He was totally insensible to Nikolas’s pleasure.
He didn’t need to think about anyone else, be something he wasn’t, or constantly please someone else.
Nikolas was free to walk anytime he wanted.He didn’t want to.
Nikolas Mikkelsen wasn’t going anywhere, and Ben exploited the power he now knew he had.
His need was urgent.He was desperate to come, thumping in, shifting angle, lifting hot flesh higher, holding it spread, kneeling to it and panting, and then finally he was there, flooding, light behind his eyes, and wave after wave of pure bliss washing down his spine and out into the needy, tight receptacle that met him pulse for pulse.
* * *
Nikolas dozed off.He didn’t blame himself too much when consciousness returned.After all, it had been a long few days.Also, he was very comfortable, despite lying face first on the carpet with something very heavy on his back.The weight was apparently asleep, if the slow, deep breathing was anything to go by.Ben deserved his sleep, too.
There was something in Nikolas’s mouth, and he tried, unsuccessfully and silently, to spit it out.This wasn’t an uncommon occurrence after sex, unpleasant, but to be expected.Easing his arm up without disturbing his sleeping burden, he removed the object.
Tinsel.Huh.That was new.
He smiled.It grew into a chuckle, which he repressed and turned into a stretch of deep contentment.Such undiluted pleasure hadn’t been destined to be his lot in life.He’d long resigned himself to the struggle, the hardship, the agony of being who he was.And then Ben Rider had come along.
What random circumstances brought people together.
How many twists of fate had put a man called Aleksey Primakov in the right place to take a phone call from the PM?
“One-upmanship with the bloody Americans…They’ve got torture protocols—yes, isn’t that amusingly ironic—I want some, too.Go to Hereford.”
The last thing Nikolas had wanted to do was watch some SAS soldiers being put through resistance to interrogation training.He hadn’t wanted to go to some ghastly town in Wales and then, worse, be driven out to the bleakest and most unpleasant place he’d seen since leaving Afghanistan—Sennybridge.Also in Wales, he was informed by his annoyingly cheerful driver.
Perhaps that day God had been taking a break from making Nikolas’s life miserable.Perhaps he’d actually decided to cut him some slack.However it had happened, his path had then crossed that of Ben Rider’s.Despite a few hiccups along the way—resistance and denial on his part—they’d not been uncrossed since that day.Tangled together.Literally.Lying beneath Ben, surrounded by the cast-off decorations, weak winter sun illuminating their naked bodies, Nikolas felt more one man than two, as if Ben’s returning memory had cemented closed the last little gap between them in their old relationship.He knew Ben felt something of this, too.
Ben moved with a new confidence, a more relaxed and easy-in-his-skin contentment.
It probably had something to do with the ridiculous pronouncementhe’dbeen forced to make in Burnley.Ben seemed inappropriately delighted by him having to say the G word.And cock, come to that.
Ben knew where he stood at last.
Nikolas had always known it of course.
His wealth, his power, his rank, his history, his intelligence, his cunning, and yet, despite it all, Ben was the centre of everything.The hub of their relationship.
Ben was itsheart.
Nikolas grinned evilly.God had made a big mistake that day if he thought watching soldiers being tortured would bring on some kind of epiphany in the Morningstar, a road to Damascus moment of confession and contrition.
He’d just gone and stolen one of God’s finest creations, his perfect warrior angel.
And he was keeping him.
* * *
Nikolas suspected Ulyana Ivanovna had never experienced what it must be like to be royalty before.She’d flown first class to Heathrow and he’d met her in arrivals, needing to hear his language for a few hours as desperately as she’d required his help to negotiate the confusions of the vast airport.Whisked to Devon on a dark December night, she hadn’t seen much of the English countryside, but as they crested the ridge of the valley, she’d caught her breath as though in pain.
Although the house was as familiar to Nikolas now as the smaller one in London, he knew exactly how it would strike her, this visitor from the Motherland.A glass palace lay in the bowl of darkness, totally illuminated like a castle from her girlhood folktales.It was wreathed in coloured lights, and, as it was snowing, even the fake snow spread around a large fake snowman on the lawns in front didn’t seem incongruous.As they crunched up on the gravel she exclaimed softly at the enormous tree surrounded by brightly wrapped presents in a room that glowed softly with a log fire that stretched into another room, and then another and then beyond.She began to chide him about the waste of electricity and the terrible insulator glass made but her Siberian wisdom was lost to a whirlwind of scarlet flying at her from the warmth.Emilia’s Russian was woeful still, but Nikolas could see they understood each other well enough.
Ulyana Ivanovna had only known Nikolas and Ben for a few months, but those months had been exceptional and had bonded them in a way people who hadn’t gone through such experiences could never really know.Welcoming her into the house, which was so beyond her experiences as a simple midwife from a logging camp two thousand miles from the nearest town, Nikolas felt he was greeting family.
He couldn’t help a stab of gratitude in his heart when Ben welcomed and embraced her as warmly as her granddaughter had.
* * *
