Thank you so, so much for the fantastic response to the previous chapter! It properly put a smile on my face. And now here is chapter two, which is angsty and confused and a bit unlikely, but I really hope you like it :)

Chapter Two

The silence in the kitchen was heavy and close, and Elizabeth would have enjoyed watching the thought process playing obviously out across Henry's face if not for the fact she was feeling somewhat uncomfortable, and cross at him, and unsettled by the events of the day. A large part of her just wanted to close the space between them and go to her husband for a hug and the comfort she knew he would readily offer her, but another part of her was genuinely hurt by his comments about her cheating on him even if he had been joking.

It had cut just a little bit too close to the bone after the stresses of the past few months generally and the stresses of today particularly. Instead she drank some more wine and then put the empty glass down on the countertop so she could wrap her arms around herself. Her own comfort would have to do for now.

Henry's face was caught somewhere between palpable concern and instinctive protectiveness. "What –?" he started, then stopped almost straight away to take a different route. "Babe, are you OK?"

She hesitated as she thought about her answer; truth be told, she hadn't really thought about it. She'd just thought about how pissed off she was at everyone making jokes all day, and how pissed off she was at the sleazy bastard for thinking he could pull the crap that he did in their meeting and not suffer any consequences, and how pissed off she was at Henry for not getting why she might not find what he had said funny after everything that had happened between them. Truth be told, she felt a little bit like she was spiralling, and not really all that OK.

"If you say you're fine after thinking about it for so long, I'm not going to believe you." Henry spoke quietly like he was wary of spooking her.

Good. He should be wary. He had contributed to how she was currently feeling. But he was also possibly the solution, and that was why Elizabeth temporarily dropped her prickly defensiveness. "I really hate that photo on the internet," she said quietly. "Daisy managed to get them to change the caption, but still… And if it was just the photo that would be one thing, but today…" She trailed off and shrugged, not really knowing how to explain what she was feeling.

Henry walked over to close most of the gap between them but stopped about a metre away, giving her space. "Tell me what happened," he said, and it was obvious he was trying to keep his voice soft and reasonable, doing his best to quash his instinct to demand the entire story and then get on a plane to Sofia to go and beat up a senior member of the Bulgarian cabinet.

She couldn't deny she loved how keenly Henry felt things and how he so readily stepped up to fight by her side: she had missed that recently. "He hit on me, Henry, what do you want me to say?"

"Tell me what happened," he repeated, with firm insistence. Then when she still failed to elaborate he gave her a prompt, perhaps hoping that a more direct question would elicit a direct answer. "Did he touch you?"

"He didn't hurt me, he's not that stupid." Elizabeth turned to refill her wine; her stomach empty, she could already feel the alcohol starting to hum through her veins.

"Not what I asked."

From somewhere upstairs a floorboard creaked as one of the kids moved around in their room. Elizabeth cast a glance up at the ceiling, feeling bad that she was the reason the kids had all been banished to the upper floors of the house – even though they totally deserved it after ribbing her with husband jokes. And Elizabeth couldn't deny that she was glad they were safely out of earshot for this particular conversation.

When she failed to elaborate after a minute, Henry reached out to touch her arm, his hand smoothing over her shoulder and then squeezing her bicep warmly through the long sleeve of her dress. "Babe?"

Another mouthful of wine before she answered him; she liked the fast buzz it gave her and the way it helped to numb the edges of an awful day. Lifting the glass to her mouth dislodged Henry's hand from her arm. Part of her missed the touch, but part of her thought it made it easier to stay mad at him when she couldn't feel his concern in the heat of his hand against her. She needed to stay mad at him because it made it easier to tell him about what had happened at the meeting, and she knew that she needed to tell him.

"Well, he lingered too long on the introductory handshake but that's nothing unusual. The meeting itself was fine… not fine. Bulgaria's refusing to sign up to the deal that's on the table because they think it gives them a bad hand, but it was just a business meeting. It was what it was. But we need them to sign up, and so when none of my incentives worked I resorted to appealing to his pride." Elizabeth looked down at the wine that swirled lightly in her glass, wishing with the benefit of hindsight that she'd just halted the meeting when it became obvious no material offerings were going to work – at least not any material offerings that were actually on the table.

Henry had drifted closer to her as she spoke and now his fingers lightly brushed the inside of her wrist. "I take it he's a guy who likes it when you stroke his ego."

In her current state of mind, the supportive, probing comment irked her and Elizabeth pulled her hand back, feeling the need to be separate, to guard her personal space as she remembered the events of the meeting. "Yeah," she said curtly, resisting the urge to add what guy isn't like that? "So I told him that we really need Bulgaria to sign up to this thing or else others might start to back out, that he can act as a noble leader in bringing this deal to the region, et cetera, et cetera."

"And then?" Henry prompted.

"Then he tells me there's one sure way to get him on board, one thing that would be compelling enough to make him change his mind." She broke off, forcing herself to meet Henry's eye so that she could read his reaction. For some reason it made her feel slightly better to see that he was hurting, too. Then she felt bad for enjoying his discomfort.

Henry's face had taken on a slightly appalled expression. "He meant..?"

She nodded. "Yeah." She blinked and looked away again. "I thought he was joking."

Henry reached out again to touch her, his fingers curving warmly around her wrist. His voice was quiet and hard to read. "He wasn't."

"No." Elizabeth straightened up and looked back at her husband, torn between letting go and just sinking into him and maintaining the annoyance she currently felt with him. She figured she could do both and so she let herself soften slightly under his touch even as her voice was hard as she spoke again; curating her indignation was the only way to get the story out. "Anyway. I thought he was joking, but I didn't think the joke was funny and I told him that. Then he leaned towards me and he had this look on his face like maybe he wasn't kidding."

Needing a brief moment, she lifted the wine glass to her lips with the intention of taking a sip to stall for time, but she was starting to feel slightly queasy and clattered the glass back to the countertop. She studied Henry's face instead for a moment, watching him stand intent like there was currently nothing in the world more important to him than what she had to say. She thought that was probably true. She just wished it had been true more often in recent months.

She still felt a little bitter about that, and her lingering hurt was all mixed up in the new as she continued. "He told me it was really very easy to get Bulgaria's support for the deal, and he made some quip along the lines of the media already posting that we're married and therefore obviously sleeping together, and therefore why not take advantage? I'm pretty sure I was gaping at him like a goldfish… Anyway, he shifted closer and reached out and brushed my hair behind my shoulder and that's when I threw him out of my office with a stern warning to tell his president that if they don't fall into line on this, they'll find out soon enough what it's like to get screwed over a trade deal."

There was a dichotomy inside Henry: the relieved pride he felt at Elizabeth chucking the bastard out of her office with such certainty warred with the blistering anger and indignation he felt on her behalf that she'd had to deal with the situation at all.

"You did the right thing, kicking him out of your office," he said, because he thought that she needed to hear that. Needed to know that any diplomatic blowback that might occur wasn't on her.

She nodded. "Yeah, I know."

Elizabeth looked away, finding her half-empty glass of wine of considerable interest as she failed to meet his eye. Henry found he couldn't get a proper read on her; he thought that all her feelings were jumbled up and she couldn't quite decide which to settle on. Her arm beneath his hand was tense, and it seemed like she was very deliberately holding herself slightly back from him even as the rest of her body language suggested she wanted to do just the opposite.

Time to take a chance even though Henry knew she was still legitimately annoyed at him. He slid his hand up her arm to cup her shoulder in his palm and then tugged her gently into him, giving her opportunity to resist but inordinately pleased when she didn't. He wrapped his arms securely around her, feeling her cheek press against his shoulder and, after a minute, her own arms slid loosely around his waist.

"I'm sorry you had to deal with that," he murmured against her hair, turning to press a kiss to the crown of her head. "I want to kill that guy."

Henry felt the twitch of her lips against him as she smiled briefly but he couldn't see her face to be able to tell if there was any humour in it. "Get in line," she said.

Hearing the slight tremor in her voice, he held Elizabeth a little tighter. "Did you report him?"

There was a pause before she answered. "Russell asked how the meeting went. I told him he hit on me so I kicked him out. He said 'good'."

Close enough. Knowing the chief of staff, for all his bluster and bravado, no doubt that 'good' meant that retribution would be served. But still – "You should have called me."

Elizabeth pulled back then so she could look up at him, and her eyes were flashing in a way that suggested she was close to rising to anger. Even so, she sounded muted when she said, "I couldn't, I was busy. I had meetings."

That may have been true enough, but they always found time to text or call each other during the day, usually multiple times and no matter how busy their schedules were. And especially when something bad had happened, something that would no doubt have hit Elizabeth personally: she always found time to call him.

She blinked. "And I didn't want to talk about it."

He found he couldn't quite read what she meant by that. "With me?" he queried.

She gave a non-committal shrug in response. "With anyone. I didn't want to take the chance that anyone would think it was part of the joke."

That cut below the belt. Henry thought that may have been the intent. He couldn't keep the hurt out of his reply. "Hey, I know I was joking with you before you left this morning, but you know that if you had called me with that story it would have been anything but a joke. I would have been there for you."

To her credit, Elizabeth looked like she did know that. "Yeah," she said quietly, and her eyes were swimming bright blue with tears.

He couldn't figure it out. She had obviously wanted his support at the same time as not wanting it, wanted to talk to him even as she hadn't. He lifted his hand to stroke her hair back from her face, feeling her hands bunching in his shirt at his hips. "So why wouldn't you call me? Why so reluctant to tell me what happened today?"

Her response was louder than he had been expecting and sounded very much like it was something that had been brewing for a while; Elizabeth's voice was full of pain that made him feel like his chest was being cracked open. "You said you couldn't talk to me because I remind you of how you failed!" She pushed back from his embrace and squared herself off in front of him, arms folded across her chest in a measure that may have been defensive or protective – or both. The tears were still shining in her eyes but now she looked resolute, certain. She looked him direct in the eye as she said, "Well, I can't talk to you for the same damn reason."

TBC