In this chapter, "The gentleman dost protest too much, methinks."

He Says, She Says

They stood there regarding one another, each perfectly still, and the time seemed to stretch out for an age.

Finally, too edgy to remain motionless for one more second, Sherlock broke the silence. "On first name basis now, are we?"

"Forgive me if I'm taking liberties," she answered blithely, albeit in a more forced tone than she'd used back in London, "but after someone saves my life in such a dashing and heroic fashion, I'm prone to drop the formalities."

He ignored her bait. "I told you to run," he said curtly. "Why are you here?"

She gazed at him measuredly for another moment, and he felt his agitation ratchet up another notch. He had just defeated a cabal of terrorists; he did not have the patience to stand here playing Grandmother's Footsteps like they were Year Three primary schoolchildren. He was about to unleash a scathing remark, when she drew closer to him.

She was wearing his dressing gown—again, simple marquise-cut diamond studs, and nothing else, and she smelled of chai. Except for the fact that the tea was chai rather than English Afternoon, it seemed that her time abroad hadn't changed her much, and a fleeting part of his mind, one that he promptly ignored, seemed to whisper that he was glad of it. Familiarity is comforting, nothing more, he dismissed.

Irene had obviously noticed him observing her, and she returned the favour, then remarked, "You seem. . .rather worked up." She raised an eyebrow to help drive her implication home, but he'd perceived it crystal clearly.

Elevated heart-rate, erratic respiration, slight perspiration. . . did she think this was his reaction to finding her in his hotel room?

Wrong.

"Well, yes," he drawled, unbuttoning his shirt cuffs with a jerk and beginning to roll up his sleeves. She tracked his every movement, he saw. "I just faced and defeated an entire faction of violent insurgents armed with automatic assault rifles for you, avoiding my possible death."

Irene's eyes widened as the two words 'for you' seemed to hang in the air between them, and Sherlock pressed his lips together, castigating himself. The way he had phrased it—it would make her think his motivations were based on some sort of. . . sentiment.

He'd had approximately four reasons to make this trip to Pakistan, and playing a hero to her damsel in distress did not rank among them. . . he was no hero, and she, though perhaps temporarily in distress, was hardly one's stereotypical damsel.

Those were nothing but meaningless, clichéd sentiments anyway, weren't they? Yes, yes. He shook his head slightly with his eyes lightly closed – he didn't want to become distracted by useless corollary thoughts.

When he opened them a moment later, she was still regarding him in silence, and he rolled his eyes and crossed the room past her to deposit his keycard and car key on the bedside table.

But instead of directly addressing what he supposed she could view as a Freudian slip, she said softly, "I'm here in part to ask you the same question that you asked me when you first walked in here." She turned back to face him, looking assertively into his eyes. "Why are you here?"

"Well you see I've booked this room and I intend to sleep in it; it's been quite a long day, as I'm sure you can imagine, and -"

"Sarcasm, Sherlock?"

Why was she so bloody stone-faced and unreadable? he thought, not for the first time, as he scrutinised her.

"Mmm yes, John's shown me that it can prove a rather effective rhetorical device, when used appropriately..." he'd been aiming for airy contempt, but knew that he was falling short. He was still too stimulated by the events of the compound to successfully play aloof.

"It's coming across as deflection."

He scoffed aloud. "You presume."

She ignored his dismissive tone, and moved closer to him again. He could now see that her eyelids were slightly swollen and the tip of her nose was faintly red. She had been crying several hours previously, and the observation made him uncomfortable. It elicited some flicker of. . something. . .within him, and he shoved the sensation away roughly.

"Why did you come to Karachi? Why did you save me?" she pressed, maintaining unwavering eye contact.

He had another question of his own: Why was she so damnably persistent?

"Those are two separate questions," he pointed out. "To which shall I respond?" He felt cornered, both figuratively and literally, and he didn't appreciate being made to explain himself to this woman.

"They are," she allowed, nodding slowly. "But I think that they have one common answer." Her dark blue eyes were still on his light ones, and her gaze seemed to drill directly into his brain.

"A simple thank you would suffice, you know," he retorted, breaking their eye contact to look at something else, anything else.

"Just," she said, bringing her hands down hard on the writing desk and slightly raising her voice, "answer the question. Please."

He stared back at her, then raised his chin imperiously. "Fine. I was bored. I needed a challenge. John was away visiting family this week."

The woman shook her head sceptically and crossed her arms in front of her chest, obviously not satisfied with his answer. To his immediate chagrin, his eyes were drawn to the line of cleavage this created, and he felt scornful annoyance towards himself. Irrelevant, he thought.

"Sherlock—"

"Miss Adler—" they spoke at the same time, both sharply.

"Those aren't real reasons," Irene pressed forward. "I want an explanation."

"I've just given you three, all of which are perfectly legitimate," Sherlock snapped. Then he continued in a clipped rush, "I don't know how you're choosing to define the term 'real' in this context, but if you knew me at all—as I think you flatter yourself that you do—you'd understand that for me, there could be no greater or more valid a reason to do anything than to satisfy my curiosity, cure my boredom, and pursue a line of inquiry to its conclusion. And I'm frankly disappointed that you would be so quick to dismiss ambitions to which anyone and everyone should aspire. I thought you were different—cleverer. . more like me." He stepped from her, looking down upon her contemptuously. "Apparently not. Now if you'd please leave -"

"I am grateful, Sherlock," she murmured, apparently trying another approach. But instead of casting her eyes downward as he might have expected her to do at such an admission, she was carefully examining his face.

"Oh, spare me," he said tonelessly. "I know I said you should thank me, but I don't actually want your gratitude. I have that five times a week like the work of the world's dullest clock, from the countless strangers whose cases I solve."

"Five cases a week? I thought you said you were bored."

"They're not mutually exclusive conditions. I have quantity, yes, but not quality," he said in an uninterested voice, although he had to admit that he wasn't feeling uninterested. He couldn't necessarily give a name to what he was experiencing, but his vitals hadn't calmed, that was certain. His pulse was still elevated, his breathing uneven, and he felt almost as he used to, when he'd been on the apex of a cocaine binge.

"But a chance to track a target across national and international borders and datelines? An opportunity to take my skills out of London and try them against a previously untested category of adversary? All under the considerable nose of my dear elder brother? On the topic of gratitude, I suppose that it's actually I who should be thanking you."

"So you did track me," Irene nodded, a satisfied glint in her eye.

"Naturally," Sherlock rejoined, looking down on her. "How do you think I came to be here in just the nick of time?"

"That is precisely what I'd like to know," she said, a sly quality in her voice he didn't care for.

"It wasn't for the reason you're thinking, you know," he said derisively, but she merely gazed back at him, and he knew that she was taking in his clammy forehead and flushed cheeks, and recalling his own words to her: "I took your pulse: elevated. Eyes: dilated."

But it wasn't the same thing, damn it. His symptoms could be attributed to the adrenaline-filled incident earlier in the evening, and it infuriated him that she would use the physical responses he had acquired in her rescue as some sort of proof against him, of a fiction she wanted to perpetuate for her own emotional satisfaction.

"Déjà vu. . ." she hummed, stepping further into his personal space, and this confirmed to him that she was indeed thinking of their last confrontation, and believing that perhaps the tables had turned, and that it was now he who was motivated by that chemical defect known as sentiment.

He felt certain that the tables had most assuredly not turned. . . but why did her conclusion—and the conviction in her eyes—make him so angry? Another, more detached, and probing, section of his brain questioned: If it wasn't true, why should he care what she ignorantly chose to believe?

"I don't do this," he said flatly, his arms rigid at his sides.

"And what is 'this'?" she said, mimicking his tone back at him with a slight smirk.

Now he was starting to feel claustrophobic, and far too warm. Hadn't the domestic staff set the thermostat to compensate for Karachi's brutal heat?

"You know."

Her smirk widened, but she seemed to sense that she was pressing him too hard, and she leaned back, withdrawing from his immediate vicinity ever so slightly.

"You'd want to know, too," she said, and he studied her through narrowed eyes, wary. "If you were unconvinced of someone's motive for a particular act, especially one so very extreme as yours, you would absolutely—I quote—'pursue a line of inquiry to its conclusion.' And that, Sherlock, is why I'm here. Because we are the same, you and I." She looked at him from below hooded, long-lashed eyelids, and her lips curved upwards. "In more ways than I think you even realise, I'd venture to say."

He tore his eyes from those lips, but the icy blue gaze that he met from her eyes was no better. Why was it so, so frightfully hot in here?

"And I am unconvinced."

"Oh, for heaven's sake!" he shouted up at the ceiling, finally losing his composure. Her persistence, his agitated physical state, and the damn heat were absolutely intolerable.

"Fine, Miss Adler, we are alike. And I didn't relish the idea of losing a mind like yours. Does that suffice?" He was terribly resentful that she'd extorted this confession from him, and yet he felt somehow liberated by his outburst as well.

Yet she just stood before him, unmoved. "There's more."

"No," he stated coldly, now desperate to rein back his fit of pique, although he had the dreadful feeling that he had crossed some sort of boundary, and there was no going back. "There isn't more, despite what you'd like to believe. . . And this is simply the same strategy you employed when you texted me nonstop, despite the fact that I never replied. You hope that by repeatedly throwing yourself at me, I'll finally succumb to your agenda. That we'll have dinner," he sneered, his words dripping with derision.

But at this, the woman actually grinned, and Sherlock felt almost helpless in the surge of his anger. Or something. Was it anger? He had never felt this sensation before, and he thought that he was thankful he hadn't. It was unbearably overwhelming, and he felt all his other processes weaken and bend under its encompassing tide.

"But you did reply, Sherlock," she contradicted. "You wished me a Happy New Year."

He stared at her, speechless. His mouth opened and closed but no sound came out, and he could actually hear the percussive roar of blood in his ears. For what he supposed was the first time in his life, he didn't have a ready retort.

"I'm—" he attempted to start, but the words stuck in his throat, which he cleared. "As I said. . .I'm surrounded by ordinary people. It would be. . .unfortunate if you were killed." He drew himself up taller and resolved that his next words would finally put an end to this preposterous conversation. "But I do not have feelings for you, Irene. I'm not interested."

"I don't believe you. . .Sherlock," she said slowly, with absolute certainty, and her statement resonated like an indictment.

Dear God, but she was relentless. Making a sound of disgust, he grabbed the key card, and pushed past her towards the door. She could stay here, but he was leaving.

But before he could head out of the room, she spoke again. "I incite a reaction in you, it doesn't take a detective of your calibre to observe that. Something you don't normally feel—maybe something you've never felt. Admit it, there's more to your motive for coming here."

He spun on the spot, and stalked back towards her, his eyes aflame. "It's evident that you need more," he spat, enunciating each word with ice-cold clarity. "I've never needed anything sentimental in my entire life, and I don't intend to start. So don't project, Irene, it's nearly always a fallacy."

She was undaunted, and he was at a loss. His caustic venom was usually deadly, but instead of crumbling, she just blinked serenely at him, the trace of a playful smile still hovering around her lips.

He started pacing in front of her, begrudging the fact that he was so clearly riled up, while she was standing there, elegant even in a man's dressing gown, and coolly confident. Yet he was powerless to stop, and he increased his pace when she started speaking again.

"What is it that you're fond of saying?" she asked, and her smile widened further. "Right: 'When one has eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how mad it might seem, must be the truth.'"

He stopped mid-step and stared at her. "What? I – what?" he spluttered, experiencing a strange dissonance from how he had originally meant the words when he'd typed them on the main page of his blog (analytically and precisely), versus the context in which she was using them now. In fact he was having a hard time following, which never happened, and though on one level he was aghast, he was also almost too dizzied by the circumstance to fully register it. Instead, the ludicrous words, 'You've seen my website?' floated up, but he shoved them back down ruthlessly. He settled for demanding, "What is that supposed to mean? We haven't eliminated anything."

"Well, no, not 'we'," she demurred. "But you have."

He tried to freeze her with his most callously dismissive 'you're utterly absurd' face, but it was a feeble attempt, and she was apparently immune.

"I have done no such thing," he said flatly, but he dreaded her self-assurance, her calm poise.

"Tracing my whereabouts, tracking me to Pakistan, coming to Karachi, and risking your life to save mine are all gestures that greatly surpass any mobile password pun, Sherlock. And since you deduced my feelings for you based on that code, my dilated pupils, and my elevated pulse—you, the infallible Sherlock Holmes—then it stands to reason that you are. . . similarly invested." She reached out and grasped his wrist, just as he had done to hers that night in front of his fireplace at 221B Baker Street. "What, I wonder, is your pulse right now? Your pupils, I can attest at least, are as large as saucers."

He jerked his wrist away from her touch, knowing full well that if she were able to measure his pulse right now, it would only serve her purposes and render her even more certain of herself. But his elevated heart-rate was due to anger and to his survivor's high, not arousal, he insisted to himself.

"But we're not the same," he protested weakly. "You can't compare—we're variables x and y."

"Oh, but you just that we were," she practically purred, looking up at him with radiant triumph in her face, and that same sense of fury—or a close approximation thereof, and the nameless something snarled to life within him once more.

She thought she was so clever, so droll – she fancied that she had outwitted the world's only consulting detective, and she was so damned pleased with herself. As if some verbal proof could substantiate anything at all in reference to emotions and sentiment, or hell, even lust. That was the precise reason he avoided such trivia in the first place!

And yet, meaningless as it was, wrong as it was, he could not let her win even at this. The self-satisfaction on her face was intolerable, and she clearly believed her own words. First the bloody SSG agent thought he needed saving back at the insurgents' compound, and now this? It was absolutely unacceptable and infuriating.

Charged, he stepped into her space this time, meaning to—what?—intimidate her with his height, or get her to recant somehow, he wasn't certain. . . But instead, when she looked up into his face, the expression of victory replaced with something new and wholly unfamiliar to him, words finally failed him. Frustrated, confused, and utterly out of his depth, he grabbed her around the waist and pulled her towards him, not even understanding himself what might happen next. . .

"Sherlock," she murmured on an exhale, pressing even closer to him so that their bodies touched from chest to thigh. He had been waging an internal conflict so intense that he didn't hear her words, but he certainly was aware of the physical reaction his body had to the intimate contact. It was indescribable, and new.

It had been a very, very long time since he had encountered anything that surprised him or granted him novel insights, but he thought that perhaps he had never even experienced anything so categorically different as this.

All the rage, frustration, and especially that indefinable yet unbearably compelling 'something' he was feeling (lust? Is this what it felt like?) seemed to magnify and hum as a result of the contact, and it was a more distracting, euphoric, and paradoxically clarifying-yet-disorienting high than that of any plant or chemical he'd tried.

"What. . ." he tried to articulate, making one final attempt to clear his mind of this strange, almost dream-like state and apply sense to the situation. But when she gazed up at him through her own lust-darkened eyes and her shallow breaths sent her scent wafting over him like opium fumes, any advantage that the rational side of his internal conflict might have had was lost, and for the first time in his life, he succumbed to reckless impulse and physical desire.

With a strangled moan of mingled vexation and longing, he cupped his hand behind her head and drew her mouth up to his as he crashed down to meet her, and their lips came together in a heated collision.

It wasn't his first kiss, but it certainly was the first one that he had initiated himself, and to his shock, this one seemed to matter somehow. . . Even despite the disorientation caused by this sudden urgent passion (or perhaps because of it), he understood that the awkward pressing-together of lips from his school days could not begin to compare with this exhilarating and almost hedonistic experience.

His heart pounded violently against his ribs as he pressed further into her, backing her up against the wall. He realised that he had become instantly addicted to the feel of her, which somehow seemed to both satisfy that feeling of agitation that had been rapidly escalating since he'd first entered the room, and stoke it further, causing him to crave even more. It was a paradox, and though usually such things attracted Sherlock's interest, he barely registered this one now, let alone allowed it to distract him. Nothing could divert him from this utterly new experience, not when his whole being was thrumming with the overwhelming notion of yes, after an entire adulthood of 'no'.

For the first several moments, The Woman was pliant and soft under his hands and lips; she allowed him to push her backwards, and her mouth yielded to his. But as time passed and he reached the extent of his previous experience, she took over, and he felt an eager thrill. His interest in khat was completely forgotten; whatever part of him that had wanted it was now wholly engrossed in this.

Tilting her head, she parted her lips to him and he mimicked her, reacting and adjusting to the new stimuli with his brand of single-minded intensity, and channelling all the adrenaline and turmoil that he had been feeling into their joining mouths. The sensation of her tongue sliding against his was foreign and yet it was also undeniably arousing, and the haze fogging his rational mind condensed further, leaving only his basest form.

In a moment of feverish impulse, he seized her under her thighs and hitched her upwards, pinning her against the wall and pressing himself in between her parted legs. She made a surprised but pleased purr in the back of her throat that was unlike any noise Sherlock had ever heard before, and it seemed to transmit directly to his growing arousal. He responded with a similar groan, while canting his hips forward unthinkingly, and he was gratified to note that it seemed to have a reciprocal effect on The Woman. Her hands skimmed, alit, and grasped his shoulders, his back, his arms, his head, in an endless pattern, before she locked her arms around his neck, bringing them closer together still.

He vaguely understood that the kisses and caresses of each passing moment seemed to further prove her words to him—about him—correct, but proving her wrong no longer felt like such a priority. In that moment, he couldn't really fathom why this need was so powerful and all-consuming (adrenaline? frustration? curiosity? . . .sentiment. . .?), but it was more than enough that it was.

And after a night of fighting and resistance (first with insurgents, and then with her), he could now do nothing but give in.

If you're under 18, please head directly to Chapter 6. If you're over 18, proceed with caution when I post the next two chapters (4 and 5). They will be rated M! (Muahahaha)