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Squeezy sighed and lifted up enough to rest his chin on the back of one hand, gesturing with a weary finger to the laptop. “What ya doing?”
Ben felt a little guilty replying, “Looking for a holiday—for me and Nik.” Squeezy’s eyes widened. Ben added, with clenched jaw, suspecting his friend had also been about to ask from what, “We need to be out of the country before the New Year…for the wedding.”
“What about me? Can’t I come too?”
Ben heard a tiny sound of repressed amusement from his other half, but tried not to respond in kind. He dug deep into his knowledge of human psychology but came up blank, so was incredibly relieved when Nikolas said in all seriousness, “I need you here when I’m not. I could not now go anywhere unless I knew you were.”
Squeezy wrinkled his nose, scrunched his face, dug a cuticle for a moment, then replied quietly, “She’d be here…Sunshine.”
Nikolas snorted. “She would. But you are my…what is the word in English? Huh, I don’t know it.”
Ben and Squeezy glanced at each other. Nikolas apparently caught the look and added, as if he were merely commenting on the weather, “You are my sword—my projection of force. You relieve the third strand.”
Squeezy, wisely in Ben’s opinion, appeared to decide not to ask what this actually meant, nor to protest his exclusion from the holiday further. If studied closely, Ben would almost have said there was a smirk of pure pleasure around the annoying one’s lips.
Squeezy relaxed back into his chair. “So, where you going?”
Ben hunched his shoulders a little. “We can’t decide on anywhere or what we’d both like to do.”
Squeezy’s brows rose and after a moment he suggested, “How about a tennis camp? Boss could play against some rankers and you could…well, you could learn how to get it over the net.”
Ben narrowed his eyes. His prowess at tennis against Nikolas was a bit of a standing joke in the family community. Even Molly boasted she could beat him. She had apparently not learnt yet, being only three, that nice adults let children beat them at things. Nikolas, obviously, never let anyone beat him at anything and roundly trounced any takers. Ben then pictured Nikolas floundering against a genuine seeded player and had to grin. He’d pay to see it.
He glanced over at Nikolas and Nikolas was frowning, staring at Squeezy. He muttered in Danish, “Has something sensible just come out of that mouth?”
“You like the idea?”
Nikolas shrugged. “I do not think such places exist, but…” He waved his permission imperiously at the laptop.
* * *
It was whilst mulling over Squeezy’s surprisingly intelligent contribution later that day that Ben’s brainwave of the previous evening came to fruition. Nikolas helped by appearing in his riding clothes and saying casually that he was going for a longer gallop than usual, given his abortive attempts the previous day.
Ben was about to suggest he come too, when the thought that had sparked this enthusiasm—I couldn’t think of a better way to spend a few hours—rubbed up against the Squeezy-inspired activity-holiday idea and completed his brainwave.
A riding holiday.
It was perfect.
But did such things exist?
He went into Nikolas’s study, enjoying the slight sense of transgression—he wasn’t banned from using Nik’s office, or the computer come to that, but he had been once. Times changed. Nikolas had changed.
Smiling to himself, he once more did some Googling and discovered that indeed riding holidays did exist. All over the world, apparently.
He dismissed most of the locations. They’d both been to many countries ending instanin different circumstances, and Ben was pretty sure neither of them wanted to return. Similarly, breaks in remote places he’d never actually heard of were binned quickly. He and Nikolas were disaster magnets, as they were only too willing to admit, and the last thing they needed was unpronounceable destinations.
There was really only one option.
The trouble was, this one came with an unfortunate downside.
Ben didn’t know everything there was to know about Nikolas Mikkelsen, even after their many years together, but one thing he did—Nikolas would not go anywhere related to the worddude. He just wouldn’t. That aspect of a ranch holiday in the United States of America had to be completely and utterly suppressed.
* * *
Chapter 11
Fourteen Years Ago
