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Ben held his gaze, pinned as he was to the chair by Aleksey’s booted foot, which he held pressed to Ben’s chest. After a moment, he lowered it back to the floor, and they were at something of an impasse.
Aleksey sensed it would only take one move on his part to turn this into something they would both presumably prefer, so he stayed very still, drilling Ben only with his eyes.
“I’ve been gone a whole month.”
“As you are my employee, I am clearly aware of that.”
“Well I wondered.” He made a small finger gesture towards the TV.
“Perhaps you have somewhere you would rather be?” He was risking things a little with this observation, as for a few months Ben had apparently found one Kate Armstrong’s bed quite a convenient place to be after operations. It was inevitable, Aleksey supposed, that two beautiful people working in the same organisation would inevitably be attracted to each other. And Kate, a skilful computer scientist he employed in his amusing termedtyping pool,had a remoteness about her which would attract someone like Ben.
But both he and Ben seemed to have agreed now that such a sharp swerve, such a ridiculous u-turn from whatever it was they had together, was a fiction Ben couldn’t carry off sufficiently well to fool either of them.
Ben, therefore, ignored the implication, as Aleksey had suspected he might. Instead, he made a small, unmistakable gesture with his hand, asking permission to rise, and Aleksey stood back.
Backing slowly, Ben retrieved his bag and slung it across his shoulder.
Still not breaking eye contact, possibly waiting for some encouragement to stay, he walked purposefully around Aleksey then turned and faced the door.
“Are you going to ask me how it went?”
“I run the Department, Benjamin; I do not need to ask.”
“I didn’t mean the doctors.”
Ah. Aleksey did want to ask this. He’d been wanting to ask this for the whole month.
When Ben got no reply to his observation, he took a breath and walked out.
As he watched the broad back leaving, it occurred to Aleksey that the meeting might have gone better had he admitted he’d had a miserable few weeks imagining Ben with Salma Barakat and that he’d missed him very much indeed.
* * *
Chapter 25
Four Months Before April
The first time Ben had seen the elegant, ancient manor house of Barton Combe he’d been a very different man. A formless one, ready to be moulded into something new. He had arrived on his bike, having been invited for the weekend during his first interview by his prospective new boss: Sir Nikolas Mikkelsen. He hadn’t wanted a new job, didn’t know why he’d been told to attend an interview in Whitehall, and had arrived in SW1A slightly crumpled and angry because there were far better things to be doing in London, in his opinion, than meeting with a suit. Ben didn’t like civil servants. No one in uniform liked civil servants. Especially the Whitehall variety.
But this one…
This servant of the Crown had risen from behind his desk to shake Ben’s outstretched hand—Mr Rider, thank you for coming—and Ben’s world had shifted on its axis. Perhaps it had only been the first realigning of the sculpting and shaping that was to come. This man, to put it mildly, was not like the others. He’d seemed almost gaunt initially to Ben’s quick assessment, but the grip on his fingers had put the word rangy into his head instead. The man was weathered into steel. He was vain though, intensely so. Ben had recognised the trait in the foreigner as easily as he suspected it in himself. As he’d sat once more, Sir Nikolas had neatly positioned himself into a liquid wavering of sunlight reflected off the river through a vast window commanding a startling view of the Thames. The man’s golden hair had been illuminated through this conceit, and Ben had repressed a smile as he’d sat in the relative gloom.
Only a predator serenely secure in his own territory displayed itself so; it wouldn't even pretend to hide in the shadows.
Until this one had.
As if reading Ben's mind as easily as he might have read the documents in his in-tray, the thin, silent administrator had turned his chair so his back was to the sun, his face then entirely shadowed, hidden, leaving Ben squinting into the light.
Ben hadn’t been used to such thoughts—predators, shadows, prey—and his confusion at thinking them had made him seem dumber than he usually was. Maybe it had been the odd questioning, or perhaps the strange leaps of subject matter, possibly even the way the man had stared at him but had not listened to anything he’d said, but Ben had become more and more self-conscious in his presence. Buthewas British Special Forces, and this jumped-up office worker wasn’t even English. So Ben had rallied, it’s what he did.
This memory made him smile now as he drove their little family on the familiar lanes towards Philipa’s house—Philipa and Nikolas’s old marital home—Nikolas absentmindedly turning the little brown package, the object of this visit, around in his hands. Ben glanced quickly at the striking profile in the passenger seat next to him, wondering if Nik was remembering that first weekend, too.
Remembering Nikolas’s past never worked out too well for them.
The future however…Ben grinned to himself as he overtook a slow-moving tractor. The future seemed to him now to be a bright upland towards which they flew in tandem, still hungry for each other, still aloft on the winds of circumstance and owning the sunshine. He glanced behind at the little figure fast asleep in her child seat and at the vast creature upside-down in the remaining space, head hanging off, jowls flopping and hairy belly exposed. Their third companion was nothing more than an ominous presence in a crate in the boot. PB didn’t like his crate, Squeezy maintained. All wolves resent confinement.
Their family. Quirky as it was. He turned his attention back to the road. Back to his thoughts about Nikolas.
