Chapter Nineteen #2
“I didn’t want to tell you in your fragile state. She’s a model. I couldn’t help myself.”
The disembodied voice was coming from somewhere to his right, and he made his way cautiously through the trees.
“Are you jealous, Benjamin?” Nikolas dropped on him from a tree, pushed him face first into the mud and ran off, naked, in the direction of the tor.
Ben swore and threw a rock at him, which connected with a satisfactory thud and an “Ow!” of annoyance.
Ben, also naked, took after the fleeing figure.
There was a path under the flying buttresses of the rear part of the house.
There was a stream, an old bridge and a pond.
Nikolas was squatting on the far side of the pond, white in the moonlight.
As Ben watched, he seemed to…disappear. He was spreading fucking mud on himself!
Ben slithered across the slippery bridge.
Nikolas had shifted into the bracken and was silent.
Ben looked at the boggy peat and at his own naked body glowing pale in the unearthly light.
He copied Nikolas and went, darkened and muddy, into the dense bracken of the tor. Stealthily, he began to crawl up.
Obviously, Nikolas Mikkelsen knew this place very well.
The bastard had probably climbed it with him before.
Ben didn’t know it, but…did. He had a kind of innate sense of where he was and where he was going.
The smell of the bracken at night was incredibly familiar.
Even the play of moon shadows stirred something good in his heart.
He heard a faint sound and knew someone was cursing that telltale noise and trying to stay silent.
He didn’t give away his location. Shape, shadow, silhouette, texture, spacing, movement: it wasn’t rocket science—the things that gave position away.
He could see the top of the tor a few metres away now and decided to go for it.
He’d have a full arc of vision then across the hillside. He’d be able to spot the bastard.
He made a dash for it. Something caught his ankle, and he fell heavily, grunting in pain as his knee hit a rock. He was trampled, his hair ruffled, and Nikolas disappeared up the rocks to the top of the tor.
Ben couldn’t risk an attempt on the summit now. The cheating bastard had the high ground.
“I wish I had my cigarettes with me. How inconvenient.”
Once again the disembodied voice drifted out in the darkness.
Ben considered his options.
He didn’t have many. One occurred to him.
It was slightly beneath him, but then he was standing buck-naked on a tor on Dartmoor in the middle of the night covered in mud, chasing a man he’d recently fucked up the arse.
He wasn’t in any position to take the moral high ground.
He began to climb, got about halfway up a cold granite face and slipped.
He made a lot of noise as he fell, tumbling to the moorland grass below the rocks. He lay still.
“Ben?”
He could hear the cogs of the man’s mind grinding. Was it a trick? Would his Ben Rider-Mikkelsen have done this—the Ben that Nikolas had destroyed with lies? Ben heard a slithering down the rocks, bare feet, naked skin on granite, and then a soft thud alongside him. “Ben?”
Nikolas wasn’t coming close.
“I know you’re fooling, Ben. You’re too good to have fallen climbing there. You’ve climbed this tor thousands of times before.”
Pathetic.
“Ben. This isn’t funny anymore. I’m not coming over there to check you. I’m not stupid.”
Yeah, you are, and you will. Eventually.
“Ben! I mean it! Stop it! This is really dumb.”
Almost there…
“All right! I’ll tell you about Emilia. She’s a lap dancer. I think you’d really like her if you actually met her.”
“What!” Ben turned, about to spring to his feet.
Nikolas crowed in triumph and shot back up the tor.
This time Ben had him in sight. The bastard couldn’t launch a surprise attack from the top. He scrabbled after the fleeing figure and they reached the smooth crown at the same time.
Ben lunged and brought Nikolas down. They were both completely winded, Nikolas from laughing and Ben from fury. He began to punch into Nikolas’s kidneys, holding him down by sheer weight and anger. Nikolas tried to speak through the sniggering and the pain.
“She’s Russian, Ben, so she gives me things you never could. I’m so sorry…oh, God, stop. Please.”
Ben stilled for a moment. “Russian? Emilia was in Russia. I was in Russia. Emilia was the princess in the mist with the hair like fire. I remember Emilia. She was just a kid…She…” He looked down at Nikolas’s sparkling eyes and hit him again, just because he could.
He lay alongside him on his back in the moonlight, cold, naked and wet.
“You utter bastard.”
“Ack, you needed the exercise. You’re getting fat. What did she say before you broke my phone?” Nikolas prodded gingerly over his nose as he spoke.
Ben was too busy trying to sort memories to reply.
A girl. Trees. A river. Snow that made him happy.
And that was the memory that then became crystal clear—the two of them making love in the snow.
“Oh.” He turned his head. He’d chased a stranger up this tor, but beside him now was Nikolas—still indistinct, distant, as if seeing him from the wrong end of a telescope, but Nikolas, nevertheless.
The man he’d lain with somewhere in the snow and kissed until his lips had been swollen from the rub of stubble.
He remembered how he felt about that man.
He wasn’t feeling it now, but he remembered it, and that was overwhelming.
He grabbed Nikolas and began to kiss him again, wanting that swell and friction on his lips. Nikolas tasted of peat and cold air.
He tasted of desire.
Ben mouthed into the kiss, “I remember you.”
* * *