The hotel room is just like the dozens of others she's been in over the years: pillows that never feel quite comfortable, a bedspread with some sort of abstract print, a television five years out of date. She could be in Bristol or Manchester or Glasgow; it doesn't matter. It never does.

It's Leeds right now, has been for the last three weeks, when what was supposed to be a four-day professional development course turned into a two-weeks-and-then-some murder investigation that had the locals in a panic. The higher-ups had disdained to send a DCI – not that she'd thought it likely, but she'd made the request anyway – but they had at least obliged her with DS Nkata, which meant her grumps were tolerated with either equanimity or cheerful teasing and she was guaranteed a certain level of professional competence.

All told, it could be worse, but that doesn't make her heart hurt any less from missing him.

Her mobile rings, piping "Land of Hope and Glory" in a tinny sort of melody, and she snatches it off the nightstand. "Hi," she breathes, and his chuckle comes back at her, warm and gentle.

"Hello, darling. How was your course? We never did get round to discussing it, what with everything else."

"Oh, dead boring." Even though he's not here to see her, she waves an airy hand. "Shite I could have told you years ago, you know?"

"Oh yes I do. I wish I'd been there just to hear your commentary. And your case? How is it looking?"

"We're making progress, despite the interference of the locals. At least Winston's here to make it bearable. How are things on your end? How's the new Inspector doing? Did you really make him cry?"

"Oh, not you too. I make one Inspector cry and suddenly it's all over the Yard like wildfire!"

"So that's a yes then."

He sighs heavily, but she can hear his amusement. "It's entirely possible that I told him he hadn't two brain cells to rub together and that 'my sergeant would have seen that in five minutes' and perhaps he ought to choose a line of work that is a bit less intellectually challenging. But I admit nothing."

"Good Lord, you're awful. I've been away too long."

"Yes," he says, suddenly serious, his voice a little hoarse. "Yes, you have. I've gone half mad without you, love."

"I miss you, too," she says with a lump in her throat, and she does. "I feel like part of me is missing. I mean, yeah, every third word out of your mouth usually makes me want to hit you, but I'd rather have you here and want to hit you than not have you here, you know?"

"Now, I thought we were down to every fifth word."

"It went up again. I'm that cross at being split up. "

"Ah, that explains it." There's a wealth of meaning in those words; he may be teasing but she can hear even over the phone that he is missing her just as desperately as she is missing him, and it's a cold sort of comfort as she faces yet another night alone.

"Where are you on your case, anyway?" She is not whinging, except for the part where she absolutely is.

"Oh, we're nearly done. You've got another day or two of wrap-up, right?"

"Three days. We make the arrest tomorrow, but at least we've got the bastard. Bloody local coppers, they can't find their arses with two hands and a compass." The tirade comes out of her in a gust of temper. "My train's on Saturday, I'm back on shift at the Yard on Monday."

"I am counting the minutes, Barbara."

"Me too. I – hang on." The knock on the door has her spilling out of bed. "Someone's at the door, probably Win wanting to go for drinks."

She flips the latch, unlocks the door, and pulls it open until the latch catches.

Her mobile spills to the carpet with a thud.

"I did say I was counting the minutes," says that dear, familiar voice, and then she is fumbling with the latch and yanking the door open and she doesn't care that she's in a t-shirt and a pair of his nicked boxers in a public hallway where anyone can see, she is spilling out the door and into Thomas Lynley's arms and he is holding her close, so close, sweeping her off her feet to bury his nose in her hair.

"What are you doing here?" The words come out of her in a gasp as she fights to get her arms round him properly after three empty weeks. "How did you…"

"We closed the case around three today," he mumbles into her hair. "I was heading north on the M1 half an hour later. I'd cancel your train ticket, by the way, if you'd rather ride back with me instead."

"Ride back with –" She pulls away from him enough to look into his face, though neither of them have let go of each other yet. Distantly she hears the door slam shut behind them, closing out the rest of the world, and she feels a flash of relief that this little reunion has gone private. "Ride back with you? Tommy, are you staying?"

"Of course I am." His hands, those lovely calloused palms and strong fingers, stroke the loose, unfinished plait right out of her hair, and she nearly purrs with delight. "I can spare a few days' leave time, especially if it means I get to see you three days sooner."

"And will you keep your nose out of my investigation?"

"If that's what you truly want, Barbara."

"Good." Halfway to giddy, she beams at him. "We'll need to be on our way by half past eight, then."

"Oh, Barbara." He holds her tighter, sinking onto the foot of the bed. "I was hoping you'd say that."

"Don't be a bloody idiot," she says for the sake of tradition. "Of course I want you along, you ponce, when do I not?" She takes his hand and presses it to her lips, kissing his knuckles with something close to desperation as the reality of him being here after three weeks apart swamps her at last. Resting her head against his shoulder, she looks up into those soft brown eyes in that beloved face and echoes something he had told her once before, months ago, late at night with music still in the air. "I want to be with you." Her voice is low and warm and terribly, terribly intimate. "More than anything else in the world, I want to be with you."

"I want you, too. I always want you, Barbara. I never stop wanting you."

His arms are so tight around her. It is heaven, he is holding her so close, and for the first time in three weeks she feels whole again. "I know," she whispers. "Me too. Oh, Tommy, I was half alive without you."

"As I was half alive without you. Oh, Barbara…"

The way he says her name sends a thrill up her spine. His hands are all over her, scorching heat through the thin cloth of her shirt, and she presses herself closer and closer still. The look in his eyes is enough to melt her into a puddle; he's looking at her like she's the only thing in the world that matters or will ever matter again, and she knows that no matter how long she is lucky enough to love this man, she will never fail to be amazed by what he tells her with that look alone.

"I love you." His voice is a low, husky rumble in his chest, and she shivers with the vibration. "I don't tell you that often enough, Barbara-lynne. But I do love you. So much I cannot begin to comprehend it." Soft and warm, his mouth covers hers, and she curls her hand into his hair and holds on for dear life. "Look at you," he murmurs when they break apart at last. "You have your heart in your eyes, did you know that? You can hide everything else but you can't hide what's in these eyes of yours. And when you look at me the way you are right now…" He pauses, obviously a little overwhelmed, and her own breathing is none too steady. "Lashes like sunrays and eyes the colour of sage in summer. Good God, you're beautiful."

"You're rather poetic tonight." She tries for sassy but instead she sounds wondering, almost awestruck. He doesn't often turn the poet on her, but when he does, she is helpless.

"You inspire poetry in me, love," he tells her seriously. "And what's more, you deserve it."

She tucks her face into his shoulder, overwhelmed. His arms come around her, enveloping her completely, and though she tries to fight them the tears come in a rush.

"Sweetheart, what – oh." Rough, almost overcome, his voice rumbles in her ear. "Oh, darling. I've missed you too. Desperately."

She should feel silly, she thinks absently, crying like a schoolgirl missing her first boyfriend, but then she can feel his own tears dampening her hair, and suddenly she doesn't feel nearly so silly. Not if she's not the only one reduced to tears over three weeks spent too many hundreds of miles apart for the comfort of either of them.

"How can I love you this much?" The words come out of her unpremeditated, even unthought until she says them. "How can I need you the way I need to breathe?" She turns wide, fretful eyes on him. "How can one person be so important that losing you would shatter me completely? I know it is true, but I don't know why. Oh, I could give you a hundred thousand things I love about you, but none of that is the why. You'd think we'd know by now, we've been married for months!"

His hands are in her hair, soothing. "I don't know, Barbara," he says seriously. "I truly don't, even now. It terrifies me, what I feel for you. It's… all-consuming. It's not rational. But does any of that matter now? Does anything else matter, aside from knowing that we're in it together?"

"No, I don't suppose it does. Well," she says with a shaky laugh. "At least I'm not the only one who's bloody terrified." Her breath shudders out. "The first night I was here I realised I'd forgotten how to sleep alone. Oh, there were times in London when you'd not be there for one reason or another, but you still were there, too. In the sheets, in the walls. In the air. I could breathe you. And here… I couldn't."

Solid and familiar, his chin comes to rest on the top of her head. "I know what you mean," he murmurs. "I was all right the first few nights. I could pretend you were working late, or chasing a lead, or… I don't know. But then your scent began to fade." His arms tighten around her. "Even in the weeks after you first made DI, when I barely saw you, your scent was always there. I didn't know how much I needed it until it wasn't there any more."

For the second time in as many minutes, tears spring to her eyes. "Hold me," she demands, voice hoarse. "Don't let go, love. Oh, God, don't let go."

And he does hold her. Oh, he does. She curls herself into him, relaxes into the pressure of his arms tight around her, tucks herself into him and just breathes.

The fine cotton of his Oxford shirt is starchy under her cheek, wrinkled from the work of the day, and she can smell dirt and sweat and the faint stench of the morgue caught in the fibers. She has always loved that so much about him, that he never hides behind a desk but is willing to leap fences and cross rivers right next to her in pursuit of justice, and for a brief moment she wonders how she ever could have thought him too arrogant for the job. Oh, he is arrogant, but he never considers himself above getting his hands dirty; the callouses on his palm had told her that from the first day they met, upending years of prejudices in a single stroke and knocking her off balance in a way she's never quite recovered from. He is her balance now, and it is only now he is here that she realises how nervy and unstable she has been these last weeks without him.

The tip of her nose brushes his chest, the skin bared by the open collar of his shirt, and she shivers helplessly, pressing closer to him. His hand has crept inside her own shirt to splay over the bare skin of her back, and she kisses the hollow of his throat, desire surging again after the brief lull of calm.

He takes her mouth with an urgency that staggers her, landing her flat on her back before she can blink. His jacket falls away with surprising speed, and her fingers fumble at the buttons of his shirt, tugging impatiently enough that she hears thread snap. His hands can practically span her waist and they are branding her hips now, hauling her up against him as he buries his mouth against her collarbone. His touch is too much and not enough but like a moth to a flame she runs toward the fire, unafraid to burn.

"Barbara." Raw-edged and desperate, he gasps against her skin. "Barbara, please."

"Yes," she babbles, yanking ineffectually at his shirt and trousers. "Yes, please, God, Tommy, I need..."

"Shhhh," he murmurs, stroking her hair with a shaking hand. "Just let me... ah! Sweetheart, sweetheart, hold on, I can't - "

White cotton falls away at last and then he is pulling the borrowed t-shirt over her head, tossing it carelessly aside, and sweeping the boxers down her thighs in one stroke. She rolls her hips against his, desperate for friction; their fingers tangle at the zip of his trousers and he cries out, a strangled sound that is half agony, half pleasure.

They are a tangle of flailing limbs for a moment; then his trousers and pants are both gone and they are skin to skin at last, straining against each other. His body is still covering hers and she throws her head back, baring her throat to his mouth; he nips and kisses the soft skin and she clings to him, begging without words.

He takes her in a single stroke and she is home, finally and completely, never mind that they are hours from London or Cornwall. For the first time in three weeks it doesn't matter that she's living out of a suitcase and sleeping in a bed that will never be hers. Home is the brown eyes scorching into hers with a mixture of shock and stunned joy, and she thinks wildly that she could be in a cabin in Siberia and never care so long as she still had those eyes and that smile.

She touches his mouth and he nips her finger with a cheeky grin, and it's over before either of them see it coming; they have been apart too long to last. She shatters beneath him with a sharp startled cry, clutching convulsively at his shoulders as he sinks his teeth into her collarbone and gasps through it. They melt into each other as he murmurs her name with a reverence that touches her heart and brings tears to her eyes, and even as she still trembles with aftershocks her arms are curling around him and he is stroking her hair and brushing kisses over her cheeks.

She smiles up at him like an idiot, grinning foolishly. "Well," she murmurs, laughter shimmering in her voice, "it appears I missed you even more than I thought."

He snorts a little, his hands still wandering. "You were hardly alone, darling. Though I'll admit I didn't quite expect either of us to go up that fast!"

Now she does giggle outright. "Well, set fire to a tinderbox and it's the only logical result. Or didn't they teach you that at Oxford?"

He stares at her, and a slow smile curls the corners of his mouth. "Oh, they did," he assures her, something sultry in his voice that makes her shudder all over. "And they also taught me quite a few ways to - relight the flames." Now he is smiling, dark and wicked. "Petrol on the fire, you might say." To prove his point he kisses her full-out, and she gasps, eyes going cloudy with lust. "We're not finished burning yet, Barbara my love, and brighter than ever."

"So I see," she manages, and then she forgets how to speak completely.

Much later, when the night is full dark and her husband (my husband, she thinks with a shock of wonder, I don't think I'll ever get over that, how did someone so wonderful happen to me?) is fast asleep and holding her close against his chest, she looks up into that beloved face and lets her thoughts drift.

He's a beautiful man, though less so now than he was when they met; his waist is thicker, his face carved and lined in a way it hadn't been then, and he looks far less like he'd just stepped out of the pages of a catalog. But for all that he is infinitely more beautiful to her now than he was then; she knows the story of every line on his face, every silver hair in the shaggy black silk.

He had been the first thing she saw when she woke in hospital with a blaze of agony in her abdomen and the fog of hydromorphone clouding her mind, and when the black-and-beige blur above her had resolved into that familiar face, something inside her had sighed in relief. During the long hard road of her recovery he had been at her side every moment he could spare, spending more time at her little flat than at his townhouse as they made an unspoken compromise between her need for independence and his determination to watch over her.

In a way, she thought, he had been as afraid as she in the months after the shooting; though neither of them spoke of it, they had clung to each other almost from the first no matter how bitterly they fought, and as tragedy after tragedy had come their way they had only clung tighter. To this day, only half her nightmares are about facing down the barrel of a live firearm. The other half had their positions reversed as she was forced to watch him take a bullet in front of her eyes with nothing she could do to stop it, and sometimes when she woke panting in the night, she wondered, as she wiped the tears away, how on Earth he had borne it.

But as she had in that sterile hospital room, she almost always woke from the nightmares to his beloved face, and she thinks that maybe her answer is also his. God knows after the pub he'd held her as though he'd never let her go, and though he never spoke of it, whenever he woke from his own nightmares she could see his eyes drinking in her face, as though he needed to make sure she was really there and that the nightmares were only dreams after all.

I really have forgotten how to sleep alone, she muses. It's been so wrong, sleeping these past few weeks, but now it's finally right again.

Her hand drifts up to brush his cheek as he nuzzles against her fingers, and she finds herself back to her original thought. He's so beautiful, she thinks with the kind of foolish sentimentality that only half-drowsing night can bring. Every line of him. It's our history written here, in the lines on his face and the scars on his skin. Every smile, every fight, every sleepless night and evening drink and brutal case, and most of all how much he loves me - how much he's always loved me, even before either of us knew. It's all right here, and I'm the only one who can read it.

The kind, soft brown of his eyes blink open then, and he smiles sleepily at her. "What are you thinking, darling?"

The words are slurred with sleep but the affection infusing them is unmistakable, and she smiles in response. "How beautiful you are," she murmurs, and he gently kisses her fingertips.

"I'm not what I was," he says, his voice husky and a little sad.

"No," she agrees softly. "You're so much better. It's all here, you see." Her hand caressed his cheek, then his temple and the crow's-feet at his eyes. "Our whole story. And nothing could be more beautiful than that."

"The pain, too?"

He doesn't have to clarify the question. Their road has been hard and fraught, demanding sacrifices enough to make both of them blanch. From the early days of working together with clenched teeth, to the trauma that had built them into an unbreakable team, to the rocky transition from partners and friends to partners in life, every gain had demanded loss, every happiness had been paid for with pain. It still was, in a way; their relationship, whatever it was, would never be easy. Sometimes they fought so bitterly it reduced both of them almost to tears, and they were so bound to each other now that being apart for too long was almost too painful to bear. It was the price they paid; they stabilised each other, but only because they were so unstable and broken on their own, for that was the dark side to the bond that knit them together in heart and soul. They healed each other, but only at the price of scar tissue that ached and pulled.

But God, how we love each other! she thinks with a shiver of joy, for that was one thing neither of them would ever doubt again. Oh, how they fought, and sometimes they hurt each other in ways no one else ever could, but the one thing she never doubted was that everything he did, he did for love of her, even when he was pigheaded and high-handed and utterly, completely wrong.

Oh, yes, we hurt each other, she thinks, but the difference is that we heal each other, too.

"Yeah, Tommy," she murmurs around a suspicious lump in her throat, because she loves him, oh God how she loves him, and the rapture of it is worth anything. "The pain, too. Joy doesn't mean a thing without it, you know."

"I wish it didn't have to hurt," he murmurs as he touches his forehead to hers in an intimate caress, and she stuns him when she gently shakes her head.

"I don't." She smiles at him, that smile that will blaze in his heart forever. "Don't you see, Tommy? The pain makes the joy mean something. I wouldn't trade a minute of it. It's all a part of us, the bitter and the sweet. That's what makes it real. This isn't a fantasy, love. This is real, and this is hard, and it's the best thing that's ever happened to either of us."

He stares at her in awe, then gathers her even closer. "'...to revel in your joy and never shrink from your pain,'" he murmurs, quoting their wedding vows. "That's what that means, isn't it."

Her smile blazes brighter, and she kisses him gently. "There we are," she teases him. "Knew you'd catch on eventually."

He yanks her against him with a speed that leaves her giggling helplessly, and when she tucks herself against his chest, he finds himself pressing a fervent kiss to her temple and cradling her close. "Welcome home, Barbara," he says softly, and she reaches up to caress his cheek before she settles herself back down with a contented sigh and drifts off to sleep.

Smiling like a schoolboy, he holds her just a little closer, and follows.