A/N: Long overdue. I apologize. I allowed myself to get sidetracked by George Gently. A lovely man in desperate need of... well, you know. So, the first new George Gently fic to hit FF in about 2 years is up. Three stories in the hopper. Bad, bad idea.

My thanks to dancesabove and to all of you who read and tell me what you think, as well. Knowing folks are out there makes writing possible.

"With Adam," she began, with some obvious thought, "something was just off; not right. It was all very cordial and polite. And we got along – as if we were family, really. But there was never that... well, mad, harried, I-might-be-sick sort of feeling." She paused to look at him quite seriously. "Doesn't that happen, that feeling, to other people?" she asked him so desperately.

It did, he knew. It had happened to him a few times in his life. But he would not admit it – not to this vulnerable, confused young thing. He wouldn't tell her there were moments when he was very much mad and harried, and feeling rather ill and foolish.

Or that it was, quite impossibly, because of her.

And so Christopher only nodded to reassure her.

"If I ruin things..." Sam said, tensely. "If you never want to see me because of this, and I lose you..."

"You won't," he tried to promise. The roughness to his voice heartened rather than frightened her.

She managed a small smile. "I should go. I can't..." she stammered.

"Sit down, Sam," he heard himself say. His hand reached out for hers decisively and he brought her to sit at the table. Once he had the tray set, he carried it over to join her.

/ / / / / /

There was their silence while he poured. That only continued as Sam then rocked the liquid in her cup back and forth.

He stirred his tea and stole a look at her. He could see she was nervous. To his eyes, she was her old girlish self in some moments like this, then a whole new woman in others.

A sigh rose up from her, and she smiled ruefully. Visibly, then, she became that woman who'd been brave enough to approach him. Sam leaned a little further across the table, smiled a little more broadly.

"It's you I want to be with. It has been you... all along."

Any tone of anxious confession was gone from her voice. What she was saying seemed to make her... happy. And he could not reconcile that with the confusion he felt.

"I – I don't believe you," he said, seeming perturbed. He didn't know how anything else said today could possibly stun him, but he felt a sort of fog threaten his mind's workings. He grasped for an explanation, a rational way through this. "I think all of this has more to do with breaking off the –"

She looked more confident than he had ever known her to be, as she shook her head to cut him off. "No," Sam told him resolutely. "You are afraid to believe me. It would certainly be far easier not to believe me. Because this would risk everything... change everything. But I think you know that I mean this."

"It was not that long ago that you were engaged to another man," he told her pointedly.

"Because I made a mistake. I had wanted things to be easy. That was what I did wrong," she said. "I wanted to love the man who loved me. To do what people expected. But finally, I knew I couldn't marry Adam – no matter how alone I'd be. And even though it meant facing all the guilt of having said yes to him."

Sam steeled herself to bring up the worst of it; the part she thought was a stumbling block for him.

"And yes, we ended up in bed together, which solved nothing. Just made it all more dreadful and awkward. As well as obvious to me that it was a mistake."

She didn't think he seemed embarrassed over her comment. A horrible, immature part of her admitted that she wouldn't have minded if Foyle had seemed a bit jealous. Instead his look struck Sam as one of concern. There was a patrician and Victorian want to stand by her, take her part. And she saw all of that in the tense flex of muscles across that face that she knew so well.

"Christopher, you are sweet, dear God. But I don't want you to blame him. To think I am naïve." She paused. "My fall was my own," she said, a tad too melodramatically. "He did not lure me to bed," she admitted.

Foyle was not sure which would have been worse, a Sam who had been rather badly used or this one who acknowledged having been quite willing. He closed his eyes a moment. And like a sad old man surrounded by his regrets, all he could think was that he wanted to change time. Be younger. Go back. Be what Adam had been to her.

"You need time to get over this... to get over Adam," he finally told her.

"That's not it. You won't believe me, will you?" she objected with a shake of her head. "I should have done it – propositioned you – a long time ago, if I had only had the courage. Or if I had only understood the way I was feeling." She paused then, her eyes drifting across the table top as she considered how to explain this. "There was a movie I saw while you were away," she surprised him by saying. "Do you ever think about a book or a movie?"

"All the conversations that we've had?" he replied with a raised eyebrow. "You must know I have..."

"But I mean, think about it, and how it's like you and your life... something that personal, you didn't usually talk about."

"I couldn't, Sam. It isn't done! Policemen riding around, talking about their feelings?" He had a look on his face that was somehow both tortured and amused. "Being with you made me want impossible things, more real conversations. You made me want to skip off from work and sit with you. To not hear the word 'sir' again..."

She squeezed his hand over that.

"The movie was Brief Encounter. With Trevor Howard. Do you know the story?" she said, after she had given him a small smile.

"The basics. Two married people meet and are attracted to each other..."

In her impatience Sam cut him off again. "It's worse. You see, it was the real love of her life. At least, that was what I thought. She meets the real love of her life, but it's too late. She's already married to someone else. Not to a bad man. Just... the wrong man."

"You decided Adam was the wrong man." The part Christopher is missing, Sam thought sadly, is that he is the right one.

Still she nodded. "Because I liked being with Adam. But I didn't mind when he left. Because I don't want to kiss him... hard, as if I can never get close enough. It was just a general sort of unease I felt over life, I think, that made me accept his proposal. Not any real passion. But I tried to convince myself..."

"Why?"

Sam shrugged sadly. It had been so much easier when she had discussed this with her mother. The woman had understood. Had guessed it all. But her former boss couldn't see it. Could not realize how scared and weak she sometimes felt.

"It was just before I met Adam that I told myself I had to grow up. Give up on... fairy tales. You had moved on after the war," Sam said. "Everyone had. And I needed to do the same." She pushed at her hair and smiled as if a bit ashamed. "The war was over," she tried to explain. "And we were all supposed to get on with our lives. But that really was my life, the war. With all that gone, I was left... well, adrift. And... then... do you remember when we stood up with the Milners?"

Even with no more said, Foyle knew what she meant, that morning in the church. The powerful moments that made up Clementine's christening.

"At the font, side by side."

"Side by side," Sam said lowly. "God help me, we stood there, and there was so much hope, so much future in what the vicar said. And I thought, for just those moments... I let myself believe..."

He squeezed his eyes shut. It hurt to hear this, to know where it was going. "Oh, Sam."

"I let myself believe," she forged on, "that this wonderful, hopeful future was supposed to be as it was in that church."

"You and me," Foyle whispered.

"Together. But all of that, that fantasy, just vanished when we hit the sunshine outside. You seemed more stiff and aloof than you had ever been, and suddenly it all felt foolish and impossible."

"I am not the best with church ceremonies."

"No," she said, with half a laugh. "It was that I looked at you and had to face that things were no different. You were still 'Mr. Foyle,' and I was everyone's jumbled-feeling acquaintance. And I felt very shoddy for wanting those things I'd imagined," she smiled sheepishly. "Especially for conjuring it all while standing in a church! And I convinced myself that all my thoughts of you had been something I needed to give up."

"I did no better by you, when I then nearly got you shot," he said, in a perverse attempt to lighten the mood.

"No, I almost got you shot! We certainly got Adam shot! Which gives the three of us a strange little history..."

"Please, Sam," he winced.

"Then, later, in all my moments alone, I was left to realize that I am almost thirty..." she added, by way of explanation.

Quite unconsciously he made an amused little noise over her age.

"Oh, scoff! But you weren't still trying to figure out what to do at my age. It has felt as if the most important bit of my life is over. As if I were losing you. I felt childish clinging to you. Clamoring for every chance to see you."

"And I felt an old fool every time I forced my way back into your new life."

Something in her eyes thanked him for that. It was a look he had missed.

"And Adam was there, with enough enthusiasm for two, really," she continued. "I got caught up in it, in how in love he could make me feel..."

"When you really weren't in love with him," Christopher ventured.

"Exactly." Sam's expression was briefly sad as she put her empty cup back down. "If I had understood that you should hang on to fairy tales, I would have. Insecurities and the rest of the world be damned," she mused with a crooked little expression.

When he asked her then to sit with him in the front room, it came as a quiet murmur that matched the blanketing shadows.

/ / / / / /

Sam followed him to the far side of the room, but did not sit just yet. His back was to her as he moved to adjust the wireless. She let emotion guide her; let her need for comfort free her to stand behind him and rest her head on his shoulder for a moment. It surprised her when he found her hand and drew it around him to hold it at his chest.

"It's going to be all right, Sam," he said at a hush.

"You've said that to me... so many times over the years."

"Mm-hmm," he agreed quietly.

"And you've been right… a few times at least," she teased.

"When it comes to you, Sam, I'll always want things to be right. For you to be happy."

Christopher noted that this was easier somehow now, better than their conversation at the table. Better than so much they had tried to talk about today. His eyes were on the wall and he could have the conversation as if he were only speaking his thoughts aloud and alone. But this was also better (so very much better) because there was the feel of her, the hand he would not release. And then, the reward of her head placed once again on his shoulder.

"It all seems so utterly ridiculous now – my plan for when you came home, I mean," she almost whispered in his ear. "Propositioning you like that. Nothing apparently kills the desire for..."

She meant sex, he knew. That nothing kills the desire for sex as much as talking about it.

One finger in his collar, he loosened things further. Not always true, he thought with a bemused twitch of his lips. And lowly then, he found himself asking, "But apparently talking about Adam kills your... libido?"

"Yes."

"Good," he said, and he turned to face her.

She was confused, too unsure to be at all hopeful. "Good?" she merely echoed, searching his face.

He said nothing, but continued to study her. She found it difficult at times that this man seemed to be thinking, always thinking.

She was the one to break the silence first. "Just… tell me. Get it over with."

"Tell you?" He looked confused.

"That it's hopeless." She dropped her head for a moment, in that shy way she still had after all these years. "It's hopeless, because if you had wanted to be with a woman you would have brought one to all of those functions or nights out. Because I watched. I tried to notice. I needed to know if there was someone. Was there, and I missed it?"

"Is it hopeless? Oh, most likely," he opined, as lightly as he could. "But, there was no one, Sam, because I was already with the only woman I wanted to be with."

"Oh." And it was her turn to be quite stunned.

His face turned worried then. Until it seemed he could take no more of the storm inside of him. He leaned into her slowly. And the kiss he gave her was hard. But tight and troubled. His hands didn't seem to know just how he should hold her. Christopher was blatantly out of practice, but quite unwilling to opt for caution.

His voice cracked slightly, once he spoke. "That is what I wanted to do, once I knew we were safe that day in London, in the basement. Dear God, I have wanted to do that. But," and he stressed his next words, even as he fought to calm himself, "I won't have an affair with you."

Her misunderstanding flashed across her face. What was he saying? she was nervously wondering. That he was past the type of need she felt? Or that he was afraid it was something he couldn't manage emotionally?

Tense and afraid, she waited for some clarity.

He swallowed hard and then gave her hope as his hand reached to stroke sensually at her neck, fingers trailing just inside the edge of her blouse.

But his words sounded quite final. "You need to go home, Sam."

She smiled weakly, acknowledging the impasse they had reached. There were just a few words as she put on her coat with his help, and eased out the door.

Alone then, he knew he should ring Andrew to let him know that he was back in Hastings, safe and sound. But Christopher felt so uneasy that it would be, he decided, unwise.

Foyle believed he was a settled, successful man. Lucky, in that he had been blessed with a certain amount of intelligence and savvy. Those things had gotten him through so many difficult times. A few gifts, and hard work, had brought him to today.

But today, he had somehow completely, just completely, lost his footing.