Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Kate came down to the house two days later. She’d been reading the transcripts from sessions of gay men in crisis since she’d hacked Doctor Wood’s computer, so she wasn’t in the best of moods.
She sighed as she came into the kitchen. “Where is he?”
“Riding. He’ll be back soon. What’ve you got?”
“The ideal couple. Have you talked him around yet?”
Ben shook his head. “I haven’t mentioned it again. I thought it was best to wait till you had something. Is it going to work?”
“I’ll wait till he’s here, save me going through it twice.
Thanks.” She took her tea to the table and sat sipping it thoughtfully as she looked around the vast, impressive kitchen.
She smiled privately and glanced at Ben.
He brought his tea to the table and pushed over a plate of biscuits.
She nibbled the edge of one. The atmosphere was a little awkward.
A few years ago they’d have been ripping each other’s clothes off, not drinking tea and thinking of something to say.
She remembered Ben Rider’s body extremely well.
It wasn’t something you forgot. She remembered waking up alongside him, awed at his beauty, jealous of his beauty, which seemed to take no effort to maintain.
Although Kate had once told Ben she’d always known he was gay, she’d lied.
She’d not sensed anything from him to hint at this, except perhaps a cold remoteness when they made love, which she’d put down to his job—a sense he was going through the motions rather than connecting.
Sometimes, in quiet moments, she compared herself to Nikolas Mikkelsen, trying to assess how and why Ben had decided he preferred that body to hers, that person to her.
She couldn’t begin to imagine living with her boss.
None of them working in ANGEL could. None of them knew how Ben put up with him.
They all revered him, respected him, obeyed him, worked for him, but they all—even Squeezy who wanted to fuck him—admitted Nikolas unnerved them, exhausted them, and confused them.
Ben seemed to float over the tumultuous ocean storms of Nikolas’s presence like a tranquil cloud, entirely unaffected.
Which to a casual observer might appear as if the things Nikolas did and said didn’t affect Ben, which of course wasn’t true.
She sometimes wondered what would happen to Ben if Nikolas cheated on him.
Then they’d all see the truth of the relationship: Ben wasn’t the cloud floating above the storm; he was the decreasing pressure causing it, and thus the storm was a manifestation of him.
He kept Nikolas Mikkelsen bound to him, and controlled every which way he raged.
Kate didn’t relish seeing the storm unleashed, set free to roam on its own and decide its own shape and power.
She shivered, trying to cast aside gloomy thoughts.
But she couldn’t shake the impression made upon her by the men she’d studied as they poured forth their despair.
“Are you out, Ben?”
Ben choked a little on his biscuit (his fourth). “What the fuck?”
“No, seriously. Do you and Sir Nikolas go out as a gay couple?” Ben was now by the kettle, back to her, finding something that urgently had to be done on the counter. “I guess you haven’t had families to come out to…Do you…?”
Ben looked as if he’d never been so glad to hear Nikolas return.
Nikolas nodded to Kate, clearly surprised to see her, ignored Ben and sat down at the table with an expectant fold of his arms. “Well? He’s returned. That’s why you’re here, no?”
She gestured to Ben and he sat down in the spare chair.
She saw Nikolas flick his eyes to Ben for a moment, frown slightly as if he sensed something wrong, and then, although she couldn’t see this or confirm it, she knew without a doubt he’d slid his foot over, for Ben glanced at him with a small smile of reassurance.
She pouted a little as she pulled the info she wanted from her briefcase along with her laptop.
She didn’t remember having that silent communication with Ben at all.
She remembered trips to a motorcycle showroom.
She remembered the sex. She remembered a few dates to violent movies.
Nikolas raised his brows at Kate in expectation. She shook her head. “He’s still missing.”
“Idiot. Well, he’ll come back when he’s worked it out of his system. I’m going for a swim.” Before he could rise, Ben put a hand on his arm.
“Nik, there’s something wrong about all this. You know that.”
“I know no such thing.”
“We need to speak with the people running this course.”
“So? Do it. Call them.”
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, “You owe Michael. I was there, remember? I saw him.”
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. But you can.”
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—”
Nikolas had begun to laugh. Ben was obviously trying not to.