"No don't say it," Ruth said, her hand cradling his face gently. "Just leave it alone. Leave it as something wonderful that was never said."

"But you know," he said.

"Harry, I have to leave," she said. "You're going to make that so much harder if you say those words. So I am asking you, for me. Please, don't."

"Okay," he said. "It shouldn't have ended like this. It should have been..."

"Yes," she said. "We both know how it should have been," she added sadly. Before she could think about it, she leaned in and kissed him very, very softly. It was freezing, but her lips were warm and he gravitated towards her. He flicked his tongue over them and she sighed a sigh full of passion and lost chances.

"Don't go," he said, even though he knew it was fruitless.

"I don't want to go," she said. He gripped her hand and squeezed so hard that it was painful but she didn't pull away. Suddenly the boats horn blared out. "I have to go."

"Don't forget me," he said, as in that moment he was struck by a huge fear that once she'd left the country, he would fade from her mind.

"It's not possible," she said with a smile. His grip was still tight on her hand. "You have to let me go Harry." With great reluctance, he did. "Goodbye." She turned from him, seeming poised and sure of herself as she got onto the boat. That was until she turned and her eyes caught his. Those beautiful blue eyes, which always showed her emotions. At least to him. At the moment they were full of regret, longing, pain and that four letter word he wasn't allowed to say to her. Harry stayed perfectly still as the boat became a smaller and smaller dot on the landscape. He stayed there until he was looking at nothing but the iron grey of the Thames, leading out into the ocean. He stayed there until it started to rain, and no one would be able to see the silent tears rolling down his face.

6 Months Later.

Harry poured a generous measure of whisky. Then doubled it. He hadn't been home in more than two days now. Bloody terrorists. They were always so inconsiderate. But in the end, nothing serious had happened. No British citizen had been injured, or death on his conscience. No bombs had detonated, and the suspects were in British custody. So it had been a good, if exhausting day. He took a large gulp of the fortifying drink and then sighed as the door opened.

"You could knock," he said tersely.

"Fine," Malcolm said, curling his hand into a fist and rapping his knuckles smartly on Harry's desk. "This is important."

"It always is," Harry said. "Okay, can it wait until tomorrow? I need some sleep before I focus on the next crisis."

"No, it cant wait," Malcolm said. Something in his face had Harry's senses on full alert.

"Sit down," he said, nodding at the chair. Malcolm did, a file clutched in his hands. "So what is it? Do we need to hide in a nuclear bunker?"

"No," Malcolm said. "I found something. While trawling the C system and infiltrating the..." Harry tuned out as the technical speak started to go over his head.

"Okay, you found something," he said. "I don't care where. What is it?"

"Read it," Malcolm said, handing it over carefully. There were five minutes of total silence as Harry absorbed what was written on the pages in front of him. Once he'd read it once, he gave it another go.

"Is this what I think it is?" Harry asked.

"Yes," Malcolm replied.

"Proof?"

"Yes," he said again. "She's innocent, and we can prove it. We can bring her home."

It took Harry a good sixty seconds to actually think about that sentence. Home. She could come home. For the first time in six months, he smiled.

He couldn't sleep. Every time he closed his eyes, Ruth was behind his eyelids. What would she look like now? Where was she? What had she been doing for the past six months? These were things he didn't know. He had refused to look for her, even through the temptation. If there was a record of her being alive and well on MI5 computers, it would be a very bad thing indeed. So, he hadn't looked. She could be anywhere on the planet by now, he knew Zaf had arranged a false passport for her. Was she happy? Did she miss him?

He missed her, every single day. He missed her understated beauty, her quiet intelligence and especially the way her eyes would light up when she looked at him. He missed everything about her, a powerful ache that never left him. An ache where his heart should be. It hurt to think of her, separated as they were. But it hurt much more if he didn't think of her at all.

Malcolm had promised to find her, but they both knew it would take a few days. Probably longer, as they were planning on tracking one of the most intelligent MI5 operatives Harry had ever known. Even with Malcolm's brilliance it would take time. But there was hope. He would find her, and (assuming her life hadn't moved on drastically) he would bring her home. He couldn't wait to see her once more. He needed to see her calm beauty. Even if it were just once more, his soul yearned for her.

"Got you," Malcolm said, looking at the CCTV screen. He was looking at the very grainy footage of a second hand bookshop in the outskirts of Prague. A brunette woman had come in, wrapped in a bulky coat against the cold and the falling snow outside. She shook her hair, so it would be free of the white flakes. She spent a good twenty minutes browsing the books, and when she turned to look at a shelf on the opposite side of the shop, Malcolm had frozen the image. It was Ruth. It was finally her. He'd been looking for her for a week now, all the time with an irate and impatient Harry breathing down his neck. He'd followed her to Prague and found out that a woman called Lucy Taylor was working as a translator for a law office in Prague. Lucy Taylor was the name on the passport Zaf had given Ruth, so he'd looked for her. And looked. Even when he found her, he realised that she was avoiding the major places in the city, anywhere that was likely to have CCTV cameras. Ruth was probably frightened, he thought grimly. But here was the proof. Ruth was alive, well and living in Prague.

Malcolm printed off the image, then wrote down Lucy Taylors address in Prague, her place of work and her phone number. He put that, Ruth's recently reclaimed passport and the image of Ruth in an envelope, and then set it on Harry's desk. He knew his friend would want to be alone when he opened that.

Meanwhile in Prague

Ruth moaned as she woke up with an intense pressure on her rib. The baby was kicking her, and none too gently either. "Oh baby," she sighed. It was two in the morning, couldn't she give it a rest? Ruth sat up and wrapped her arms around her large stomach in discomfort. The baby had seemed to decide that two in the morning was the perfect time to perform acrobatics, including kicking her ribs. This was the third night this week that the baby had woken her.

"Well, it's a preparation for the sleepless nights of motherhood," she said to herself. She felt a soft thump in reply and smiled. Stranded in a foreign country, away from home she might be. But she wasn't alone.

I've read (and written) quite a few stories where Ruth comes back to the UK with a child after Cotterdam. I wanted to try one where she's pregnant. Hope you enjoy this. And it started off life as a one shot, and its grown from there.