She's been quiet for the last couple of days. More specifically, she's been quieter than usual since Simone hurled a gift-wrapped box in her direction, jumped in a cab, and disappeared out of their lives. Simone always did make the impact of a huge rock thrown into a quiet pool, so of course her visit to London was no different.

The night she arrived, he did the gentlemanly thing and gave her his bed, spending the night tossing and turning on the couch. The next day, Harry stood behind his chair, massaged the ache out of his neck, and let him know he would be sleeping in her bed until Simone vacated his. And God, how he loves her bed, knowing she's lying next to him, her skin against his, her breathing soft as she sleeps. He loves what they have, the way each day it feels like something bigger than the day before, and he really loves that his feelings don't scare the hell out of him like he thought they might.

He's confused now though. She's an expert in using silence as her weapon, his Harry, he knows that, he's been on the receiving end of it enough, and it's way more deadly than any yelling she could ever do. He's asked if she's okay and bitten his tongue every time at the quiet "fine" she offers in response, but he's not going to bite his tongue tonight, he's going to find out what's going on with her. He feels like he did something wrong but he's damned if he knows what.

Pushing through the pub door he spots Dave, Watson, and a handful of the other guys from work and he hopes she's here too, although if it turns out she's gone home already then at least he'll know where to find her.

"Chas…" He reaches the bar and makes a beeline for his friend and colleague. "Is Harry here?"

"Yeah, she's over there. Being bored to tears by Fry, by the looks of it." Chas waves a hand and he turns, spotting her right away, cornered slightly by Fry gesturing enthusiastically about God only knows what, her eyes glazed over, her expression giving away how desperately she's trying to look interested but failing in some style. "Everything okay?"

"Yeah, we're good. Thanks, Chas." He nods and heads over towards Harry, watching the relief cross her face when she spots him, a tiny thawing but enough to be grateful for.

"Scram, would you, Fry? I got something I need to talk to my partner about." Fry looks wounded but he doesn't argue, he just turns on his heel and bolts back towards the bar.

"God bless him, he tries, but I'm really not sure how much longer I could have coped with hearing him wax lyrical about darts, of all things." She slides her hand under his jacket, surprising him, her hand moving to his chest and settling there. "Thank you."

"Can't stand by while my girl is being bored half to death by the dullest guy on the team and not step in." He winks at her and the tension in her face lifts, there's even a half smile threatening to head in his direction. "You okay? Kind of felt like you were avoiding me today…and the last couple of days, actually."

"I wasn't avoiding you. Or maybe I was a little. I…I'm sorry about last night." She shrugs and he thinks maybe he should have fought with her last night when she told him to go home. Instead, he had sighed, slammed her door on his way out, and spent today getting nothing more than one word answers to every question he asked her.

"I missed you." He lifts her hand from his chest and, safe in the knowledge their colleagues are behind him, squeezes her fingers, smiling when she doesn't pull away, sensing that they're teetering on the edge of a truce, even if he still has no idea what part he played in this particular battle. "I sleep better with you next to me, princess, you know that."

"Come home with me tonight?" He hates the note of hesitation in her voice, the fact that she thinks he could ever say no to her, or would ever want to.

"Absolutely." He strokes his finger slowly down the side of her face, remembering where he is and that almost everyone they work with is here, but not giving a damn because this is so much more important than any prying eyes. "I'd come home with you every night, Harry, if that's what you wanted."

"You shouldn't make promises you can't keep, Dempsey." She leans into his touch but her smile has gone back into hiding. "I was promised every night once before and that didn't go entirely well."

"Yeah, I get that, but you haven't been promised it by me." He thought they'd moved beyond this, her tendency to expect betrayal just because it happened before. He thought he'd been proving himself but maybe he was stupid to think he'd done enough.

"You're right, that was unfair. I'm sorry." She winces slightly and he hates it. He wants to take her hand, drag her out of here, and remind her that he isn't Robert Makepeace, that he hasn't, isn't, and will never let her down like that. "I just thought…stupidly, I suppose, that we were on the same page, that we might want the same things. Eventually, I mean, not right now, but I…since being with you, Dempsey, I've realised there are things I want and I…well, it's hard knowing now that perhaps you don't want those things."

"Alright, I'm going to have to 'fess up here, Harry. I have no idea what's going on, not a clue." He knows this probably isn't the right place for this discussion, but he needs to know what changed, or what she seems to think has changed when, in his eyes, it was starting to become more clear every day that they want exactly the same things.

"I thought things were going well…with us, I mean. Did I get that completely wrong?" She closes her eyes for a split second, the way she always does when she's trying to put her thoughts into some sort of order. "Was this just a bit of fun for you? Because it felt like more, it feels like more, and I-"

"Whoa, Harry, I'm not sure what you think has changed or if something happened that I totally missed, but I wake up every damn day praying that I don't screw this up, because it's way more than just a bit of fun." He scratches the back of his neck, feels himself frowning, his brain clawing for the right words to let her know what he was almost sure she already did. "I honestly could sleep next to you for the next fifty years and I'd never get tired of it."

"You could?" He nods and her smile starts to reappear. It's faltering slightly, and it hasn't quite reached her eyes, but it's there, it's a good enough start. "Now that you've said that aloud, you don't want to run screaming from the room?"

"Nope. I'm good." He grins at her and there it is, the proper smile, the one that makes him want to wrap himself around her and never let go. "You know, I figured I was making it pretty clear this was way more than just casual, way more than fun. Not that we don't have fun, but you know what I mean. More than just fun, I guess. What the hell happened to make you question that?"

"Simone happened." She bites her lip and looks down for a few seconds, sighing before meeting his eyes again.

"Simone? I don't...I was at your place the whole time she was here. She was in my bed, yeah, but I was in yours, Harry." He's more confused than he was before, if that's even possible. "Me and Simone, we have one hell of a messed up history, I'll give you that, but that's it. We've been over and done with for a long time. When she showed up out of the blue like that I thought she must be in some kind of trouble, or she just couldn't resist a free vacation. There's nothing on earth she could do to make me want to go back to her, I thought you knew that."

"I did, I do. It's not that. I admit I did wonder just briefly if she might make you realise you missed New York and you'd want to go home, but I wasn't worried about you going back to her. It's…do you remember what she said the night we were at the piano bar?" She bites her lip again and all he remembers is how beautiful she looked that night, how relaxed she seemed in the face of the whirlwind that is Simone, and how his ex was right about one thing; the top really did look better on Harry.

"She was wasted out of her mind, as usual. She says a lot of things, I've gotten real good over the years at tuning her out after a while."

"Well, I don't have those years of experience, Dempsey, so I heard everything she said." Her voice takes on the sharp, clipped tone it does when she's annoyed, and she sighs before she goes on. "What she said was that she could picture the two of us together, a little house, a garden…a couple of kids. Is any of this ringing any bells with you?"

"I…, uh, yeah, I do remember her saying that, yeah." The realisation of what Harry might be upset about starts to dawn and he wishes he could rewind to that night and drag Simone out of that bar before she opened her damn mouth.

"Well, what I remember is your reaction." Her tone is softer again and she looks up at him, her blue eyes filled with hurt, uncertainty. "You looked like those were the worst things you could possibly imagine anybody daring to suggest, and I suddenly thought I'd done it again, let my guard down, started to picture my future in a certain way, with someone who obviously isn't thinking along those lines at all, so I-"

"You stepped back, shut down, expected the worst, right?" She nods and he silently curses himself for his reaction that night, a little bit irritated at her too for jumping to the conclusion she did. "So, because I didn't tell my drunk ex-girlfriend that yeah, she was right, all of that stuff with you is exactly what I want, you decided I was just another guy cut from the same asshole cloth as your ex, and-"

"No. No, that's not what I think at all. You're nothing like him, Dempsey, and you know that. What I thought was that yet again I'd misjudged things, only this time it was a misjudgement that could ruin everything, really ruin everything. I don't want to…" The look in her eyes is part frustration, part focus, so he waits, lets her say what she needs to. "I really don't want to mess everything up. Our friendship, our partnership at work, those things matter to me, you matter to me, and I thought I was about to lose it all because I had made assumptions about what you wanted and had got it horribly bloody wrong."

"She was screwing with us, Harry. She may be a crazy, jaded drunk, but she's no slouch when it comes to people. She can read people like a damn book, and she's known me long enough that she could see the second she got here that I'd changed. Then she met you and boom, right away she knew why, so of course she couldn't resist needling us that night in the bar." He remembers Simone slurring her words by that point, remembers the scorn in her voice that Harry wouldn't have noticed but that he knows all too well. "I looked you right in the eye when she said those things, Harry, I thought it was obvious that I wanted all the things she said. I just didn't want to play her games. Not with this, not with something as big as you and me."

"You know, sometimes you're not as obvious as you think you are." She pushes an errant strand of hair out of her eyes and lets out a soft sigh. "You might want to keep that in mind for future reference."

"What did she say to you?" He knows, suddenly, that she was lying when she told him Simone hadn't said anything. He was lying too and he thinks they probably need to work on their communication skills some more. "Simone. She did say something, didn't she?"

"She seemed…threatened, I think, by me." She frowns and he knows she's right. Simone was threatened by Harry, by her very presence, her poise, but mostly by how clear it was right off the bat that she was everything to him. "Perhaps threatened is too strong a word but she was definitely wary of me, and she knew there was something between you and I, I could tell. She knew we were…she said you were comfortable with me, it was obvious you were fond of me, and-"

"Fond of you?" It's exactly the sort of word Simone would use only to mock Harry's use of it and that annoys him. "She said I was fond of you?"

"She asked if you had talked to me about her and I said you were obviously fond of her." She shrugs and he can't help wondering what the hell else Simone was shooting her mouth off about while she had Harry basically captive in his bedroom. "Then, like I said, she seemed to know, or seemed to think, that I was…important to you."

"Important to me?" He knew Simone would start trying to play games with Harry as soon as she arrived, and he knows too that Harry isn't one to bite. Instead she has clearly been sitting on her annoyance since Simone left and letting it grow.

"Are you going to repeat everything I'm telling you?" She sighs and he knows he's close to the point where she'll tell him to forget it, that it doesn't matter, even though it quite obviously does. "That's it, that's all she said, and I'm not sure why I lied when you asked if she had said something to me, I just-"

"Jesus, Harry, I'm not fond of you, I'm in love with you. I'm completely crazy in love with you." Her mouth drops open just slightly before she catches herself and her lips curve into a smile instead. "I guess I should have said that before now, right?

"Damn you, Dempsey. Yes, maybe you should." Her smile gets wider and she steps a fraction closer, sliding her hand into his, apparently also no longer caring where they are. "Then it's a good thing I love you too, isn't it?"

"Yeah, that's definitely a good thing." He squeezes her hand and glances briefly behind him, their colleagues too focused on their own conversations to notice the two of them about to disappear out into the night. "Shall we get out of here?"

Outside he stops and pushes her against the wall, suddenly needing to touch her properly after a night alone and a day that had him feeling miles from her, knowing he can't wait until they get home. She murmurs a faint protest against his lips, but it's a stand against the location, not the action. The fact that she's the one to deepen the kiss, the one whose hands are roaming with a desperate urgency under his jacket, tells him it's a token protest. He pushes a hand into her hair and she moans, her hips pushing into his as her kiss becomes a smile that he can feel, can taste. He doubts she's deliberately trying to kill him, but if they don't leave and continue this somewhere with no interruptions, he's pretty sure it might happen anyway.

"So…you love me." She gives him a smile so simultaneously sweet and sexy that he doesn't quite know how he survives each day beside her.

"I do." He grins at her, her happiness contagious. "You love me, that's the crazy part."

"My father always said I had a crazy streak." She lets out the giggle he loves, the one he didn't know was part of her repertoire until one night his tongue found a sensitive spot and the sound she made sent him into orbit.

"Smart man, your Pops." He's about to suggest they really do leave this time, when the door opens and Chas steps out, a look of confusion on his face quickly replaced by a wide grin.

"Thought you two had headed out ages ago." Chas's eyebrow raises, his curiosity obvious.

"Yeah, we did, but we got distracted, I guess…" He shrugs and his friend stands there, his grin still in place. "Did you know Harry loves me, Chas?"

"Bloody hell, Dempsey." Harry swats his arm, but it's playful and she's smiling so he knows he's gotten away with it.

"What?" He grins at her and pulls her to his chest, his arm wrapping around her. "It's Chas."

"Good to know it's not one-sided, Dempsey. Nothing worse than unrequited love." Chas shakes his head and laughs. "Have a good weekend, you two. See you on Monday."

"Perhaps you'd like to go back inside and announce it to the rest of our colleagues?" She slides her arm through his and smiles up at him. "Actually, don't answer that. Come on, let's go. There are things I want to do to you that would get us both arrested if I were to act on them here."

"You know, some things might be worth getting arrested for, Harry." He presses his hand to hers and squeezes her fingers gently, smiling back at her.

"Mm, maybe so, but there are fresh sheets on the bed at my house and wine in the fridge…" There's a glint in her eyes that he loves, the one that tells him she has the kind of plans for him tonight that he couldn't have dared to dream about a few months ago. "And I think there are strawberries too, and whipped cream, and -"

"Yep, you're right. Let's get the hell out of here."