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A log settled on the fire with a small crunch, increasing the heat momentarily as it was consumed. Once more the tempo changed and Aleksey led them to match it. But they were both more than aware now that other thoughts were crossing their minds, other needs beginning to assert themselves. Aleksey listened to the new song for a moment, and then to Ben’s surprise, sang again. When challenged at this hitherto undiscovered vast repertoire of song lyrics, he just shrugged and replied playfully, “I have been laid up for three months with a baby tyrant watching Disney films. I now know songs no man should ever have to admit to. But this one is true, Ben. Itisenough for this restless warrior just to be with you.”
Ben hugged him possessively. “Can this be real? I keep thinking my life reaches these moments of perfection, but then I feel this ominous sense that something is coming. But I don’t feel that now. It’s just perfect. Youareperfect. Do you think the universe has stopped messing with us yet?—oh, and possibly another answer thanfuck fate. I’m not sure that did us much good last time.”
Aleksey chuckled, obviously enjoying the very tight hold and what was increasingly evident between them, something very difficult to hide for one man, let alone two. “I don’t know,min skat. I have always felt a very firm hand upon the helm of my course.”
“Hmm. And yet also that we all make our own destiny in life?”
Aleksey ruffled his hair a little in admonishment. “Two things can be true at once, Grasshopper. I think perhaps from the first time I saw your green eyes you have been the one controlling my destiny, and therefore I made my own course by choosing to take that terrifying first step of loving you. Do you see what I’m trying to say?”
“Nope. I never do. Shut up and dance.”
Aleksey nuzzled into Ben’s neck, his teeth pinching lightly, bites Ben knew well. Each sharp nip sent an equally intense jolt straight to his groin, firing off desire which flooded through his body like the purest alcohol.
They started to kiss, their feet stopping the slow sensuous dance, hands now roving across solid muscle, warm skin and hair.
Ben took a step back to catch his breath and held out his hand, his invitation obvious, but stated anyway. “Come to bed.”
Aleksey glanced down. Ben sometimes wondered if this beautiful man engineered this look so that his dark eyelashes, so rare on a blond-haired man, brushed across his prominent, scarred cheekbones. He suspected he did. But Aleksey only muttered, glancing at the dog, “Our great pretender should go out first.”
They both contemplated the huge hound, who to be fair to him didn’t appear to need to be going anywhere very fast. If anything, his legs had just disjointed a little more and his snoring become louder at the very suggestion he did.
“Do you think we’ll ever find out how he did it? Got back on his own across the moors, finding Squeezy and bringing him?”
Despite life’s current perfection, the strange, unexplained events of that December day still haunted Ben. For all the dangers and incredible peril they had faced in their lives, before and after meeting each other, they had become closer to being irrevocably separated that day than at any other time. And not just from Nikolas’s near-fatal accident in the mineshaft.
Ben had begun to understand that the real dangers in life were hidden in the mundane—it had just been a fall into a muddy hole mere walking distance from home.
But falls were dangerous.
Especially those off high pedestals.
* * *
Chapter 69
April. Today
Aleksey stretched a little, ignoring the constant ache in his leg, contemplating the dog, and considering his answer to Ben.
One day, when they had nothing better to do, he was planning to get Radulf to tell him exactly how he had pulled off his great rescue. There were many things he wanted to know. He still recalled the moron claiming that Radulf had told him to move back into the house—this return being at least a month before he was actually needed for dog-sitting while they were on holiday. A month before that need, possibly, but coincidentally only a few days before Squeezy being there saved their lives. Radulf could not have made it to the caravan by the cottage.
Strange coincidence.
So Ben’s question was a hard one for Aleksey to respond to, not least because it also crossed his mind occasionally that the dog had not performed this miraculous feat that day on Dartmoor at all, and that he and Ben had not, therefore, been saved. And even Ben appeared to be experiencing something of this sense of unreality—that all of this was too perfect.
So although he had not voiced this to Ben, Aleksey knew there was only one way that things could be so entirely faultless, and that was something he didn’t want to consider at all. But he was forced occasionally to contend with the belief that had come across him lying on the Dartmoor turf, that hewasactually dead, and that for some unfathomable reason he was now in heaven. Not a puffy cloud and pearly gates one, obviously, as if that were all true then he’d be going down fairly swiftly when the book of his life was opened and checked. But if something of a man lived on after death, some spark of memory, a flicker of his life’s desire, then this is exactly how he would have planned his own afterlife. This house, these friends, and, of course, this man.
Possibly without the leg traction though.
But how else could a man like him, given the things he had done, be living this moment with Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen?
Belief in his own death that day on Dartmoor hadn’t been helped, obviously, by being invited to his own funeral. It crossed his mind that he had actually attended his real burial earlier that day. But being dead, however, and thereby possibly a little confused, he’d only imagined the split parts of his personality being put beneath the ground, when in fact it had just been him. It was a tricky thing to decide, one way or the other.
If he were dead, though, his body was giving a pretty good impression of being very much alive.
Why had he not danced with Ben before now, in all the years which lay behind them? He didn’t think he’d ever done anything which had given him more unexpected and unplanned for pleasure. There would have to be a lot more dancing now—and perhaps more spontaneity in general. Perhaps trying to plan everything had not been such a good course for his life.
So, dancing. But maybe not so much singing. He grinned inwardly. It didn’t do to give away all your secrets. Which thought brought him nicely back to the dog, whose secrets were more than on display.
