Love is a Stranger (34 page)

Nikolas relented reluctantly. “I need some exercise though. We could climb the hill.”

“No, it’ll pull your stitches. Let’s explore the grounds. Come on, Gaylord…” He heaved Nik up.

They began to follow the stream away from the bridge. It ran through a dark tangle of rhododendron for half a mile or so and then emerged onto open moorland. At that point, they found the remains of an old dry stonewall that appeared to run around the grounds, dividing them from the open moor. They crossed it and walked on the open moorland down the western edge of the grounds. They seemed to run for about a mile. Nikolas was limping visibly now, although he seemed unconcerned and was chewing a stalk of grass. Ben decided to cut back through the grounds to shorten the walk for him, but it proved hard to move through the overgrown tangle.

Eventually the oaks thinned, and they came to a clearing with a stone chapel. They stood looking at it for some time, both seemingly unwilling to point out the obvious. Everything felt unreal before but
this
was positively fairytale. Nikolas was the first to move because he wanted to sit down for a while. He went around the chapel to the door, glanced at Ben, and pushed it. Of course it swung open—why would it not? After all, he was the ghost of a dead man in a make-believe place. Inside, the heat of the sun immediately vanished. The stone exuded cold chill, but there was a timeless quality to the air as if the cold kept its secrets. Nik lowered himself gratefully to a pew and lifted his leg, stretching it out. Ben went up to the altar. He realised he was walking on engraved stone and stepped back, reading. “William de Redvers, 1802-1874. God grant him peace.” He turned at a slight exclamation from Nikolas, who appeared about to say something but then made a peculiarly European gesture of dismissal with his hand and began to read some of the carved graffiti on the pew with great interest. Ben went up to the altar and stared up at the small, exquisite stained-glass window. “Why do you think this is all abandoned? It doesn’t make any sense.”

“I don’t know, but maybe it is not that unusual for the very wealthy? My estates near Copenhagen and on Aeroe are empty: the villa, the farms, the summerhouse. I haven’t wanted to do anything with them. It seems too wrong to sell them, as they are family history, but I haven’t wanted that history—or that family, particularly. These things are complex.”

“I wouldn’t know. I grew up in a council house. When my dad died, if I hadn’t joined the army, I’d have been homeless.”

Nikolas was watching him with an odd expression, but he didn’t comment, only changed the subject by saying, “We should get back. I have maybe gone too far.” Ben took it very slowly on the way back, a direct route from the chapel to the house, about half a mile on an overgrown path. They emerged at the edge of what must have been a tennis court but, neglected, was now just a vague reminder of one. Ben toed the grass. “You play?”

“Of course. I told you, I had the finest education money and influence could buy. You?”

“Nope. Tennis is for posh buggers.”

Nikolas was silent for a moment. “I could teach you, if you would like? Later, of course. When I am healed and can beat you.”

Ben turned to him and suddenly grinned. “You’re fighting back at last.” Nikolas narrowed his eyes. “When you first got here, you were resigned to your fate—what you thought you deserved. You’d waited so long for your past to catch you up, and then it did…But now you want your life back. Your future.” Nikolas pursed his lips, studying Ben for a moment, and then he continued walking slowly. He held out his arm, indicating he needed Ben to lean on.

He seemed very thoughtful on the way back. Ben attributed this to the pain he must be in, but just as they reached the house, Nikolas suddenly said, “I didn’t expect to see you again. If you had lied to me as I lied to you, I would’ve wanted to kill you. But you were here. If I want a future, Ben, then it is because of you.”

Ben privately basked in the unexpected and rare praise but only commented dryly, “You only lied by omission, remember? You never told me anything anyway.”

Ben helped Nikolas upstairs to the bedroom. Just before he lowered him to his sleeping bag, Nikolas grabbed Ben’s T-shirt and pulled him in for a kiss. As it always did between them, desire sparked. Nikolas groaned and put his hand down to Ben’s jeans, feeling the growing hardness. Ben batted his hand away. “No, you need to rest. I’ll take care of it myself. I still remember how.” He eased Nikolas down to the bed, but Nikolas didn’t let go of his hand.

“Stay. Let me watch.”

Ben was outraged. “No way.”

“Ben…” He pulled him down again, but they both knew Ben only fell because he wanted to. Nikolas slowly peeled Ben’s jeans down then lay back to watch, his face partially obscured by shadows. Ben was fully illuminated in a streak of light through the mullioned windows. He took hold of his cock, and at exactly the same time, they both moaned. It was all the encouragement Ben needed to be fully aroused, despite the unfamiliar exhibitionism. He began long pulls, twisting his foreskin at the end. He held out his palm, and Nikolas spat on it, no words needed. They smiled at each other as he continued, slick now and faster. His cock was high, hard and tight. He could feel his balls, rising and ready. He leant forward and groaned, “Open your mouth.” Nikolas shook his head.

“I want to see.”

Ben groaned, out of control now. He just turned away, arched his hips forward and came, strings of milky cum shooting out and splattering to the old wooden floor. He fell forward, braced on one hand. One more tug, one more spill, and he was done. He lowered himself slowly to one side of the dampness and lay face down, his heart racing. Eventually, he flung an arm over Nikolas. By the silence, Ben guessed he was already asleep. He curled in close, breathing in Nikolas’s scent, so evocative, so…familiar, and fell asleep on the reassuring thought that the most important things in his world hadn’t changed at all.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

The next day, the stitches came out in a painful but satisfactory job. Ben had put stitches in more than once, often on himself, but he’d never taken them out. He didn’t want to hurt Nikolas, but couldn’t help finding it funny when the stoic Special Forces Russian fussed and whined and swore throughout the whole operation. He took it as a sign of return to health and Nikolas-ness and tuned him out.

When it was over, the patient lay back exhausted, but after half an hour, he was flexing his knee, testing the wounds, and then he was up and taking careful steps. He seemed satisfied. “Good. A few more days and then we leave.”

“Where?”

“Well, I have come up with another option, but I don’t think you’re going to like it.”

“Uh huh.”

“You were right. I do want a future, and I want it with you. I don’t believe we can have that on the run. Neither do I believe that Gregory will accept a pay off for long. He would be greedy. He is Russian, after all. But what if I resurrected the idea of our agency—and I asked him to join us.”

Ben was silent for a moment then said as calmly as he could, “Well, you’re right about one thing—I don’t like it.” Then he let rip. “
What the fuck! He’s trying to kill you
!”

Nikolas did his irritating European gesture of dismissal. “In a way, yes. But he’s angry and bitter, and that is mostly because I did what we all dream of, I escaped. No one escapes from Zaslon, Ben. It wouldn’t be permitted. But I did it. What if I offered him the same opportunity? With my—our—help, he becomes a wealthy British citizen with a job. A new start. He couldn’t do this without my money and my help, but I believe he would go for it. After all, despite the fact he’s currently trying to kill me, we were friends once. Good friends. Close friends…in some ways.”

“How close?”

“Close enough for me to know how he thinks and he me. There’s a saying in Russia: keep your friends close but your enemies closer.”

“Yeah, yeah, everyone has that expression.”

“Well, there you go. It must be true.”

“What’s he like?”

Nikolas studied Ben for a long while. Then he began to laugh. He couldn’t stop. Eventually he coughed out, “You will hate him, but he will not…hate you. Not at all.” And that was all he would say, until the laughter made one of the cuts on his chest bleed again, and he had to allow Ben to stick it together with some tape. Even then, every time he looked at Ben’s increasingly stony expression, he clenched his jaw to keep his face straight.

Ben decided to go for a run. He needed the exercise, but mostly he wanted to get away from Nikolas for a while so he could think about the latest option without the distracting presence of the man he just wanted to lose himself to every time he was near. He felt that disquieting slipping away of his own identity with this new
Aleksey
even more forcibly than he’d felt it with the old, more aloof Nikolas. He put on his boots and some old lightweights, called for the dog, and set off up the tor, and then headed off into the open moorland. He’d only been gone an hour when the mist came down, and what had been a hot summer day turned into a cold, wet world of uneven ground and unreliable footholds. After falling for a second time, he reckoned he was only persevering to prove some point that no one but he was bothered about anyway, so he turned around and headed back, slightly more careful and making sure Radulf stayed close to his side. The mist lessened as he descended from the tor, but by then a steady drizzle had begun, which turned into heavy rain by the time he’d splashed over the stream-covered bridge and made it back to the house. He was very cold, wet, and muddy, and for the first time began to see some disadvantages to his plan of camping out in an unfurnished house.

He was bending in the doorway to the kitchen, removing his boots, when he sensed Nikolas in the room watching him. Nikolas held out a towel, and when Ben came closer began to rub his hair with it. He undressed Ben, peeling off his wet clothes and then pulled him closer to the fireplace, where he’d lit a fire and hung one of the sleeping bags to warm. Ben let him wrap it around him wordlessly. It was the first time Nikolas had ever really looked after him the way he constantly and naturally looked after Nikolas, and it left him bemused and off balance. When he had Ben sitting by the fire, Nikolas slipped in behind him, stretching his injured leg out carefully. He sighed, sliding his warm hands in under the sleeping bag and across Ben’s cold stomach. He kissed into his neck and seemed quite content just sitting there watching the flames with the sound of the rain beating down outside.

Gradually, Ben grew warm and stopped shivering. He relaxed back into Nikolas’s arms, which tightened almost automatically around him. As the minutes passed, the atmosphere of the old house began to work its strange magic on Ben. He felt compelled to think about his mother. Perhaps being wet and cold from a moorland run was reminiscent of his time as a boy in Yorkshire. He almost felt as if she were in the room with him. He could picture her there, sure enough, humming something tuneful as she rolled pastry. Had she ever rolled pastry? He couldn’t remember. He felt Nikolas shift position a little behind him. He wondered how many times he had sat with this man, or lain with him after sex, when Nikolas had been thinking about his past, his mother perhaps, stirred to sad memories by something he, Ben, had said or done unconscious of the effect this would have on the other. How had Nikolas stayed silent about his mother during their trip to Saddleworth? “
It is your mother’s grave, Benjamin. Even you are allowed to cry here
.” It saddened and infuriated Ben in equal measure that Nikolas was so unable or unwilling to unburden himself. He hadn’t even had a body to morn. Ten years old, swimming out in a frozen ocean, seeking her…It made him shiver to think about it.

“Are you still cold?”

Ben bit his lip and shook his head slightly. “Tell me about your mother. What do you remember about her?”

Nikolas sighed. “More questions. You should have been employed by the Inquisition, Benjamin.”

“I want to know.”
I want you to talk about it.

“That’s something I don’t like to talk about.”

Ben shook his head despairingly but amused by the exact repetition of his internal dialogue. “You don’t like talking about anything.”

“The other things I don’t like because they don’t paint me in a good light, and as you know, I like to be the perfect, shining hero of all your imaginings. Stop laughing, you are hurting my leg. This I do not like to talk about because it’s painful.”

“You do remember her then?”

“Of course, foolish child. I was ten. Two years older than you when your mother died.”

“Was she—? I mean, did you suspect she would ever…?”