Death's Ink Black Shadow Read online

  Now, Ben knew with complete certainty that he was the only subject of Nikolas’s thoughts—his face, perhaps his muscular, strong body. He rolled off the sofa and stood alongside Nikolas, who remained lying down, regarding him through lust-blown, unfocused eyes.

  Very slowly, Ben began to unbutton his jeans, which were hanging unusually low, dragged down by the recent activity on the narrow couch. Dark pubic hair became visible, and he witnessed Nikolas’s eyes focus suddenly, like a cat’s seeing a flick of moment that piqued its interest. Nikolas’s movement reduced to a holding pattern as his concentration moved from the taut v-line of Ben’s abdomen to the hint of what lay beneath the soft material.

  Ben released the last button and the jeans fell of their own accord, nothing to hold them up on his zero-fat body. He was commando and so displayed himself to Nikolas in all his glory. He knew he was anatomical perfection. Showing this off for Nikolas wasn’t vanity.

  Ben began to stroke his cock.

  Nikolas picked the pace up again, their beating hands now in a matching rhythm.

  Over a decade of sharing their bodies and now they’d found something new.

  Ben wanted to fall upon the challenging arrangement of flesh and bone beneath him, wanted to be merged as one, as they always were, but he couldn’t deny that this was fun, too. It was so simple. It was just being male and revelling in cock. The thought made his lips quirk, and he saw an answering smile on Nikolas’s lips. Why hadn’t they done this before? He sped up a little more, knew he was coming but didn’t bother to align this with Nikolas, didn’t need to make sure he was coming, too. They were separate men jerking off. Simple.

  He came over Nikolas’s face, which he hadn’t meant to, but once begun, he gloried in it and began to laugh as the white shots splattered onto Nikolas’s cheekbones, rained down onto his lips and finally hit his eyes, which Nikolas had to close. In the privacy of his own mind, Nikolas appeared to find the conclusion he needed, and Ben stared, hungry with desire, as Nikolas erupted over his hand, the spill apparently helped by the deathlike grip Nikolas had on Ben’s thigh, up high, in the hollow of his hip. Ben was glad Nikolas had needed that joining of flesh to finish.

  It gave him a good idea.

  Before Nikolas could even open his eyes, while he was still in the downtime after ejaculation, Ben dragged him off the sofa and entered him. It was a messy tangle of half-mast clothes, trapped legs and a soft cock, but he managed to be inside enough to harden on the pleasure, and then Nikolas helped by wriggling out of the rest of his clothes, undressing Ben, even while they remained joined.

  Ben could see Nikolas was as impressed with their strategies as he was. He swooped down and kissed him, and then it was very familiar once again. Simplicity was all very well, but Ben was more than willing to take the complexity of fucking another man if it meant this. There was nothing better he did physically—and Ben had spent his entire life obsessed with achieving physical perfection—than being inside Nikolas’s tight arse.

  But the asinine thought, once allowed, made Ben lose focus on the import of what he was doing. He began to snigger and couldn’t take it seriously, and missed his stroke once or twice. He softened on the ludicrousness of what he was actually doing, and all the perfection he’d been congratulating himself on was lost, because he wasn’t stiff enough to retain it, and he fell to one side, laughing so hard that he was afraid other spills might emerge to join the general mess they always managed to make. This only made him convulse harder, shortness of breath now making him hiccup. He would have controlled himself, but he turned to try and apologise to Nikolas and found himself on the blunt end of a phone as the flash went off.

  He choked on dismay and outrage, still unable to control the tears streaming down his face and tried to wrestle the camera away, but Nikolas was quicker and lay on it and wouldn’t budge. “It will be a very flattering one of you, Ben—pissing yourself and floppy—” Nikolas curled up, groaning at the punch the floppy had elicited, but, Ben noted, keeping the phone safe. “I might have it put on canvas. Hang it—Fuck!” Ben got his fingers in between Nikolas’s ribs—a hard jab that would have made a corpse curse. Nikolas loathed being tickled, couldn’t tolerate it, and Ben knew he’d soon surrender.

  The doorbell didn’t often ring this late at night.

  It was such a mirror of the event a few weeks previous that they both sat up and said at the same time, “Steven.”

  Nikolas closed his eyes for a moment, reached for his clothes and muttered, “I’ll go.”

  Ben wasn’t sure what was more momentous: that Nikolas had volunteered to answer the door, or that he appeared completely unflustered to admit—which would be clear to any visitor straight off—that he’d been in the middle of sex with his boyfriend.

  Ben listened to the muted conversation as he dressed and then went into the kitchen. They were at the table. Nikolas was leaning back in his chair, lighting a cigarette. This, added to the rumpled hair and dishevelled clothes, sent a jolt of desire straight through Ben, and he went to the counter to hide it, pressing his cock into the hard surface while he waited for the kettle to boil. It was getting worse—this constant desire for Nikolas. Even now he wanted to—

  He heard an unlikely sound and turned to find Steven sniggering at Nikolas. Ben winced. Nikolas hated to be laughed at. This boy didn’t know him well enough to be taking that liberty.

  Nikolas blew a cloud of smoke then very swiftly leaned over and ruffled Steven’s hair.

  Ben turned away, hiding a private smile.

  When Nikolas agreed to make an effort, he followed through.

  He sensed Nikolas getting up. Heard him come closer.

  A strong hand gave him a painful smack on his arse, then he was arm wrestled around the neck and knuckle-rubbed, as Nikolas murmured in Danish, “I should have washed my face before answering the door.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Ben never tempted fate if he could help it, but once he’d thought one morning how happy he was, he couldn’t stop thinking it on and off over the next few weeks. Not only was there nothing wrong, everything was very right for once. Despite all the new people who had come into their lives recently, he and Nikolas couldn’t have been closer. Once Nikolas had accepted Steven’s presence, albeit not as Steven’s father, he seemed to relax into revisiting memories of his family, as if this younger version of himself could banish demons he’d carried all his life—that dragging these things into the light wasn’t giving them air to breathe but killing the foul offspring of darkness under the brightness of the sun.

  He still refused to co-operate with a book about Aleksey Primakov, for obvious reasons as far as Ben was concerned, but he’d agreed to a compromise with the insistent Steven—Steven would write a book about the Mikkelsens up to the point where the orphaned boys disappeared to Russia. Nikolas had won Steven over by adding that he should include Godfred Mikkelsen—Steven’s great-grandfather—and the acquisition of his billions making armaments during the war.

  Ben had never given Godfred Mikkelsen any consideration whatsoever and so had never wondered how Nikolas’s family had acquired their fortune—other than Nikolas once mentioning that they invested in misery. Godfred had almost single-handedly fuelled the Nazi war machine, apparently. Godfred’s fortune, and that of Nikolas’s, was, as Nikolas wryly pointed out to Steven, tainted.

  Would that not be an interesting angle to pursue in his book—how the daughter of such a man had perhaps inherited a blemish that had led to madness and suicide?

  Steven seemed to like this idea a great deal.

  Ben couldn’t help but feel a shiver of unease at Nikolas’s suggestion, and took the first opportunity of actually having Nikolas to himself to question this rash plan. Predictably, they were in bed. Less predictably, they weren’t having sex. Nikolas was reading a biography about a Danish polar explorer, and Ben was thinking. He’d started out mulling over designs for Nikolas’s ring, plans that preoccupied him pleasantly whenever he had a spare m
oment—there was no hurry; Nikolas wasn’t going anywhere. But deliberating over which metal he wanted it made of had led him to consider lead, the weight of it and its killing power, and that had led on to thinking about Godfred.

  “You never told me your grandfather was a Nazi.”

  Nikolas turned a page. “He wasn’t.”

  “But you said he made armaments for the Germans during the war.”

  “He did.”

  “So that—”

  “He was entirely apolitical, as am I. He was a lovely man. Nika and I adored him.”

  “But—” Ben frowned, staring at the ceiling, his head resting on folded arms. He wasn’t sure what apolitical meant. He was out of his depth already and wading deeper. “But, surely if he’d not sold them all those tanks and shit, they’d not have been so powerful for so long. The war would have finished earlier.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Didn’t he think about things like that?”

  “Certainly not. He thought about his shareholders, as all good businessmen should. Fortunate for us that he did, no?”

  Ben really didn’t want that pointed out. He’d worked that much out for himself. Nikolas seemed to read his mind and added slyly, “Perhaps we should renounce our good fortune? The house in Devon? This house? Get…what is that word that begins with j? I forget. Oh, I know—jobs.”

  Ben went back to thinking about the ring for a while. But Nikolas’s snide superiority niggled at him. “He must have seen what they were. Hated them, at least?”

  “Not at all. He was a very religious man, and I believe he trusted in God implicitly.”

  “Huh?”

  “If God didn’t want Nazis, he wouldn’t have created them, would he? Who are we to challenge God’s plan for mankind?”

  “What? That’s…” Ben wasn’t sure what it was, and the water was up over his head now. “That’s not right at all.”

  He thought he heard a faint snort and glanced over, but Nikolas was turning a page and frowning. Before he could comment, Nikolas added dryly, “I think my mother took the most effective revenge on him.”

  “Huh?”

  “She married a Russian.” Nikolas tossed his polar explorer on the floor and turned to Ben. “Come, I do not keep you for your brains or conversational skills, Benjamin Rider-Mikkelsen, but only for your body. You are merely dec—” Ben knew he shouldn’t rise to the provocation, but as that was the fun part, he shut Nikolas up with an abandoned kiss that left them both breathless, grinning, and swollen with anticipation for the pleasure yet to come.

  § § §

  Buoyed on the sense that everything was going just right for once, Ben organised a repeat of Molly Rose’s visit to Devon, only this time he persuaded Jennifer Armstrong to allow Molly to travel on her own—without her grandparents. Ben suspected Molly’s grandfather had been influential in Jennifer’s acquiescence. He was taking his wife off for a much-earned mini-break walking in the Peak District. One Saturday morning, therefore, Nikolas and Ben turned up in St Albans and left again an hour later with an additional passenger on the backseat next to Radulf.

  Molly Rose was nearly seven months old now.

  She had an unruly tangle of jet back hair, pale skin and green eyes.

  It was eerily normal in the car for the first few miles, Nikolas driving because Ben said he wanted to be ready. Ready for what he’d not fully reasoned, even to himself, but just ready. He kept turning, nervously checking the backseat. Molly only had eyes for Radulf, who was doing entertainment duty by putting his paw into her lap every time she squealed. Whether he was trying to calm her down or wind her up, Ben couldn’t decide.

  They had to stop after an hour—they always did because Ben was always hungry. It was so familiar to them that when Molly set up a wail at almost the exact time that Ben complained, “I’m star—” they both laughed and, glancing over, Ben saw a faint blush on Nikolas’s scarred cheekbone. Nikolas just shrugged it off, but Ben knew he was secretly very pleased with life, too.

  Nikolas said he’d carry Molly, which surprised Ben, until he realised that the offer left him walking the dog up the muddy bank, and then picking up after him—the general disadvantages which entailed from being a responsible dog owner. Radulf appeared entirely unconcerned as he was led back to the vehicle, but then, Ben reflected, he was blind and unable to see what he’d produced.

  Ben was accustomed to Nikolas being stared at wherever they went—whether for height, beauty, scars, or superb tailoring—but he’d experienced nothing like the attention Nikolas garnered when holding a baby.

  Ben supposed it was the contrast of opposites.

  He found them in the shop. Studying teddy bears.

  For a moment, it was if his heart had contracted in his chest, a familiar feeling in moments of extreme stress with Nikolas, but rarely like this before—out of pure and unadulterated love for him. Nikolas had Molly propped comfortably on his arm, her dress and princess coat easily a match for the quality tailoring of his long, navy, cashmere overcoat. He seemed entirely at ease with her, showing her various bear options and considering her responses quite seriously, as if they were having a deep conversation about the merits of one stuffed toy over another.

  Ben thought back to all the things Nikolas had been—still was in many ways—how he knew Nikolas still saw himself, the monster he feared lurking behind the beauty, and realised that for the first time he was seeing Aleksey as he would have been had not events turned so sour for a ten-year-old boy. This was the man who could have been Aleksey Mikkelsen—doting father.

  And he had given this to Nikolas.

  The irony was almost too much to bear. Kate had stolen from them in a terrible act of betrayal, but in that theft she’d given them this gift. Ben wasn’t into babies. He wasn’t into children. He was into Nikolas, and Molly Rose, his daughter, made Nikolas happy.

  Ben smiled and was about to join them and decide bears for them, when he heard a quiet, “She must be yours.”

  He turned to find a very attractive woman standing close, also admiring the stunning couple in the next aisle. Ben quirked his lips and wanted to add, “So is he,” but restrained himself.

  “She’s the spitting image. She really is the most beautiful baby I’ve seen for a long time. Absolutely gorgeous.”

  The unknown stranger seemed quite happy contemplating Molly’s perfections. Nikolas apparently sensed the scrutiny and glanced over. He gave Ben a private smile and kissed into Molly’s hair. The woman let out a sigh of pleasure, although Ben realised, with a blush, it could have been his. He shook himself, nodded politely, and went over to the smirking Nikolas, who greeted him with a knowing, sly, “Jealous?”

  Ben wasn’t sure how to begin punishing him.

  Molly helped him out.

  Nikolas’s face changed from seductive wickedness to horror in a moment. He thrust the baby at Ben, muttered, “I’ll order for you,” and disappeared.

  The smell was incredible.

  Ben held Molly at arm’s length, mutely appealing for her to tell him what to do. She clearly didn’t have a clue either.

  Ben remembered all the bags Jennifer had packed for them. He’d wondered at the time how he and Nikolas could manage on one shared overnight bag, yet a seven-month-old baby required three trips back and forth to the house to load up with her things.

  He hurried back to the car and laid Molly on the backseat. Radulf hopped wisely, Ben thought, into the front. He’d lost his eyesight, not his sense of smell.

  The bags in the boot were full of mysterious-looking pieces of equipment, which Ben ignored. Then he noticed a waterproof holdall, and found what he was searching for.

  He laid everything out, checked his kit one more time, consulted his op orders, and set about his task.

  How hard could it be?

  If Ben heard a small wheezy, “Heh” from Radulf at the new appreciation the human was getting for the ease of his toilet needs, it was ignored.

  By the time he finished, M
olly was clean and comfortable, but all her clothes were now in the waterproof case and required washing, along with three towels and a blanket. He eyed the enormous selection of things Jennifer had insisted they bring with huge relief and picked something else for his daughter to wear. There was a one-piece with a hood that had rabbit ears.

  With no assistance at all from Molly Rose, Ben got her stuffed into it.

  He picked her up.

  She vomited milk all over him and the one-piece. The ears, however, weren’t affected.

  § § §

  By the time Nikolas came back out, Ben was stripping off his own T-shirt to add to the vast pile of washing now in the waterproof bag. Nikolas lifted his eyebrow appreciatively. “Sex, Benjamin, in the car park? How novel.”

  Ben gave him a sour look and pulled on a clean shirt.

  Molly, now dressed in some baby jeans and a sweater, began to cry.

  Nikolas gave Ben an accusatory frown. “What have you been doing all this time? Have you not fed her yet?”

  Ben was tempted to reply, “I haven’t fed myself yet,” but it was beneath him. He’d discovered the bottles in another bag whilst he’d been desperately rummaging for the nappies, and so produced one and the heater, which, Reginald Armstrong had informed him, worked off the car lighter. He assembled it all and collapsed gratefully into his seat. Molly’s wails got louder.

  Nikolas checked his watch. “We’ve been here over an hour, Benjamin. You are very remiss.”

  Ben curled his lip but kept silent.

  Finally the machine’s light went off, and he thrust the bottle at Molly. To his intense relief, she took it and held it herself. He sank back, exhausted, in his seat but glanced at Nikolas to see a small grin of amusement whipped away. “What? It’s not funny, Nik. Stop it! I didn’t sign up for any of this.”

  “I suspect no man truly does. Babies are the inevitable outcome of what we do sign up for.” Ben slumped and tried to appear even more starved than he was for a little sympathy. “Besides, between the two of us, I think we can cope with one baby?”