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By the time the weekend was upon him, waking to frost on the windowpanes, Aleksey was feeling a little more charitable towards Ben Rider. He was considering forgiving the coldness and lack of apology he’d been offered at the hotel.
He’d discovered since then that Ben was living temporarily in a transit mess in Chelsea. SAS or ex that regiment, there was always a bed in a mess somewhere; that’s just what being in the family meant. But it was little more than squatting, and as Ben had lost all of his clothes and possessions except his bike and a set of running shorts, a little bit of tea and sympathy seemed the order of the day. But as he would have said, had he anyone to put his very reasonable point to, he’d never meant to explode theentirecottage.
He’d woken early for some reason, already thinking, as if he’d had a long conversation with someone whilst asleep that he was only now concluding, but could not remember what they’d been talking about. He felt tired as soon as he opened his eyes and a cigarette was not helping. He glanced to the other side of the bed, as if its unruffled perfection could tell him what the topic of this reflection was. Then he frowned, studied this unused space for a moment more and shifted imperceptibly into the cold middle. He’d never noticed before, but he slept on one side of the bed. He didn’t like being wrong-footed, ever, and he especially didn’t like it when he did it to himself.
Ben would arrive sometime in the middle of the morning, depending on traffic. Aleksey suddenly chuckled to himself and took a particularly long drag on his cigarette at the thought of other people on a road anywhere in the world who could affect Ben Rider’s speed. They’d once travelled to some hellhole English city for the same meeting—Nottingham, he seemed to remember—him in his Range Rover, and Ben supposedly following along on his bike because he’d needed to be somewhere else that evening. He’d been keeping his vehicle to a reasonable hundred and ten miles per hour on the motorway because it was tricky when you didn’t have a driving licence. It wasn’t something he could ask the typing pool to forge for him. The English, he’d discovered, could be entirely perfidious about things such as international espionage and assassination and other nefarious black ops, but the minor, trivial regulations of a nanny state were followed to the letter. Five in the morning, the road had been empty in front and behind, until a speck in black had appeared in his rear-view mirror. The next time he’d glanced up, Ben had been right behind him. Then he’d undertaken in the inner lane and powered past him so fast that Aleksey’d reckoned the bike wasn’t getting much change out of a hundred and eighty.
Aleksey tracked Ben’s route from Chelsea to Devon in his mind’s eye, thinking about the leathers (huh, they’d be new ones now, he supposed), tight on Ben’s tanned skin, how he ran his fingers through his hair as he wrenched off his helmet, how, when he first arrived, he was like a barely contained explosion of need from the exhilaration of the speed. And then Aleksey’s thoughts inevitably drifted south.
He was the spark that ignited that great release. And even he did not know why this was. Most people avoided him. But for some reason, Ben saw in him what others could not, and what Ben saw inflamed him.
They could not keep their hands off each other.
Aleksey was as unable to control this physical reaction he had to Ben as Ben was to contain the blast.
Aleksey had the strength of will to avoid seeing Ben at all. He sent him on ops in an attempt to break this dynamic between them. But for four years now when they did meet it was actually physically dangerous for both of them.
Aleksey lit another cigarette and watched the smoke curl above his head to the ancient, flaking ceiling above him. He mapped the day in his head. Their activities were somewhat dependent on Ben’s mood when he arrived. Sometimes, he was entirely relaxed and delightfully charming in his own unpolished way. Sometimes his demons drove him, and he needed coaxing carefully to submission. This was probably going to be one of those weekends.
Aleksey made allowances for Ben that he did not make for other people. But then Aleksey knew things about Ben Rider that Ben would probably wish he didn’t.
Ben had not known love in his life either.
Aleksey tried not to overtly dwell too much on his own childhood. It was ever there, controlling who he was and how he responded to every situation; he knew this and accepted it would never change. Such damage couldn’t be forgotten or overcome, but it could be repressed. Like his reflection in the mirror, he actively chose, day after day, to avoid it.
But lack of love leaves something hollow inside a person, and Ben’s aching emptiness was so obvious to him he was only surprised other people weren’t aware of it. They only seemed to see the charming, beautiful young man, always willing to help, always confident, always smiling self-deprecatingly at the incredible gift of physical perfection life had handed him.
But Ben’s growling emptiness sometimes darkened his mood, made him angry. And coming to Barton Combe didn’t help, of course. Which is probably why Aleksey invited him all the time. It clearly infuriated Ben that people could live in such unearned luxury, and yet he loved the house and the perfection Philipa created within it. This place was serene, beautiful, and Ben yearned for it, yet reviled it at the same time.
Ben desperately wanted his hunger for love and security assuaged, but did not even recognise this need for what it was.
Aleksey stabbed out his cigarette and decided he’d thought long enough about Benjamin Rider. He occasionally wondered if Ben wasted as much time thinking about him. He suspected he didn’t, which was at the very heart of his dilemma really.
It was all very well understanding this infuriatingly beautiful young man, knowing how he thought, what drove him, playing him like a fucking piano concerto, when in reality you knew fuck all about the most critical thing of all. What did Ben want from him?
What was Ben thinking, even now, in those new leathers, on his beloved bike, arriving to see him?
Aleksey had no fucking idea, and more importantly, he couldn’t see a way to find out. If his childhood had taught him one thing, it had taught him that wanting to be loved only got you beaten, starved and sodomised.
And that had just been his parents.
* * *
Aleksey watched Benjamin stride into the kitchen from the corner of his eye, knowing Philipa was probably lurking expressly to observe this small drama.
Ben was still angry. He particularly enjoyed Ben Rider when he was stonily trying to aggravate him. He was almost at his most endearing. It was like a very young cub chewing on a tail, thinking he had the better of the alpha male lion he was nibbling.
Philipa gave him a conspiratorial eyebrow flick and left them to it.
He sensed Ben wouldn’t agree to accompany him up to bed immediately, so suggested Ben’s next favourite activity after eating, which he was already doing with his usual alacrity, polishing off a plate of mince pies that would have fed half a dozen people. Actually, Aleksey reflected, if push came to shove, he wouldn’t put sex with him higher on Benjamin Rider’s list of priorities than food. Ben, in his odd brain, had apparently decided early on in life that eating could fill his emotional void. Aleksey could have told him, if asked, that it was better to stay hungry.
Satiating needs gave them power over you.
Ben agreed to the proposed ride.
As they saddled up, Aleksey debated bringing up the subject of the fire again. They didn’t have much in common, Sir Nikolas Mikkelsen and Benjamin Rider, so conversation was always something of a trial. Aleksey, of course, could have thought up an endless stream of interesting and amusing things to share with Ben. Had there not been this deceit between them, Aleksey would have been more than happy to give Ben the benefit of his observations on all sorts of matters. He pictured doing it occasionally, and it always made him laugh.
Once again, he began to dwell on the disadvantages of playing this role. Enforced silence and shadows. He didn’t see himself as a man of either of these things. Anyone who had known Aleksey Mikkelsen as a boy would not have thought so, that was for sure.
