Ten minutes later Harry hadn't returned and Ruth looked up as the rain began thundering against the tea shop's window, surprisingly heavily. She put down some money on the table and then left, going in search of Harry, ignoring the rain. She'd been right, he wasn't far away, she saw his figure at the end of the street. He too was ignoring the change in the weather. She rushed towards him and reached out a hand to his arm, he felt wonderfully real under her touch. "Don't run from me Harry."
"I'd have done anything to hear from you," he said, and looking into his eyes she could see he was genuinely upset. "Anything."
"You're not thinking it through," she said. "This doesn't mean that my feelings…" she tailed off, because talking about emotions and feelings between the two of them was never easy. "That you're less important to me than I am to you."
"No?"
"No," she said firmly.
"Then why?"
"Harry, it's not that I don't care. The problem is I care about you too much. To limit myself to one email to you every four months, to not say anything that I wanted to say, to be counting down the days until I could safely contact you again. Wondering if today would be the day I'd read your words… it would have been a slow torture. Nothing I wanted to say could be put in an email without any hacker realising exactly who you were talking too." She sighed before speaking again. "It would have been a slippery slope. "Are you alive?" would soon slip to "how are you?" To "where are you?" "What are you doing?" "I miss you." And before you'd know it, Mace's men would be following me to extradite me back to a UK prison. If they didn't kill me first."
"Japan has no extradition treaty with the UK," Harry said. Then it dawned on him. "Which is the reason you're living there, isn't it?"
She nodded. "I'm frightened Harry. Mace has friends who would be more than happy to get their hands on me, especially if it meant a chance at exonerating him. I doubt they'd have used "legal" means if they were happy condoning torture."
"It might not have happened that way," he said softly, seeing her point of view as much as he hated it. He knew she was right.
"Of course it would have," she said, realising that he was seeing the logic. "I wanted to talk to you so badly that I had no willpower left. I had no restraint. And one email would have led to another, and another, and we'd be communicating daily before either of us would have known how it happened. Emailing an old insignificant woman in Devon three times a year is much safer than messaging the head of counter terrorism for MI5 in London. You don't know who's spying on you, reading those messages. It was too dangerous Harry. It is too dangerous. And you're a good enough spy to know it."
Ruth spoke so logically and eloquently that he knew she'd given this a great deal of thought, and his anger faded and his bruised pride began to fade. "It's so unfair."
"That one I'm not going to argue with," she replied, a small smile playing at the corner of her lips. "It doesn't mean I thought of you any less, Harry, or that my emotions were... different from yours."
"I know," he said. "I've missed you terribly."
"Are all the replacement analysts rubbish?"
"Well, they are," he said. "But that's not why I miss you." She smiled, a happy smile for the first time since he'd laid eyes on her. It made a smile form on his own lips and he placed a hand on the small of her back, leaning in close before he'd even made the conscious decision to kiss her. He stopped, less than an inch from her lips. "Can I kiss you?" he asked, voice hoarse with emotion, and the importance of this moment. Her blue eyes were sparkling with pleasure and joy, the Ruth of old times. She smiled and closed the small gap between them. He closed his eyes as he felt her soft full lips beneath his, so warm and wonderful. It had been far too long since he'd kissed her, and having her pressed against him felt so right. The exquisite joy of having her in his arms once more couldn't be described.
The kiss ended all too soon and they parted but he kept his hands on her back gently as he couldn't bear it were they to part completely. He leaned in for another kiss and saw her lips twitch in a smile just before they touched. He ran his tongue over her bottom lip and she opened her mouth to him with a muffled moan, her hands sliding into his hair, wet with rain and pulling him close. That was all the encouragement he needed and the kiss turned into an incredibly passionate embrace very quickly.
When they parted Ruth was breathing heavily, her body pressed against his. "That should have been our first kiss," she said quietly. He smiled at her, eyes twinkling as the rain poured down. Neither of them had paid the slightest attention to the fact it was raining. They didn't care and they were both drenched to the skin. Ruth pressed another brief kiss to his lips and wrapped her arms around him, feeling so safe and secure in his arms.
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