Love is a Stranger (26 page)

“What do I get, Benjamin, when I inevitably win?”

Ben laughed at the familiar line from a time that seemed longer ago than five months. “No way that’s going to happen. On a horse, I admit, you’re better than me. But look at us, mate. I’m gonna win.”

Nikolas shrugged. “All right. What do you want if you win? Anything. It does not matter—as you will not.”

“I take charge of the camera tonight and I get to photograph anything I want.”

Nikolas shrugged. “As you wish.”

Ben didn’t like the easy way Nikolas conceded this, and his total belief in his own physical superiority began to waver slightly. “And if you win?”

“
When
I win.”

“Whatever. Well?”

Nikolas narrowed his eyes, considering. “I want to make this good…I get to smoke whenever I like and however much I like without you constantly nagging me.”

“Hey, no fair—”

“But you say I’m not going to win.”

Ben nodded. “Okay. Agreed. Bastard. So, first one back to the beach?”

They undid their jeans and slid them off, shorts followed. Then they turned and plunged naked into the waves. The water was freezing. Ben came up quickly and went into a long, powerful crawl. He glanced behind but couldn’t see Nikolas. Then he heard a splash ahead and whipped his head around to see a blond head emerging from beneath the choppy, grey sea at least a body’s length ahead of him. He swore, incredulous, but began to swim powerfully, his muscled body, sleek and very fit, cutting through the water effortlessly. But then he found himself missing the occasional breath as the sea became even rougher out of the lea of the land. He turned his shoulders too much when he needed to breathe. His army instructors had always screamed at him, “
Keep your bloody head down, Mr bloody Rider.”
He swallowed some water but ploughed on. The buoy was about twenty feet ahead. Stunned, he saw Nikolas had reached it already, and the bastard had stopped, one hand on it, waiting for him. Ben had almost caught him when he slipped from view under the water and emerged once more ahead of him, swimming back for the beach. He didn’t even seem to be making much effort. The density of Ben’s muscles was actually working against him now—as was the huge meal he’d just consumed. He was heavy in the water, his incredible physique wasted in the cloying medium. Nikolas, far leaner and lighter, cut through the water and didn’t even appear to breathe. He had the perfect stroke, slow and even with shoulders permanently horizontal to the water. He didn’t waste one ounce of effort. Ben had begun to breathe heavily now, but he knew he was stronger and fitter than Nikolas—and fucking twelve years younger. And a soldier! Nikolas was a diplomat, for Christ’s sake. He’d spent his life behind a sodding—

Nikolas had won.

He’d reached the beach and come out of the waves like a pale water god deigning to grace the mortal realm of air with his presence. He bent to his clothes and rummaged, and by the time Ben made it to the shore, he was sitting naked on the sand, smoking. He didn’t look at Ben but squinted and held out the cigarette, regarding it fondly, then took a long, long drag, filling his lungs. He blew the smoke toward Ben who was on his knees at the surf’s edge, panting. Ben hadn’t expected to lose. It had never occurred to him he would. If it had, he would never have taken the bet. Nikolas was watching him closely. He held up the cigarette one more time then stubbed it out in the wet sand, grinding it to nothing. “There, I have now given up for good.”

Ben gaped at him in confusion. Nikolas shrugged negligently and stood. He walked to Ben and held out his hand. “Foolish child. I only
enjoyed
smoking…you, on the other hand,” he looked down at Ben, naked in the surf, his dark hair sticking up every which way from salt and wind and water, and huffed ruefully, “you, I
adore
.”

Ben was in too much shock from hearing these words to do much more than stand as Nikolas dried him off with one of the T-shirts and dressed him. Nikolas seemed amused by Ben’s confusion so he added to it by commenting very seriously on Ben’s excellent swimming technique as they climbed back up to the hotel and their suite.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Something was different that night. The words had been said, and they changed everything. Ben wondered if Nikolas’s sometimes less than perfect use of English had led him to use that word:
adore
. But he knew it hadn’t. Nikolas had chosen that word very deliberately. It seemed to Ben there was much more to this word than was conveyed by merely love. He adored Nikolas but would never say this because it made him feel weak, slightly needy. Adoration was the emotion he most closely identified with power, they couldn’t be separated. He’d rarely admitted out loud that Nikolas held all the power in their relationship—the age, the intelligence, the money, the connections, the sophistication. But it was true and was acknowledged when Ben admitted to himself that he adored Nikolas. But now Nikolas had said it out loud to him.
Adoration
. It awed Ben when he realised what Nikolas was saying in that incredible declaration. The power was
his
. Nikolas was vulnerable and needy—needed him. All their relationship so far was based on Nikolas’s innate superiority and Ben’s awareness of it, chauffer with benefits. He’d thought it only that morning. But now, on the back of a declaration on a wind-swept beach, it had all changed.

He undressed Nikolas reverently, easing the damp T-shirt off his shoulders, the jeans down salt-sticky legs. They were already both hard, both anticipating release. They kissed standing, their cocks squeezed together, duelling. Ben took them both in his fist, rubbing them together. They arched back with hisses of pleasure at the same time, then laughed and came back to kissing. Nik’s skin tasted like heaven, cold and salty. It needed licking, fingers in hair, pulling and tugging. Ben’s hand was slick now, pre-cum leaking from them both. He walked Nikolas to the bed and pressed him down, kissed him once more then turned him over. Nikolas lay sprawled on his stomach, one long, lean thigh bent up, everything exposed for Ben’s pleasure. He bent and tasted there, licking for a long time, revelling in the need and pleasure he could hear in Nikolas’s otherwise incoherent murmurs. When he was ready, he put his hands to Nikolas’s cheeks, easing him open more, then just rested his cockhead against the darker pink skin. One drop of pre-cum pulsed out and glistened on Nikolas’s puckered flesh. Ben groaned and pressed it in with his thumb. Nikolas rose up from the bed, a harsher expletive at last. “Benjamin. I will not break. Fuck me, for God’s sake.”

Ben breathed out a long moan of complete surrender at that deliciously mangled
fuck
and pushed home, deep at the first stroke, holding himself up, his powerful body tense, almost animalistic over Nikolas’s lean one. For the first time, with the word adore spreading like heat through his body, Ben didn’t feel like a servant favouring his master. He knew then he’d never see their relationship in the same light again. For the first time, he knew where he stood with Nikolas. He was adored. He braced himself on the pale shoulders and began to dip and thrust, raise and lower. He edged Nikolas’s thigh higher, got better access, found that spot that makes every man cry out with disbelief that anything, that
this
, could be so good. Nikolas was no exception. Dipped at the waist, splayed, he put a hand back on Ben’s thigh, digging his fingers into Ben’s skin as he strained to find a language to express such pleasure.

Ben bent lower over Nikolas’s back, breathing into his still sea-damp hair. “Come with me.” He put his hands under Nikolas’s hips, lifting him higher, pulling him on more, and rode hard, eyes closed, concentrating on the pleasure for both of them, making sure they got there together. He felt himself coming, couldn’t delay any longer, slid his hands further underneath and found the slick hardness. Just a touch, and he was lost to his own shuddering orgasm, his fingers being coated as Nikolas arched then melted beneath him, languid and utterly spent. For a moment, Ben thought his heart was bursting. Then he realised they’d left the balcony doors open and the sound he heard was the surf of the tide incoming on the rocks below. It was incredibly soothing to listen to as his heart returned slowly to its normal rhythm. He rolled off Nikolas, groaning as his heated, wet prick hit the cool night air. He let it lie across his hip, twitching faintly and glistening in the moonlight. He had an idea and waited until he was sure Nikolas was asleep.

Slipping stealthily from the bed, he rummaged in Nikolas’s bag until he found the phone. Sure, he’d lost the bet, but Nikolas had cheated by being a freaking Jörmungandr
of Norse legend. He’d always thought Nikolas’s eyes were almost non-human in their beauty, and now he knew why. He climbed back into bed equally carefully and was about to start taking some interesting pictures when Nikolas simply took the phone from him and lay on it. “No photos.”

Ben pouted. “That’s not fair, considering—”

“Fair or not, no photos. I have managed to live as a peripheral member of your Royal Family for ten years and still avoid having my face in any newspaper or magazine. I’m not going to start now.”

“It wasn’t your face I was going to point it at.”

Nikolas turned his head to look at Ben sitting cross-legged beside him. “Seriously. You were going to take a photograph of my arse. You thought I would lie here and let you.”

“Well, are you?”

“No face?”

“No face.”

With a shrug, Nikolas tossed the phone back over and murmured, “I wonder if I could be recognised just as well from these photos.”

Ben was too busy enjoying himself to hear anything strange in this random thought. When he’d had enough fun and Nikolas was tired of being played with and probed, they lay side by side on the bed just enjoying being there, replete, watching the play of shadows and moonlight on their skin and listening to the hypnotic sound of the waves.

“Where did you learn to swim like that? I’ve known you four years and the closest you’ve come to water is a shower. When did you have time for sneaky swim training?”

“I used to swim a mile in the sea every morning before breakfast when I was growing up. I always won.” He smiled at some private memory.

“Who’d you race?”

His face closed down. “Oh, local village children.” This sounded false even to Ben who hadn’t learnt to swim until he’d been thrown in a lake at his first junior leader’s camp. He couldn’t imagine any village where children had time to swim like that before school every day.

Ben twisted to retrieve his jacket from the floor and pulled out the photo of Nikolas as a boy. Nikolas glanced over at it, then away, his face neutral. “Put it away, Ben, please. I have allowed you to keep it, but I do not like to see it.”

“Is this when you were swimming?”

“In the sea? No. I stopped that when I was ten. I lost the desire for it.”

Ben reluctantly put it back in his pocket. “We should get to sleep. Back to London tomorrow. Kate leaves at eight, so we should get back soon after. I don’t trust Radulf on his own.”

“Do you know what his name means?”

Ben turned his head, surprised. “It means something? In Danish?”

“Of course. It means wolf of the house. When I met him, I think he fooled me into seeing him as this benign hound guarding the humans in his care. I think he sees it more in terms of a home invasion.”

“Wolf of the house.”

“You are thinking very loudly again, Ben. That house may not be for sale.”

“It is. It’s—”

“Fate? You are very strange, Ben Rider. Have I ever mentioned that?”

Ben put a hand out and rested it on Nikolas’s belly. “Are you happy?”

Nikolas regarded him neutrally. “Happy?”

“Yes. It’s an emotion, Nikolas. It makes you grin—even at dumb-arse replies like that one!”

Nikolas huffed, but he seemed to be considering the question. “Some people do not have the capacity for happiness in them, I think.” Ben turned and lay on him, taking his chin in a firm grip. “That boy in the photograph was happy, Nik. What happened to you?”

Nikolas removed his hand. He smiled a grim kind of smile and then began to laugh. It was the saddest thing Ben had ever heard. He put his head down on Nikolas’s chest and was profoundly relieved when fingers began to play with his salt-tangled hair. The bitter laughter stopped, and eventually they both fell asleep to the sound of the soothing sea.

§§§