Warning: In case you didn't see it coming, this chapter is rated M! Probably the most M chapter yet, so underage readers, while you've been safe for a while, it's time to avert your eyes! Better yet, run away ;)

In case you're interested, this is the Alexander McQueen dress I imagine Irene wearing throughout the story:

tinyurl
.
com
/bwzhy7g

Her underwear is by Bordelle, because I'm pretty sure "The Woman" would own their entire collection of lingerie (this definitely being the least scandalous of the line):

tinyurl
.
com
/7zodfw9

Victory in Surrender

As they drew closer to the level where their suite was situated, Sherlock began to feel far more winded than the number of steps warranted, and when they arrived on their deck he found himself tightening his grasp on Irene's hand and quickening his pace. Next to him she let out a soft huff of breath and lightly squeezed back, but she didn't speak, and she matched her gait to his.

When they approached the door, he fumbled for the key and nearly missed fitting it into the lock in the first try, then, with a twist of his wrist, it swung open and revealed the scene he had fled only thirty-five minutes before. So much had changed in the intervening half hour, and yet not nearly as much as he'd have formerly preferred to believe. Really, the only thing that had evolved was his own acceptance of his sentiment—though the difference of that one critical factor profoundly altered his perception of everything else.

They stepped inside the room, and when she closed the door behind them, it shut out all the roar of the wind, churning ocean wake, and rumbling engines, leaving only the noise of their elevated breathing—and a faint buzzing in Sherlock's mind. It was as if his brain were spinning and whirring in a final effort to detect a flaw in his decision or find 'the catch,' but it wasn't clicking onto anything. There were no longer any barriers—real or imagined—that would come in between what he wanted, and what he would have.

Still, he stood frozen in the middle of the sitting room while she remained at the door, her hand on the handle, and the moment stretched out between them, lengthened by the intensity of their shared gaze. He knew that the temporary paralysis was no longer caused by any misgivings he felt about himself, though—nor about her. Nor was it due to any hesitation over being physically intimate. Instead perhaps he was simply nervous, he thought, then amended, unquestionably nervous, yes. It was more than just arousal that had sent adrenaline coursing through his veins, igniting his entire nervous system.

And yet there was no doubt that he felt the full power of that force as well, and he recognised that the fear and the arousal were both direct results of his ownership of his feelings, and the subsequent honesty and intimacy that came with them.

As they continued to stare at each other, both wearing flushed cheeks that were coloured from more than the wind, and wide, dark eyes, his brain finally abandoned its last efforts at due diligence. Instead, he saw flashes of a dozen different scenarios, each depicting what he would like to do with her in the upcoming hours—various explicit visions of the two of them reenacting the events of the previous night and morning, as well as attempting additional acts that he had never experienced or even really considered, but were somehow now displaying in his mind in sharp, compelling focus.

He felt his pulse quicken and his cheeks flame, and she seemed to unconsciously respond to his physiological indicators by moistening her lips with the top of her tongue and tightening her grasp on the doorknob. Still they stared at one another, as if transfixed.

Then, after only eight seconds passed since they had entered the room (though it had felt much longer), Sherlock cleared his throat.

"My coat. . . it really does suit you," he stated, and his voice came out in such a low rasp that it almost broke.

"You already said that," she pointed out with a low, melodic chuckle, and it seemed to break some sort of spell.

"Did. . ." he trailed off blinking, and recalled that he had already verbalised the politer version of the thought that had been cycling through his mind on a loop for the past four minutes, then said: "Well. It's worth repeating, apparently." His throat was dry and he swallowed convulsively.

She gave him a sly, pleased smile. "Look at you, you look like you just want to pounce on me. Have I touched upon some fantasy you didn't even realise you had?"

His lips tightened—not in any sort of displeasure, but in acknowledgement that she really had struck a nerve. He'd have never guessed that he could be so susceptible to something he'd previously dismissed as so trivial and frivolous—but that had been before he had met The Woman. "Possibly. . ." he started, then without missing a beat, he seamlessly corrected, "yes. Another first, it would seem."

One perfect eyebrow arched in question. "Are you trying to tell me that you've never fantastised before?"

There was no one about whom to fantastise, before, he thought. His sex life had begun, and, he surmised, would end with Irene Adler. "Not about sex, there are too many other things in my brain—s'never enough room for something like that to be allowed to take up space," he answered mindlessly. "When I was a child I had plenty of fantasies, as all children do, but by the time I reached adolescence I. . ." Suddenly he became all too conscious that he was rambling like an idiot, and he shut his mouth and shook his head impatiently.

"But now?" she pressed, apparently eager to return to topic as well. Her breathing was shallow, her chest visibly rising and falling beneath the thick textured wool of his coat, and all that was visible of her iris was the thinnest ring of dark blue. The rest was eclipsed by a well of black.

"Now I want. . ." he started, feeling inexorably drawn into those depths.

"What?" she pressed, a coy smile curling up at the edge of her mouth, and once again he saw the illicit images flicker tantalisingly before his mind's eye.

"Everything," he uttered, his voice raw and primal.

For a fraction of a second Sherlock saw Irene's eyes widen, then she dropped her hand from the doorknob, turned towards him, and met his gaze in electrifying dare. "And what are you going to do about that?" she prompted, her tone honeyed and insinuating.

He barely heard her question over the deafening roar of blood in his ears, and the rest of the room faded out as his vision was reduced down to her face, which seared into his focus in extraordinary high definition. He didn't have to think about the answer; before she had even finished enunciating the last word, he had instinctively closed the distance between them with two long strides. He leaned down at the precise moment she tilted her chin up, and their lips came together in a hard, bruising collision.

Again time seemed to lose its conventional meaning for Sherlock, measured by their progressively deepening kisses and increasingly heated sighs rather than by seconds and minutes. Their cabin had taken on the same isolated, slightly surreal quality that the hotel in Karachi had, and he felt as if they were the sole passengers on the entire ship. He suspected that even if they stood on the steps of the Anteros Fountain at midday, all of Piccadilly Circus—hell, all of London, perhaps—would fade away if she kissed him this way. . . She drew and monopolised the focus of his every sense and thought.

Suddenly and reflexively, Sherlock grasped her hips with both hands, and pulled her against him in a rough grinding motion, surprising both of them with his audacity. They broke apart abruptly and he looked down into Irene's face, which reflected back at him all of his own feelings of intoxicated arousal. Then, as if that had been their cue, they began to stagger towards the bedroom together: she stumbling out of her shoes and starting to unbutton his shirt, he unwrapping his scarf and dropping it to the ground, and then fumbling with the coat he had partially fastened for her when they'd been outside. A part of him wished he could somehow strip her out of her dress and undergarments while keeping her in his coat, but he would table that emergent fantasy, for now.

Just inside the small bedroom Sherlock pressed his form along the lean line of Irene's, trapping her body between his own and the door-frame and pinioning her wrists above her head so that his shirt was left a third undone, gaping open around his throat. She released his lips and with a playfully insolent glint in her blue eyes she deliberately canted her hips forward, but he immediately reclaimed her mouth and tightened his grasp on her wrists, retorting with the same movement against her.

Despite the exchange, Sherlock knew that this time there would be no real element of rivalry. . . they wouldn't be competitively comparing the other's pulse-rate or assessing whose skin was more flushed or pupils more dilated. Instead, this was a time to consummate all that had passed between them: all that had been hard-won and everything that had been resolved.

Irene freed her wrists from his grip and slid her hands down the lines of his arms and over the planes of his heaving chest, before she wrapped them around his waist. Sherlock felt her try to grasp the material of his tight-fitting shirt, but after she couldn't gain ahold of it, she slipped her fingertips under his trousers' waistband so that she could yank the hem free with a slightly uncontrolled jerk.

Sighing in satisfaction, she immediately glided her hands beneath the fabric and clutched his back, flattening her palms against his tensed muscles. He shivered at the cool caress against his bare, overheated skin, and the fine hairs on his torso and arms rose automatically in response.

Sherlock watched the look of pleased satisfaction flit openly across her face, and he realised he could fully comprehend her expressions and body language—she was deliberately and candidly revealing her true emotions to him. It was as if he had finally grasped the grammar of a foreign language so that all the disparate vocabulary he knew could finally link together and form explicable ideas. . . He might have known what individual gestures or expressions meant, but now they came together to portray the full richness of everything she was feeling, and the openness and raw vulnerability he could perceive was almost as intimate as any physical act they shared—and just as stimulating.

Irene smiled, clearly comprehending the gist of his thoughts (after all, she'd never had difficulty discerning his feelings) and in response she withdrew her hands from beneath his shirt and pushed him gently on the centre of his chest. He collapsed back against the edge of the double bed, and as he eagerly toed off first one shoe, then the other, he continued to look up into her face with wanton, hungry eyes.

Maintaining that hypnotic yet provocative eye contact, she leaned back and pulled several pins from her hair so that the secured, coiled locks she had carefully rearranged in the aftermath of her "execution" scene cascaded in soft waves across her back and shoulders. The move immediately softened her features and transformed her back into the woman who had begun to seduce him in his London flat, and who had then closed the deal in a hotel room four thousand miles away later. It struck him that her hairstyle was a calculated reflection of the persona she wished to project. The updo was rigid and severe, and corresponded with the professional characteristics of 'The Woman'. And her loose waves weren't any less contrived at times, although Sherlock felt certain that this situation wasn't one of them.

The effect was immediate and incendiary. Making a low noise in the back of his throat, he wrapped his fingers around her hips and tugged her more tightly against him so that her knees hit the mattress on either side of his thighs. He felt completely consumed with lust and admiration for her (The Woman, indeed), and fleetingly wondered where this vast and seemingly inexhaustible well of passion had originated. He understood that his desire had been ignited by the sentiment he felt, but the sheer strength of it was astounding to him. Had the propensity to feel this intensely truly just lain dormant within him, lurking and waiting to be let loose by one person—the one woman who mattered? It seemed incredible to him. And yet. . .

"Second law of. . .thermodynamics," he panted almost in answer to himself, pushing his palms roughly up her body to cup her breasts through the coat. And although he may have unknowingly harboured a fantasy borne from the circumstances of their first meeting, when nothing had lain between the smooth expanse of her skin and its lining, he now found the thick fabric frustrating. It obscured her shape and didn't permit him to feel the texture and heat of her through it. Now that he knew the sensual and somehow luxurious sensation of skin against skin, he craved to experience it again.

"The second law of thermodynamics?" she repeated a moment later after he hadn't elaborated, although her voice was distant and sounded distracted. He had slid his hands under the coat and was dragging his fingertips up the back of her bare legs, whilst his mouth fastened on the sliver of skin revealed just above the scooped neckline of her dress and between the open lapels of his coat.

Sherlock hummed in the back of his throat, and then exerted firm but gentle pressure against the backs of her knees, so that her weight shifted forward, and she straddled his lap, the edges of the coat wide open, and the hem of her dress riding up her thighs. Impatiently, Sherlock shoved the coat off her shoulders and it pooled to a heap on the floor, immediately forgotten.

At once he stretched up to reach her uncovered throat, and in between nuzzling kisses and light nips along her external jugular vein and under her jaw, he growled, "It states. . .that heat cannot flow. . .on its own. . .from an area of cold. . .to an area of. . .hot."

When she didn't respond except for a breathy sigh at the word 'hot', he tilted his head back and looked into her face, his eyes unfocused. "Metaphor," he said almost disdainfully, although there was no actual scorn behind his tone. She'd had him thinking figuratively since they reunited, so it was almost inevitable that he would verbalise one.

"Meaning. . .it took you to show me, I could be. . .like this. . . I always had the. . ." He shook his head dismissively, abandoning the effort. He couldn't really express the complexity of the comparison in his admittedly sub-par mental state, and his limited oxygen intake was an additional handicap. Instead, he trailed off and nudged his hips upward against her to convey his meaning.

She laughed, a low, delighted sound. "Trust Sherlock Holmes to express his feelings through a physics concept," she observed, her eyes bright with what looked like genuine amusement and affection, before she dragged her fingertips through his hair, then tugged the ends down to angle his mouth up to hers. His lips curved into a small acknowledging smile against hers, before the whisper of their joined mouths and the heady sensation of her tongue stroking his distracted him. That sweet, slow slide, contrasted with the pressure of her on his lap, and combined with the sharp tug on his scalp made him nearly delirious from sensory stimulation, and he groaned deeply in his throat and grabbed her thighs, pressing her closer to him.

Somehow through the haze of his prurience, he was struck with awe at how this experience was yet again so very different than their previous two encounters. He wasn't sure how he would label it out of the selection of terms he'd compiled early that morning (he would need to accrue a much larger sample of data for comparison. . .) but it was somehow much more affecting and poignant than before—even than their unhurried and sensual pre-dawn tryst.

I do know why, he thought, his heart-rate accelerating in a way than had nothing to do with his arousal, though their mouths continued to brush, connect, and melt into one another. While Irene had undoubtedly diagnosed and subsequently lit the initial spark between them, he now saw the two of them as equals in every way.

He had admired her cleverness and wit since their first memorable meeting, so much so that it did translate into very real physical attraction for the first time in his life. But he now recognised that she was unreservedly his full intellectual peer, and in turn he felt that he had become her match in his capacity to feel, and to express that depth of feeling.

And, sure of that equality, he felt like an empowered and fully-involved participant as they moved forward. Sex was no longer something that was happening to him; it was now something in which he was actively (and enthusiastically) invested. It was the difference between being knocked over by a rogue wave and submerged without warning or any preparation, and taking a deep breath before in diving headfirst with both eyes wide open, and letting the water envelop him. If he did feel that drowning sensation again, it was because he had knowingly surrendered to it. . .

The concept of giving into his sentiment and desire for her no longer terrified him—it actually felt incredibly liberating. He was secure in the knowledge that, as Irene had pointed out, they weren't adversaries. Rather, they were complementing counterparts.

In a way, the surrender itself felt as utterly enthralling and freeing as when he had finally acknowledged and conscientiously given in to his coke addiction as a younger man. He felt the same sense of thrilling release that came with fully permitting himself to indulge in what he wanted, to the extent that he wanted it.

But when he had surrendered to the drugs, he'd only felt liberated because he'd completely given up on the idea of having a productive, fulfilling life, and there had been a masochistic sort of freedom in that. It had happened at his darkest hour and was deliberately self-destructive, borne out of jaded hopelessness.

This was the diametric opposite. Now he was investing himself in something more fully than he ever had before (including cases, which didn't demand nearly as much of him), and this act, while carnal, nonetheless felt somehow wholesome and affirming. . . 'right.'

As Sherlock looked up into Irene's face, breathing hard from their intense, protracted kisses and almost dizzy with infatuation for her, he dragged his hands up her thighs, then hitched up the skirt of her dress until it bunched bulkily around her hips. Frustrated, he grasped the bottom hem and yanked upwards, only to hear a shredding noise as the rear vent tore.

He hesitated, but she shook her head impatiently, small curls starting to form around her face from the moisture dewing along her hairline. "Never mind it. . ." she panted. "I'd happily burn this dress if I had anything else to wear. . ."

He opened his mouth to tell her that she did have other things (an entire suitcase full, in fact), because obviously it would look suspicious if Erin Sigerson processed through customs without luggage. But then she rolled her weight forward so that her knees found better purchase on the mattress, and he became distracted.

He would still tell her—later. And since he had her implicit permission. . .

He looked down, and with an almost feral twist of his lips, he clutched the two ends of the skirt and jerked his hands apart, ripping the fabric apart up to the small of her back, and then grabbing her upper thighs tightly in his grip.

If she was bothered by the fact that he had just seriously damaged the only item of clothing she knew she possessed, she didn't indicate it. Instead, she stared into his face biting her lower lip, her breath quickening into short bursts. Again he thrilled at the fact that he could now understand this nonverbal language—she had taught him that—and so he knew what she wanted. It was something they both wanted.

He slid one hand to the back of her neck and drew her into a fierce, claiming kiss, then dragged his fingertips down to grasp her dress's zipper. He tugged the tab down her back with one hand while the other buttressed her against him, and then he instructed, "Lift your arms."

She did so at once, and he pulled the fabric up over her head without a moment's hesitation, revealing that she wore no bra beneath the dress. He swallowed the flood of saliva that pooled into his mouth at the sight of her suddenly bared breasts, and immediately leaned forward to take one into his mouth, hollowing his cheeks and rolling his tongue across it. She dug her nails into the ridges of his shoulder-blades and sighed in approval, and he smirked in self-satisfaction. He may have had extremely limited familiarity with physical intimacy, but there were only so many ways in which experience could improve upon pure instinct and his keen sense of observation.

"You know, somehow I don't mind if it's you telling me what to do in bed, as long as I get to repay the favour," she murmured heavily into his ear, and the puffs of breath were hot and moist against his skin, causing him to shudder slightly against her—at the thought of both prospects.

His skimmed the tip of his nose up her chest until they found each other's mouths again, moving far more sloppily and uncoordinatedly together. His mind was blank save for processing the intense immediacy of the moment, and all the sensations, textures, and low breathy noises that came with it. Now that his head was complicit in this venture, he could let go intellectually and just experience sex with his body and—for lack of a better word—soul, and there was something incredibly wanton and sumptuous about that. Reaching such a point had been extraordinarily difficult (Understatement, he thought briefly), and so he was determined to take advantage of the rewards.

"What do you want me to do next?" she asked provocatively, and Sherlock found the question exhilarating.

"Finish. . .unfastening my shirt," he said, and the words tumbled out in more of a low exhale than a voice.

Smiling with dark, hooded eyes, she ran a fingertip down the depression between his pectoral muscles where the material hung parted open, and then nimbly undid the buttons. As she followed the trail of uncovered skin with her lips, another involuntary shudder passed through him, and his head suddenly dropped backwards as a soft groan choked from his mouth.

Apparently enjoying his small noise of approval, Irene paused in her task to reach up and pull his head forward again, pressing her lips briefly but searingly to his. She broke away before he'd had his fill to swivel to the side and unbutton his cuffs, and she bent to lavish open-mouthed kisses on both pulse points she revealed.

The touch of her lips seemed to infuse a heat into Sherlock's blood that swept through his entire body, setting each artery, vein, and capillary aflame, and making him feel vivid and truly alive. Every cell of his skin and follicle of his hair felt incredibly sensitive and receptive, and it was the type of absolute cerebral awareness he utilised daily, but translated and experienced purely though his physical self—a brand new and incredible revelation.

In that state of hyper-awareness, even the slide of fabric over his shoulders, then off of his arms was phenomenally sensual. And so when she pressed her palm across the fly of his trousers, he jerked with a choked groan and his hand flew to her wrist, where he dug his fingers into her skin.

"What next?" she asked with an uneven but knowing whisper, and he looked up to her face to see her staring down at him with her rosy lips parted and a predatory glint in her eye.

"Trousers," he somehow managed to respond, albeit rather gutturally, and as she leaned forward in immediate acquiescence, he pressed his lips to her tantalizingly close breasts, craving as much reciprocal contact with her as possible.

Suddenly the ship rose on a swell then pitched to one side, and they tumbled backwards onto the surface of the bed so that their bare, fevered torsos pressed together. They both exhaled sharply, first in surprise and then arousal at their new position, and Sherlock forgot about what they were doing before that moment and became lost in a haze of mutually searching lips and pressing tongues.

But then, when Irene reached between their bodies to slide her hand through the unfastened trousers and then under his pants, Sherlock wrenched away with a heavy gasp. Her touch had produced bolts of unbelievable, pure pleasure, and all the delicious tension he felt thrumming throughout his body suddenly focused and magnified at that point.

"Hello-o," she murmured in a singsong but low and husky voice, and when she further tightened her grip on him he instinctively bucked his hips and made an undignified noise.

No longer content with waiting for her to finish stripping him of his clothes, he impatiently arched his back and shoved the material down his legs, then toed off his sock as well, before he collapsed back against the bed, gasping heavily for air.

In contrast to his urgent rush, Irene lifted her knee and slowly rubbed her nude thigh against his, and his eyes fluttered to a close as he savoured the unbelievably erotic feel of her covering him: her sleek softness and general smoothness pressed against the hard planes of his body and coarse hairs along his chest, groin, and legs.

Growling, he reached up to pull her face to his again and he didn't break their connection as he rolled them over so that she now lay pressed beneath him. After several long, luscious moments he leaned back, though only to stare fixedly at the final remaining slip of fabric that separated them.

She gave him a lazy smirk and raised her eyebrows, and he instantly translated his desire into action as he grasped her hips and forcefully pushed her further up the bed, his pulse racing and his breathing growing louder yet around them.

The silk of her surprisingly understated but clearly luxury-brand underwear was dingy and worn but relatively clean—he could tell that along with her dress, she had washed these in the hotel sink just prior to his return the night before. The fabric had already been flimsy, but now it was positively threadbare, and it clung to every curve and hollow between her legs. Swallowing hard, he reached forward and splayed his fingertips across her pelvic bone as he swiped his thumb over the thin material. Immediately the muscles in her thigh tensed and she took a sharp intake of air, and when he looked up to her face he found her staring at him as if in deep suspense. Her eyes were wide and her cheeks were the same vivid pink as her swollen lips. Feeling further emboldened by his ability to captivate The Woman in such a way, he drew his finger down the centre seam of the briefs, tracing the elegant and intricate design of her beneath the silk shield.

He heard her exhale unsteadily and in his peripheral vision he saw her toss her head back onto the pillow as he watched his hand repeat the movement, exerting slightly more pressure in each repetition. In response to Sherlock's touch, Irene rolled her knees farther apart and grasped his forearms so that series of little crescent indented his skin, but after several moments he craved a closer and more immediate caress, and he slid his fingers under the scalloped edge the black underwear. At that direct contact her head jerked up as if a live wire had touched her, and their eyes snapped together in a connection that caused everything else in the room to fade out and dim. His gaze never left hers as he moved his fingers in slow deliberate strokes, and he watched in absorbed fascination as the pulse in her carotid artery noticeably increased, and a deeper flush crept over her chest and cheekbones. Observing the effect he could have on her was incredibly arousing (every muscle in his body was starting to buzz and feel heavy and warm) but after a few moments it became not enough somehow, and he leaned closer to her and braced his weight on one arm while he pulled the designer briefs down to her knees with the other. She kicked them off the rest of the way, and then he leaned down to coax her lips open with his, tangling her dark tresses around his fingers as her tongue echoed that movement within his mouth.

And yet only a short time later he pulled his face away from hers with concerted effort—it still wasn't enough, and he knew what it was that he really wanted. There had been a particularly persistent and vivid image that would not fade from his imagination, and even throughout all the intensely arousing touches and caresses, he had been unable to stop thinking about that one act.

She had arched upward, following his lips with hers, but after a brief parting kiss he pressed her back into the bed by her shoulders, and she looked intrigued and eager.

He smoothed his hands down her legs, his eyes raking over the curve of leg meeting hip, the graceful contour of her inner thigh, and the smooth skin that spanned over her toned musculature. When his fingers skimmed over the inside of her knees he pressed outwards slightly, and with an encouraging smile and sustained eye contact with Sherlock, she dropped her legs apart.

As he had noted the first time he'd ever seen her nude and further observed in the past 24 hours, the juncture between her legs was just as pristinely manicured and chic as the rest of her, although presumably slightly below her usual standards due to her incarceration. Not that it mattered to him; Sherlock couldn't care less about how she chose to maintain herself. Previously the state of her personal grooming was immaterial because it didn't offer him any insight about her beyond what was already known and obvious. Now it was irrelevant because she would have appeared irresistibly desirable to him no matter what, simply by virtue of the fact that she was The Woman. The only one who had ever evoked the powerful, coupled feelings of sentiment and lust within him—his one exception. She was glorious to him, and so even the simple act of looking at her was incredibly titillating.

Nonetheless, he was feeling greedy and insatiable, and he still wanted more.

"May I. . ." he trailed off as he struggled to find the right words, selecting and then discarding various terms that were either too clinical, too crude, or too puerile.

"Yes?" she prompted breathily from somewhere above him.

"I want to. . ." But apparently his openly hungry expression and the singular locus of his attention perfectly conveyed his meaning.

"Oh by all means," she murmured in one long huff of breath, her anticipation tinged with a small trace of amusement.

He swallowed and leaned forward to kiss her left knee, then brushed his nose and lips down the long line of her Sartorius muscle, until he came to the juncture of leg and pelvis. Nuzzling against the impossibly smooth and delicate skin at the crease, his mouth flooded as if he were surveying a feast following the culmination of a particularly lengthy case. And in a sense, he was.

Which reminded him. . .

"The steward was right," Sherlock commented drily against her inner thigh, and though he had spoken only a minute before, his roughened voice sounded as if he hadn't used it for a week.

"Mmm?" she asked distractedly at his apparent non sequitur, and he smirked at the way she sounded utterly preoccupied.

"He mentioned that we would be eating dinner promptly at seven-thirty," he said, gently biting the flesh that covered her abductor muscles for emphasis. "Which is right about now. . ." His lewd implication sent a sort of wild thrill racing through him, and he looked up to catch her gaze. It was so unlike him—he even considered casual swearing relatively base—and yet he could not deny that he found the suggestive words tremendously exciting.

Her eyes sparked wickedly as her lips curved into a playful smile. "Mr. Holmes, I'm scandalised," she said, but her purring tone contradicted the words. He tossed her a smug leer, then without another moment's hesitation, he bent his head towards her. As soon as he made contact her words faded into a sigh and her muscles uniformly tensed, then seemed to relax until she appeared to have practically melted into the duvet.

The experience was immediate, hedonistic, and incredibly erotic. All five senses were fully challenged and engaged, and he might have been overwhelmed if he weren't so utterly engrossed and enthralled.

It was also incredibly arousing, but he channeled all of his own desire into pleasing her, and he found that it was actually extraordinarily stimulating to just be able elicit such sounds and signs of approval from her. Once again the raw, unfiltered feelings and vulnerability she revealed to him felt like rare gifts, and he felt compelled to repay his appreciation by bringing her as much gratification as possible. And though he was the one (evidently) pleasing her, he also understood how a person such as herself could obtain satisfaction from being a dominatrix. . . it felt incredibly empowering to administer and control someone else's pleasure, and through her sighs and movements, he was able to experience it vicariously as well.

As he continued, her hands slid across the tops of his shoulders and her fingertips grazed up the base of his skull before she grasped fistfuls of his hair in her palms, increasing the pressure on his head as he intensified his pressure on her.

She became ever more breathless and vocal, and her subtle vulnerability progressed into palpable desperation. He matched her growing tension with his own ardor, restraining her twisting hips against the mattress and settling more heavily against her.

After a period of time during which Sherlock became completely lost in the taste and texture of her, her legs abruptly clapped closed against either side of his head, and under her smooth skin the thigh muscles rippled and contracted, while her fingernails dug into his scalp. He felt more than heard the current of pleasure work its way through her body and burst out from her mouth in a breathless, choking moan, and he smiled triumphantly against her trembling skin. The actual experience had been even more rewarding—immeasurably more—than the initial image in his mind had suggested.

When her respiration began to return to normal, he pressed a concluding kiss on her inner thigh and reached up to intertwine his fingers with hers, then braced their joined hands against the bed and shifted his weight off of his elbows, feeling exceedingly pleased with himself.

"Who'd have thought you and I could be ordinary in this way?" she asked after she had further recovered her breath, and though her tone seemed relatively light and humourous, there was a serious, pensive undercurrent.

"This. . .isn't ordinary," he panted as he moved back up her body, dropping lush open-mouth kisses above her navel, then between her breasts, then above her clavicle and up her throat, almost unbearably intoxicated by the high of what he had just accomplished.

Relatives notwithstanding, he had never met anyone even remotely like him in his existence (besides, while his elder brother had the smarts, yes, he was so infuriatingly different from Sherlock in every other way that it completely subverted any similarities they shared). Irene, on the other hand. . . not only was she his absolute intellectual equal, but the differences between them were expansive, not reductive.

For Sherlock to have any connection with another person was uncommonly rare, and for that bond to then extend to this exhilarating physical compatibility was profound and remarkable. How could she use the word 'ordinary' to apply to them? They were a genus unto themselves.

When he finally reached her mouth and pressed his lips softly to hers, he tried to convey all the power and complexity of the deep warmth that was radiating within him and towards her, and the kiss grew increasingly more urgent and uninhibited as it reflected the growing tide of emotion between them. Definitely not normal, he thought fleetingly.

But then he flashed on the numerous crimes he had witnessed over the course of his consultancy, which had been committed in the name of passion. . . Just like all those ostensibly 'normal' people, the power of his own feelings compelled him to act completely outside of his normal spectrum of behaviour (in his case, by being physically intimate).

And so when they finally broke apart, he rested his forehead against hers, and mused in a husky murmur, "But I suppose that's what all those ordinary people in love think."

They both abruptly froze as the words he had so casually stated resonated between them. Automatically, panic flared up inside Sherlock, and it sparked, ignited—and then sputtered and faded away.

It was replaced by a steady, glowing incandescence, and for some reason he was reminded of the comforting heat of his fireplace back in London. That was where, after all, they had experienced their first real touch, despite his belief at the time that he was simply monitoring her physiological reactions to him.

He'd been lying to himself, Sherlock knew. Even then, despite the formidable fortifications he had constructed against sentiment, he had sensed this potential between them—sensed it, and been utterly daunted by its power.

Clearly, that was no longer the case.

To Be Continued. . .