Page 11 of The Bright and Hungry Future of Hawks

There wasn’t really a job, his suitability was perfect for what Aleksey actually had in mind, and Barton Combe was hardly an appropriate place to putthatplan into action.

It mystified him, and he’d made the offer.

It worried him that he might have thought of Barton as home for a moment, the only home he had, anyway. It would have been far easier to book a hotel somewhere and make a move on the other man there. He wasn’t nervous about doing this, didn’t need to be on his home turf, so to speak. So why Barton Combe? And why, come to that, a whole weekend? How long would it take to fuck him? Certainly not forty-eight hours.

And what if it went disastrously wrong? Which it could—and Aleksey admitted to himself that this had happened on a number of occasions in the past: misread signals, ignored signals… Basically, not really giving a fuck and wanting what he wanted had not always been a successful tactic when his preferred partners were men, and more particularly soldiers.

So much easier to recover from that in an anonymous hotel room than in your own home during an intimate weekend surrounded by your wife’s blue-bloodied relatives.

If he crashed and burned with Benjamin Rider, he really didn’t want witnesses. Not that either of them would speak of what had happened. Men didn’t. But Benjamin Rider storming off would be hard to explain.

Ben Rider.

Arrogant.

Badly dressed.

Ill-educated.

Annoying.

Had he misread the signals?

Ben Rider.

Sublimely beautiful.

Focused.

Alert.

Predatory.

No, he didn’t think he had. He’d deliberately taunted him with his own physicality, and Rider had seen that challenge and accepted it. This SAS soldier had not been expecting the man he had found in that bland Whitehall office, that was for sure.

But come to that, Aleksey had not been expecting what had walked through his door either.

He’d remembered the eyes.

He’d remembered a bruised and battered yet anatomically perfect body.

He’d pondered these two attributes for weeks while things turned green around him, until the outlets he chose to break this obsession left him more entangled in it than ever, until the man had become little more than an ideal churning in his memory, a much-desired, yet unattainable construct.

But a very real man had walked through his office door that morning, and he’d seen for the first time the artfully tousled hair, the designer stubble, the swagger. He’d felt the man’s power, confidence and conceit.

And yet, under all this, he’d sensed confusion, and an awareness, perhaps, that life was about to change, and Aleksey had sensed intuitively that Ben Rider feared that alteration. Ben Rider feared himself, because although Special Forces, and therefore entire in his own mind, Ben Rider was in fact hollow and hungry. Ben Rider was a man unconsciously searching for something he did not realise he lacked.

Aleksey, seeing all these things, had slid out of the bright beam of sun into which he’d deliberately positioned himself, and into shadow.

He had not been expecting this, and this needed pondering in the dark.

His initial plan, therefore, to move the interview to the nearest hotel and assess Rider’s suitability bent over a convenient bed, had been abandoned. Not least because he’d suspected that if this man did object to that line of questioning, he, Aleksey, might not come out of that discussion too well. Rider had been superb…

“…when I have the chance.”

Aleksey stared at Ben Rider. Ben Rider was staring back at him. Then he frowned. “Hobbies? You asked about my hobbies, sir.”

Had he?

---