Kate shifted her chair a little closer to Ben for support.“It’s not enough to just call.We think you should—”
“No.Why am I having this conversation again?I’ve told you no.”
She held her ground, despite his attempt to intimidate her.“You need to speak with the patients—clients?Not just the staff, and you can’t do that unless—”
“I’m not going to fucking attend a gay counselling course!Do you all understand?”
She hardly flinched, just a tiny flicker of an eye, but it could have been anger repressed.She turned immediately to Ben.
“Right.Okay.So, you and Tim will go, yes?”
Ben nodded.“Do the profiles work for us as well?”
She wobbled her hand.“Not as well, but…” She began to rummage in her bag for folders.
Nikolas stood up and went to the counter, his back to them.“Ben isn’t going either.”
* * *
Ben felt a surge of unexpected fury toward Nikolas.He didn’t mind Nikolas owning him when they were just the two of them, because then there was only one person present who believed this fiction—Nikolas.In front of Kate, however, it was humiliating—especially after her insinuation that he was…that he and Nikolas were…He stood up.Before he could work out a good strategy to counter this infuriating pronouncement, Kate fumed, “YouoweMichael.I wasthere, remember?Isawhim.”
Nikolas looked around slowly.Ben stared at him then Kate with a frown, sensing he was missing something.
Suddenly, she added, “Anyway, Tim can’t do this.You know he can’t.Butyoucan.”
Nikolas sat back at the table and put his head in hands.“I would rather be chained in a hunting shed and tortured.Oh, wait, I’ve already done that.”
Ben sat uneasily back down.“What do you mean, you saw him?”
At exactly the same time, Nikolas and Kate chorused, “Never mind,” which made them both smile at each other.She immediately apologised for nothing in particular, and he nodded, apparently accepting it any way he wanted.He ran his fingers through his hair, sat up straighter and relented, “Tell me about this plan of yours—that you’ve obviously been concocting behind my back.”He twitched the corner of his lips at Ben.“And I’m sorry.I obviously didn’t mean to tell you what you can and can’t do.”
* * *
Kate’s eyebrows rose fractionally, and she busied herself in her bag, hiding her expression.She couldn’t remember Sir Nikolas Mikkelsen apologising for anything to anyone in the eleven years she’d known him, and resisted peering under the table to see if touching of feet was ongoing.
Ben waited until she’d taken some folders out of her bag then explained, “We plan to get onto the course properly—infiltrate it as a couple recommended by Doctor Wood.So Kate’s been waiting for a suitable couple just about to go—age wise.We haven’t got time to get the perfect match.It’ll have to be good enough.”
Sensing Ben was wilting under Nikolas’s skeptical expression, Kate took over.“The doctor had a couple in yesterday who were longstanding patients of his.He wasn’t making any headway with them and persuaded them to give this course a go.They’re not ideal, but they’re the only ones remotely possible, unless you want to wait…?”
Ben shook his head.“No, we need to move on this now.Whatever Squeezy’s up to, we should do this concurrently.”
Nikolas just nodded, staring glumly at the folders.
“Okay then.These two.Similar ages to you two: forty-eight and thirty-eight…” She got an immediate chorus of outrage that she thought Nikolas could pass as forty-eight and Ben thirty-eight.She was highly amused that each defended the other.“Close enough, yeah?Sheesh.I’ve hacked their case notes from the doctor’s database, so you can read up on their profiles and all the history of their therapy.”
Nikolas eased a file towards him with the enthusiasm of a man pulling over his prostate cancer prognosis notes.He didn’t open the folder.Ben did the same with his.Suppressing a smile, Kate added, “I’ll give you the brief details, but you need to read up on them and—and I’m teaching old ladies to suck eggs, yeah?”
Nikolas frowned deeply at this and appeared to be about to ask for clarification so she continued quickly, “Nigel Stannis is forty-eight—”
“Nigel?”
Ben bit his lip, apparently at Nikolas’s disbelieving tone.
“—and owns a shop in Camden.A florist and—” She lowered her gaze to the hand on her arm then raised it to meet cold amber eyes.
“A florist?A gay florist called Nigel.Ben put you up to this, yes?”
She shook her head faintly and tapped the file he had in front of him.“What did you think they were going to be?Ex-Special Forces?”She turned to Ben.“Nigel’s boyfriend, Justin, is thirty-eight.He’s a chef, but he’s—”
