trap.

Doug parked his ATV next to Yves’s and turned the engine off. “Wow. This place is cool. Now this is a castle.” Doug looked around with unvarnished awe in his expression.

“I’m fairly sure we had the wedding reception in a far more impressive castle.”

Doug actually waved Yves’s comment off. He waved his hand as though scattering Yves’s words. “That place was more of a palace.”

“Actually, it wasn’t.” Yves would have been happy to explain the difference between a structure built to withstand enemy attack that might or might not have housed a royal versus an unfortified structure built specifically for a sovereign, but he gave up because Doug was picking his way over the fallen stones, his face as enthralled as a man in love. God forgive he come between a man and his ruins.

“This is a gold mine.” Doug bypassed the guard house and climbed through an open hole in the wall that had once been a window. The wooden shutters were long since gone, but the stones still had the notches where they had been attached.

With nothing better to do, Yves followed. “This is a ruined military post, although I will admit it is rather well preserved.”

“It’s perfect.” Doug turned and flashed a brilliant smile that stopped Yves in his tracks. “Or it’s close enough to perfect that it would be easy to get there.” He wandered through the central courtyard, wading through the tall summer grass until he reached the western side. He jumped into the huge opening and stood on the sill. The stone walls were two and half meters thick, so he could walk around under the arch and look out at the ocean. Hell, he could put a bed and sleep up there if he chose, and Yves was beginning to believe he might. He knelt down and ran his fingers over the thousand year old stones. “What are these holes for?”

“I think they were drilled in the forties. This was used as a lookout for Nazi ships and submarines, so they likely mounted a gun there.”

Doug frowned as though genuinely disturbed by an injury done to the stones. But then he said, “It doesn’t matter. There’s enough original stone work that a few holes don’t make a difference. Who owns this?”

Yves chose a particularly large chunk of the inner wall that had fallen and he sat on it. “I suppose I do.”

Doug came down out of the arched opening and stood on the stone floor. Whoever had carved and laid the floor had been so precise that hundreds of years later, weeds still had not found their way through although a few small plants grew where the dirt had collected on top of the stone. “You suppose?” Doug asked.

Yves shrugged. He had never demanded to take a close look at the structure of the royal estates, but technically it was part of his demense. “The royal estate has to pay for the upkeep, so I would hesitate to press any claim, no matter what the ownership appears to be on paper.”

“How much land do you own?”

“Everything we just rode over,” Yves said, which was a nice way of saying he owned land too far from any town to be of value to any creature other than sheep and rabbits. “Nick used to have a much smaller farm farther south, but when I needed to get away from the press, my father offered to let him use the old farm and to pay for materials including dog food to get trucked up here. Out here, transportation is a major issue, particularly in winter. It’s not the most convenient place to raise animals, especially since so many of his clients want to see the dogs before they purchase, but he’s not a fan of humanity, so he doesn’t mind.”

Instead of pointing out all the flaws, Doug continued to walk the inner walls and study the structure. “This is magnificent.”

“You’re pretty easily impressed,” Yves said dryly. “Now my father’s castle is impressive.”

“It’s a bloated whale that always going to cost more to run than it’s worth,” Doug said, his voice distant and distracted as he stuck his head into what had once probably been the chapel or a kitchen. It was hard to tell. “You could turn that thing your father owns into a five star hotel and I’d still have trouble making a profit.”

Yves had no idea where the concept of profit had come from. “There are considerations other than money.”

Doug had gone into one of the six curved rooms off the central court, but now he stuck his head back out. “That’s what people with money always say.”

“I do believe you are one of those people with money.” In a fit of idle curiosity, Yves had Googled Doug, so he knew exactly how overpaid the man was. Yves had grown up in castles with servants and he still couldn’t fathom having that much actual cash.

“It’s not about how much cash you have in hand,” Doug said. “It’s about what’s coming in.”

“And your football contract means you have a lot coming in.”

Doug went still when Yves made that observation. But then he immediately went back to exploring. “And how much do you have coming in?”

“Since this is my estate, not much.” Yves stood and went over to the largest room, which had once been the barracks. As a child, he had come here to sit in the arch and watch the sea. He’d been caught out in a storm once. He’d brought his horse into the courtyard and sat huddled in a stone niche to ride out the driving rain.

Doug followed him. “What is the one think you can never change with property?”

“A lack of indoor plumbing?” Yves guessed.

“I can work around that. But you can never change location. Look out this window.” Doug had the audacity to put his hands on Yves’s shoulders and turn him so he faced the arch.

“There’s no window here. I’m looking out a giant hole in the wall and I see the ocean.”

“Exactly,” Doug said triumphantly. Yves was starting to wonder if Doug didn’t have some hidden brain damage. “Look at how dark blue the water is and the sky is white and the waves crashing against the rocks. It’s perfect. And come over here.” Doug jumped off the two foot ledge, ran across the stone floor, detoured around rocks and over the green central area before leaping onto the matching ledge on the opposite side. “Look at this. It’s beautiful.”

Yves followed more slowly. Unless something truly remarkable had happened, all Doug could see from that vantage would be long grasses and hills marked with clumps of trees. When Yves finally reached the far wall, he realized he was wrong. There were also sheep. Sne and Yaa lay on a distant hill, two piles of white fur watching as the flock.

“And do you know what I don’t see?” Doug asked in a conspiratorial tone.

“Civilization?”

“Exactly!” Doug sounded entirely too cheerful about that. “There are no people up here. Do you have any idea what people would pay for this sort of privacy?”

Yves had to take a second to even construct an answer. When people took conversations in illogical directions, sometimes it took him a little time to mentally translate his sarcasm over to English. “I can say I have literally never considered the question.”

“A lot. They would pay a whole lot.”

“You expect people to pay a significant sum of money to sleep in a ruin?” While Yves didn’t understand American football, he suspected quarterbacks must get hit in the head more often than was healthy. Either that or Doug had brain damage before he started his career.

“A ruin, no.” Doug said, and then he was speed walking through the ruin again, looking up at the inner wall and stretching his arms, possibly to measure the size of the rooms and possibly in an attempt to fly. At this point, Yves wouldn’t put either past him. “You could easily turn this into a tourist destination. The problem with that is that the profit would get soaked up by all the independent small businesses around here.”

“I assure you, there are no businesses around here.”

“Worse, that would destroy the privacy.”

“I believe I had more logical conversations when I was high,” Yves said with a sigh.

Doug whirled around, anger on his face. “You’re blind. You have absolutely no vision.”

The emotion shocked Yves and he took a step back, suddenly reminded of how large and imposing Doug was. After a second, Yves said, “Then explain it.”

Immediately, the anger vanished and Doug sat on the edge of a broken wall. “There are hotels where people pay ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars a night. There are hotels where guests pay to sleep in glass domes under the snow where they can see the northern lights. There are even hotels that are built into the sides of cliffs so people can look over the drop and feel the thrill of danger while still sleep on Egyptian cotton. You are positioned somewhere at the convergence of those three.”

“Which means?” Yves asked. If others had successful ventures, that did not mean he was free to pursue the same goals. If anything, he could offer to send Doug’s suggestions to King Alphonso where it would be neatly filed away and largely forgotten until someone doing research in the family papers rediscovered it and wrote a book where it ended up a mildly interesting footnote.  That’s the way it worked in royal families.

“I would have to do market research, but it means you are sitting on an asset. I envy how you’re positioned here.”

Perhaps Yves was distracted by Doug’s physique, but everything he said came out sounding vaguely sexual. “Funny, when discussing my positions, I’ve never had my castle come up before.”

Doug grinned. “Very funny.”

“I would go with droll, but thank you.”

“Think how great this could be.” Doug got up and jumped, clearly attempting to land several steps up on the old staircase. Yves yelled out a warning, but it was too late. The tread gave way, and Doug started to fall.