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Nine Years Ago
Aleksey sometimes wondered if he didn’t deliberately sabotage his own best laid plans and schemes—just for the fun of it, to see what would ensue from the chaos. He suspected there was a word in English for someone who did this, other than idiot of course, but couldn’t recall it. But then if your favourite strategy for any event was to toss everything in the air and wait to see where it fell, it was a good tactic to also stand back well out of the way.
The New Year started exceedingly well.
Gussy arrived as invited. He’d travelled frompater’shouse by train and then by taxi. Struggling out of the backseat, with a number of bags, he was initially dismayed to find the entire house devoid of Godmother, party, or servants, as anyone might in his situation. Barton Combe entertainments were renowned, and New Year was a particular favourite for everyone. Although the house was still decorated from Christmas, an almost eerie emptiness greeted him.
Aleksey leant in the doorway, watching him struggle. He was undergoing a minor internal conflict himself so didn’t help.
He wandered back into the kitchen and went through his plan once more. It wasn’t his best ever, for a number of reasons, so he switched to thinking about Ben, which was, he realised with a stab of confusion, becoming a bit of a bad habit.
Who knew badgers could be so dangerous?
Ben was being taken care of in a far better equipped clinic than if Aleksey had left him in the army, but that still did not totally assuage the guilt he’d felt seeing him so battered and bruised. He was allowed to batter and bruise Ben Rider, but he took exception when anyone else did it.
“…to eat?”
The sulky voice brought him back to the present, and he rewound a conversation he hadn’t been listening to. The Honourable standing hopefully at the open fridge door gave him a bit of a clue.
“No. I could catch and gut a dog for you, I expect. Philipa has enough.”
Gussy ignored him and sidled closer.
The hairs on Aleksey’s skin literally rose in revulsion.
He had started this thing with this man expressly to stop himself taking something very different from an entirely contrasting man. He understood himself enough to see this now. Hell, he’d known it from the start. He could have let any one of the handsome, arrogant young officers who filled the corridors in Whitehall, puffed up on their titles of Aide-de-Camp, suck him off, if that is all he had desired.
But over the long years of his life, he had honed to perfection the art of starving—you obviously had to eat something; eating things you despised helped the cravings.
He had learnt this important lesson many years before in a different language and in circumstances that had engrained them too well perhaps. He recalled weeks of not being able to eat, when only scraps were served and portioned out between two starving little boys.
But then, when entirely hollowed out, they were given surprise treat days: cakes, and melt-in-your-mouth cookies Nina baked for them. He refused to eat either—waited until he saw she was watching before he pushed his plate away. He wanted the stab of—had it been pain in her eyes? No, Aleksey had thought even then, aged only five or six, that it had been an understanding of power dynamics that he saw flit across her expression. Recognition that she had lost.
He had successfully applied his ability to resist such enticing snares to many things over the years, but particularly to sex, and it had worked.
Until it hadn’t, and the scraps, the tacky liaisons, the one-night stands with nameless others had nauseated him.
Aleksey shuddered; at least he’d neverliterallytaken a mouthful of this entitled little man. That was something. He had never touched the Mountbatten with anything other than a cock so well protected it would have withstood nuclear radiation.
Gustav was staring woefully into the empty hallway.
Then his face brightened and with a sly smirk he murmured, “Oh, you naughty, naughty man.” It had apparently just occurred to him that Aleksey had purposefully arranged for everyone to be away.
He had in a way, of course, although he suspected the other would not appreciate why.
Gustav came up with many suggestions to exploit thedeliciousnessof being alone with him.
They made Aleksey wonder how it would be to live in a house with someone you actually liked. It was something else he had been pondering since the kiss.
He thought he knew what he wanted from Ben Rider. But he had not yet worked this out in practical terms—how to occupy the same space as another human being without losing yourself in the process.
He wandered into the billiard room—his and Ben’s room—and recalled some of the encounters they’d enjoyed there. Billiard tables were incredibly stable and well made, they had both discovered and occasionally commented on. Even they had not moved this ancient one a single inch from its original position on the faded rug. He ran his hand along the edge. This was not a place he wanted tainted. He wouldn’t do it in here.
He moved on to his study.
It contained little more than a desk with a chair, and a computer on which he occasionally pretended to work. His real life, what there was of it, was in his house in London. There, his study was a little more—personalised. What would health-freak Ben Rider think about some of his recreational habits if he allowed Ben into that space? Not much he suspected.
No, he wouldn’t do it in the study either: the carpet was too expensive.
