Ben poured him a glass of wine and ruffled his hair as he handed it over with a plate of food. There wasn’t much room left on the table. He shoved some of the china to one side, but with a smirk at the hissed intake of horrified breath.
Aleksey sat up and drank some of the wine. ‘Speaking of little old ladies. Phillipa told me something very odd. Do you recall her talking about the old servant she had visited on Benhar before she came across to see us?’
‘Yeah. The one who’d hated her or something?’
‘Left when she went to work at the palace nursery, yes.’
‘Work—my arse.’
‘I’m planning to later.’
Ben laughed and leaned back in his chair, his meal already inhaled. He topped up both their glasses. It was going to be a good night.
‘So, what about her?’
‘She said she was murdered. Early this morning.’
‘Wow. That can’t be common on Scilly. Everyone knows everyone.’
‘Exactly. It has the lowest crime rate anywhere I should think.’
Ben stared at him.
‘What?’ He got it. ‘Ack, I said crime rate, notdeathrate. Saving the world, as you so astutely put it to Phillipa, is notcriminal.’ He pushed away his chair and stood, holding out his hand. ‘Come. Let us go and do some things that were once highly illegal.’
He wasn’t hiding his need very well.
Ben smirked at the sight and accepted the tug to his feet. In an almost synchronised move they brushed their hips together and hissed at the same time, groin rubbing against groin. The frisson of need which tingled along his spine made him groan softly into a kiss.
There was a sharp rap on the glass. They shot apart and stared at the figure peering in at them. ‘Jesus! Molly?’ Ben strode over and wrenched the door open. Molly was in her pyjamas, bare feet, hair loose and tangled down her back. It appeared as if she’d been running. She dashed inside, flung herself into Aleksey’s arms and screamed, ‘I can’t find her! She’s run away! She’s lost,’ and then burst into tears, burying her face into his neck.
Sarah came panting across the gravel, also in her nightclothes. She reached the kitchen and put her hands on her knees to recover her breath. ‘I’m so sorry. She was out of the house before I could stop her. Miss Meow is missing. We can’t find her anywhere.’
Molly lifted her head to add, wailing hysterically, ‘She’s dead! My kitty! Oh, papa, I want her! Ineedher!’
He nodded to Ben. ‘Bring some torches.’
Ben gave him a look. He returned it.
He carried Molly back through the woods to Babushka’s house and went up to her bedroom. Ben came in behind him, clicking one of the flashlights on and off and asked, ‘Where did you last see her, sweetheart?’
Molly was hiccupping and too shaky to reply, so Sarah explained, ‘She was on the end of the bed, wasn’t she, darling—at bedtime. Then I came in to check on her before I went to bed. Molly woke up and needed to go to the—well, we were just sorting that out, and she saw Miss Meow wasn’t there.’
‘So where have you looked?’ Ben wasn’t sounding all that sympathetic to Aleksey’s ears.
‘Well, I didn’t get much chance because she suddenly flew out and…came to get you…sorry, Ben.’
Aleksey was looking at the dolls’ house.
He opened the front flap.
He let Ben have the pleasure of restoring the scrap of floppy ginger fluff to its tearful owner. Then she said Miss Meow wanted a story.
He left them all to it and returned to the house frustrated and horny.
He texted Peyton.
He didn’t even know what fucking causation and correlation meant. It was something he just heard annoying people say. In his experience, there were no coincidences in life.
