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redfiona99Title: When Chambermaids Were More Amenable
Author: Red Fiona
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters; the Conan Doyle estate do. This version is Warner Brothers’ (and friends). No money is being made from this.
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (RDJ version)
Characters: Sherlock Holmes/Irene Adler and John Watson
Ratings/Warnings: 15 - for smut.
Summary: One of the other times Irene Adler got the better of Holmes
~~~~
The year was 18__, and the shocking events of the 'Study In Scarlet' remained firmly in the minds of the people of London.
Dr. Watson, having entered into his unique and peculiar living arrangements some time previously to this, was not unused to finding notes instead of Holmes at breakfast. Today’s note was written in an even more jagged hand than usual, letters sharp as a knife.
"Have been called upon to visit Herr __, director of __, lately companion to Adler. I think we may have her this time."
Irene Adler, memorialised by Watson as 'the woman' in 'The Scandal In Bohemia', one of the few countries that she hadn't caused a scandal in, was Holmes's bête noire, or so he liked to pretend, because then Holmes could justify spending so much time thinking about her. This being in the early stages of the good doctor's courtship of Mary Morstan, he was quite pleased to have Holmes out of the way for the day.
Watson was home late that evening, and found another note.
"You were abominably tardy this evening, Watson. I have had to go on without you."
The rest of the letter contained the bare outlines of the matter.
Herr __ was one of the wealthiest men in Europe, head of a powerful business with its fingers in many, many different pies. It was said that you could not go the whole day without using a product that had had something to do with his company. As befitting a man in his position, he maintained a high moral line. Unfortunately, he frequently fell below it. During his most recent fall, a beautiful sapphire necklace, which was actually the property of the company, had gone missing.
Suspicion, rightly or wrongly, centred on the Herr __'s companion, Miss Adler, who was in London in her occasional guise as an actress. Herr __ had been captivated by her beauty and bought tickets to all her performances. His money had enabled him to obtain an introduction, and he discovered that Miss Adler's personality surpassed even her looks.
They had dined together several times, and gossip spoke of more scandalous conduct. After their last night together, with Herr __ departing for Hamburg in the morning, the necklace had gone missing. Herr __ had managed to delay his travelling by claiming illness but even this excuse would not stand for longer than a week. It was at this point that Herr __ brought Holmes in. Holmes had a deadline to work to, something which often brought out the best in him.
The lady's hotel room and luggage had both been thoroughly searched by Holmes and no necklace had been found. Holmes had no doubt that she had it; he was merely at a temporary loss as to where she had hidden it.
Holmes had tried all the usual tricks. He had had the lady diverted and searched her belongings. He had tried to stage an emergency to cause the lady to panic, but that did not cause her to reveal the whereabouts of the necklace. “There is nothing for it, Watson; I shall simply have to go undercover to investigate. She is aware of all my usual methods, and I fear she may well have chosen somewhere particularly devious to hide the necklace. However, there is nowhere so obscure that a lady’s maid will not know about it. One must simply gain the truth from her.”
Holmes left the next day in one of the disguises he was so well known for.
The next time Watson saw Holmes he asked how the case was going.
"Quite well. I think I'm getting somewhere with the maid." Where he got to with her was inside the elegantly designed and wondrously spacious wardrobe of Adler’s hotel room. He probably shouldn't be seducing other women while surrounded by Adler's clothes, and who knew she had so many.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, he felt he should really be concentrating on the woman in front of him, and her pleasure, because this was for a case, and he would do anything for a case. He pressed his lips to her jaw, worrying his way back to her ear. She let his left hand roam free down her body, as she moved against him. He caught a glimpse down her décolletage.
He recognised that mole!
His left hand immediately started to try to undo the laces at the back of the maid's dress. If he was right, there would be a second mole, about a quarter of an inch below the first.
"'Ere, what do you think you're doing?"
He managed to loosen the dress enough to check. "It's the little details that give you away, Adler." He released his grip on her immediately.
She had the temerity to laugh. "But it's such fun." The maid's strangled cockney vowels collapsed and gave way to Adler's real voice.
"Where is your maid?"
"Sightseeing with her mother. I paid for her to have the week free. Your investigation is an act of public good. I've had the most fun possible watching you stumble around and she and her mother have had a nice holiday at my expense."
Holmes thought he ought to be very angry. He didn't like being made a fool of, but this was private mockery, the only other person who knew was Adler, and she was unlikely to tell anyone. Her conduct made her notorious, but her silence kept her alive. A woman who wrote memoirs was a dangerous threat, whereas a quiet thief was merely a nuisance.
He lifted her arms above her head and held them fast against the wardrobe wall. "Where is the necklace?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?" She arched her head back, revealing a long expanse of neck. Her right leg rose and wrapped itself around his side.
He wasn't going to give in to such a simple distraction, not even when she smelled so wonderful. There was her fragrance yes, and beneath it soap, Pears, he thinks, rather than Sunshine, and something uniquely Adler.
"Yes, I would," said Holmes.
"If it was so important, he should have looked after it better."
"Adler, he could have hidden it in the strongest bank vault in the country and you would have found a way to get to it."
"Oh Holmes, you do say the nicest things." She kissed his jawline, straining against where his hands held hers against the wardrobe wall. There was the most delicious friction against the buttons of his trousers.
He kissed her, because really, at that point, what was the point of resisting - it might distract her as much as she was trying to distract him.
Of course it didn't, because that was what he loved about Adler, she never did what he predicted.
She was soft and yielding, when she wanted to be, and where she wanted to be, and led him a merry dance - every twirl another layer of clothes gone from one or the other of them. She whirled them away from the wardrobe, carefully past her luggage, which he'd already searched, around the two sets of drawers, which he'd also inspected, and down to the foot of her four-poster hotel bed.
He loved her because she was one of the people who made the world still for him. With Watson it was that there was nothing more to know, he was an open book, steadfast and unchanging, Holmes could focus on him and be safe. With Adler it was the opposite, there were no ends to her mysteries, she could keep him entranced for hours; the rest of the world paled beside her.
The very last of his clothes lay somewhere, probably disgracefully spread over the ottoman that was as far behind him as Adler was in front of him. She was also disgracefully spread, the white of her split drawers contrasting with the primrose of the hotel bedlinen. It's clear what she wanted and Holmes had always enjoyed obliging Adler.
His tongue began low, slow, fulsome strokes. She preferred that to begin with. He found that out when they'd spent three days trapped in a Milanese apartment by an unseasonal snowstorm. There had been nothing else to do but do, and they did, till they were shaking from it. He tried to remember what he'd learnt, when and how and how much pressure to apply where. Obviously, he didn't follow his memory by rote, rote would never do for Adler, and she was sharing her appreciation of his efforts, with her stockinged feet scrabbling over his shoulders for purchase and her left hand in his hair pulling him in and deeper and down.
Now was the time for darting, for stiffening his tongue and applying it with lightning precision. His shoulder would regret Adler's enthusiasm, and the way her heel bashed into his scapula, but he couldn't pretend he didn't appreciate her obvious enjoyment.
He could feel her quickening beneath him, using the grip on his hair to drive him on.
With a dreamy sigh she stilled, relaxing as all the tension that he had built in her ebbed away with every judder.
Holmes excitement had mounted, and he longed to find his release, but Adler remained a minx, dancing away from his touch to remove her drawers and her stockings. "You could keep them on."
Irene gasped, faking shock. She changed her voice back into that of the maid, "and you a gentleman and all!" Thankfully she dropped the accent. "Anyway, you still owe me a pair of stockings from Munich."
"They gave their life for science." And, if maybe a strip of what was left had made its way back to London, to a box in 221b Baker Street then, well these things happened.
God, how he missed her between meetings. He asked her to stay sometimes, or she asked him to leave with her, but they both knew it would never work, not without both of them changing beyond all recognition, but sometimes ...
He shouldn't be morose, not yet.
She must have noticed his turn to melancholy, Irene was perceptive, more so than most people, so she set about distracting him. It worked from the moment she unpinned her hair, before she even sat back down and beckoned him towards her.
He was careful as he entered her, ready though he has been for some time, deliciously aware that she would still be even more sensitive than usual. But she wasn't in the mood for careful, and she wrapped herself around him tightly, curving her back to give him greater ease, and so he could pay attention to the area around that most identifying mole.
They moved with a certain vigour, enough that Holmes noticed that they had travelled easily half way up the bed. Irene jerked, in a way that someone who knew her less well might think was her quickening come again. Holmes knew that it wasn't. He didn't know what it was though and was enjoyably puzzled.
She used the potential force in her position, and spun them over. Adler on top of him and astride, it isn't new, but the shock of her suddenly sheathing him fully took his breath away, and nearly his composure.
He felt the stones of the necklace before he saw them, the cool of gemstones against his chest, moving slowly up his chest as Irene rocked forwards. The stones followed the undulations of Irene's body, left and right, forwards and back. They rose and fell with her, but slightly out of step, as she leant far enough forward that chain pooled on his chest at her lowest point.
He knew it had to be the sapphire necklace. He also knew where she must have hidden the necklace for her to retrieve it so quickly from their present position. There had to have been a secret compartment in the bedframe, possibly in the headboard itself. She must have had an accomplice, or become significantly better at woodwork, because he had examined the bed himself during his fruitless search two days earlier. There had been no necklace, no sign of hidden panels, nothing.
How she had procured either replacement headboard, or created the compartment herself, while under surveillance was not the main question which tickled at his brain. What he desperately desired to know was where she'd hidden the necklace before then between stealing it and revealing it now. That was what thrilled him, not the sapphires, blue shadows cast against Irene's skin from where it sat around her neck, not even Adler's exquisite beauty, great thought it was, it was her mind, her marvellous intellect, one that rivalled his own, even if it spun along in a most illogical manner, it did mean she was often a step ahead of him as he tried to catch her.
He sat up, kissed her chest, in the space between the sapphires, where the gems and their blue light didn't touch. She curved away from him so he could cover more territory, every inch more valuable than any gemstone. Her hands curled into his hair again, pushing and demanding and as wonderful as the rest of Adler. It was his pleasure to do her bidding. They slid together, smoother now in their mounting excitement. She laughed, a deep, joyful breathy noise, and she had all his attention. He escaped noticing what soap the hotel uses on its linens and how long it has been since they were washed. With Adler he is free of himself.
There was an increasing urgency in his thrusts, and he could feel her walls clench around him, exhorting him to great heights, or depths rather. His world shrinks to her and him and need, more than that, want, and desire, and the look of delight in Adler's eyes.
They reach their crowning glories, if not together then at least closely. Adler is too composed to collapse into him, her training as a dancer long before she sang at La Scala meaning she held herself restrained even now. Still, she followed him down into the comfort of the feather-filled duvet.
They kissed for a while, or he thought they did, because he must have drifted off to sleep. He thought "must" as he woke to Irene still entwined with him, his very own rosy-fingered dawn. She was awake, but pretending not to be.
She hadn't removed necklace before they slept. Holmes fingered the sapphires as they lay against her chest, blue next to dusky pink nipples. "Irene, dearest?"
"Yes."
"You do know these sapphires are fakes."
"Of course. I can't imagine Herr __ hiring me to steal a real necklace."
That was unexpected information. He'd considered the possibility of the theft being an inside job, but discarded it due to the oil on the lock hinges, and the faint marks on the workings of a lock that had been, very professionally, picked. He hadn't considered this kind of inside involvement.
"He said," Irene carried on, "that the necklace was already paste when he became the director of the company. He would have come up with a tidier solution but, apparently, there is some question of an examination for valuation by the insurance company."
"And you believe him?"
Irene considered for a moment. "I think I do. I was paid enough that I don't care either way, but yes, I think I do." And that counted for something for Holmes. Herr __ was obviously an accomplished liar because Holmes hadn't suspected a thing. Well, he'd suspected several things, but none of them this. But Adler was a reasonable judge of character, so he was willing to believe that Herr __'s story was true. Holmes tried to recall what he knew of the history of the company, but his memory was not co-operating, and Adler attending to her stockings was not aiding the process. There was something about a brief period of financial difficulty some fifteen years ago, and possibly if it was a twenty-year insurance policy the timing could fit. Of course a businessman would sell the sapphires to save the company. That Herr __ preferred that people thought he had been bewitched by Adler who had then made off with the sapphires rather than think ill of the company, well, that was people behaving illogically.
Holmes had time to ponder this, and the precise method by which Adler had hidden the sapphires in the room, as he was unceremoniously pitched, along with his clothes, into the bathroom, with only a shout of "the room service with breakfast" from Adler as an explanation. It also explained the show of the putting on of the lady's clothes that he had been treated to, and why she had refused his assistance with her stays. They both knew that with his assistance it would take significantly longer, and, if Holmes had his way, would have featured at least one removal of said clothes before they were put back on again.
Adler let him out of the bathroom once the waiter had departed. They made a pretty pair, her dressed and him naked as a daisy, as she poured the tea and he stole more than half of the muffins from the plate.
"And Herr __ consulting me?"
"If the thing was to look like a real robbery, or rather, a robbery of real jewels, then he'd have to call in help. He wouldn't want the police called because of the position he was in but he would want the necklace found, so a private investigator would be the obvious choice. You are the perfect person. Herr __ can say he hired the best, and even the best was unable to stop Irene Adler."
"Most gratifying for you."
"Well of course."
"There is one problem, my dear, and that is that I don't think I can let you go. I too have my reputation to consider." While he had already made a name for himself, as Herr __'s choice demonstrated, professional pride (and personal because he was damned if Irene was going to beat him again) demanded he stop her.
"I had taken that into account."
"Hmpfh," was Holmes's only comment. He spent some moments wondering how Irene had planned to do it before he realised that the sluggishness of his thought process was not due to the previous night's exertions. "The tea again, Adler?" And he'd been so careful to swap the cups around when she poured.
"The teacup itself this time."
"This is an outrage." It would have sounded better if his tongue hadn't become numb and thickened in his mouth.
"I am sorry, but you must admit, it is better this way." It was the last thing he heard before it all went black. He would have argued about this being the better way were it not for the effects of the narcotic, and he would definitely have argued after the ear-piercing screams of the maid who found him.
Luckily Watson had returned at a reasonable hour from his rounds the day before, so was in a good enough frame of mind to bail Holmes from his place of bondage ... his second place of bondage, to be more accurate, given the state the maid found him in.
Watson was unnecessarily amused at Holmes's predicament.
"Why do you always fall for her schemes?"
"It's not always."
"It's near enough always." Watson was right, which probably made the feeling worse. But she was worth it, especially as the thrill of the chase was an attracting factor for both of them.
~~~~
End notes - This was the fic where I realised that something I had the characters do was physically impossible. Once I'd come up with a way round that, it was plain sailing.
Author: Red Fiona
Disclaimer: I don't own the characters; the Conan Doyle estate do. This version is Warner Brothers’ (and friends). No money is being made from this.
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (RDJ version)
Characters: Sherlock Holmes/Irene Adler and John Watson
Ratings/Warnings: 15 - for smut.
Summary: One of the other times Irene Adler got the better of Holmes
~~~~
The year was 18__, and the shocking events of the 'Study In Scarlet' remained firmly in the minds of the people of London.
Dr. Watson, having entered into his unique and peculiar living arrangements some time previously to this, was not unused to finding notes instead of Holmes at breakfast. Today’s note was written in an even more jagged hand than usual, letters sharp as a knife.
"Have been called upon to visit Herr __, director of __, lately companion to Adler. I think we may have her this time."
Irene Adler, memorialised by Watson as 'the woman' in 'The Scandal In Bohemia', one of the few countries that she hadn't caused a scandal in, was Holmes's bête noire, or so he liked to pretend, because then Holmes could justify spending so much time thinking about her. This being in the early stages of the good doctor's courtship of Mary Morstan, he was quite pleased to have Holmes out of the way for the day.
Watson was home late that evening, and found another note.
"You were abominably tardy this evening, Watson. I have had to go on without you."
The rest of the letter contained the bare outlines of the matter.
Herr __ was one of the wealthiest men in Europe, head of a powerful business with its fingers in many, many different pies. It was said that you could not go the whole day without using a product that had had something to do with his company. As befitting a man in his position, he maintained a high moral line. Unfortunately, he frequently fell below it. During his most recent fall, a beautiful sapphire necklace, which was actually the property of the company, had gone missing.
Suspicion, rightly or wrongly, centred on the Herr __'s companion, Miss Adler, who was in London in her occasional guise as an actress. Herr __ had been captivated by her beauty and bought tickets to all her performances. His money had enabled him to obtain an introduction, and he discovered that Miss Adler's personality surpassed even her looks.
They had dined together several times, and gossip spoke of more scandalous conduct. After their last night together, with Herr __ departing for Hamburg in the morning, the necklace had gone missing. Herr __ had managed to delay his travelling by claiming illness but even this excuse would not stand for longer than a week. It was at this point that Herr __ brought Holmes in. Holmes had a deadline to work to, something which often brought out the best in him.
The lady's hotel room and luggage had both been thoroughly searched by Holmes and no necklace had been found. Holmes had no doubt that she had it; he was merely at a temporary loss as to where she had hidden it.
Holmes had tried all the usual tricks. He had had the lady diverted and searched her belongings. He had tried to stage an emergency to cause the lady to panic, but that did not cause her to reveal the whereabouts of the necklace. “There is nothing for it, Watson; I shall simply have to go undercover to investigate. She is aware of all my usual methods, and I fear she may well have chosen somewhere particularly devious to hide the necklace. However, there is nowhere so obscure that a lady’s maid will not know about it. One must simply gain the truth from her.”
Holmes left the next day in one of the disguises he was so well known for.
The next time Watson saw Holmes he asked how the case was going.
"Quite well. I think I'm getting somewhere with the maid." Where he got to with her was inside the elegantly designed and wondrously spacious wardrobe of Adler’s hotel room. He probably shouldn't be seducing other women while surrounded by Adler's clothes, and who knew she had so many.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, he felt he should really be concentrating on the woman in front of him, and her pleasure, because this was for a case, and he would do anything for a case. He pressed his lips to her jaw, worrying his way back to her ear. She let his left hand roam free down her body, as she moved against him. He caught a glimpse down her décolletage.
He recognised that mole!
His left hand immediately started to try to undo the laces at the back of the maid's dress. If he was right, there would be a second mole, about a quarter of an inch below the first.
"'Ere, what do you think you're doing?"
He managed to loosen the dress enough to check. "It's the little details that give you away, Adler." He released his grip on her immediately.
She had the temerity to laugh. "But it's such fun." The maid's strangled cockney vowels collapsed and gave way to Adler's real voice.
"Where is your maid?"
"Sightseeing with her mother. I paid for her to have the week free. Your investigation is an act of public good. I've had the most fun possible watching you stumble around and she and her mother have had a nice holiday at my expense."
Holmes thought he ought to be very angry. He didn't like being made a fool of, but this was private mockery, the only other person who knew was Adler, and she was unlikely to tell anyone. Her conduct made her notorious, but her silence kept her alive. A woman who wrote memoirs was a dangerous threat, whereas a quiet thief was merely a nuisance.
He lifted her arms above her head and held them fast against the wardrobe wall. "Where is the necklace?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?" She arched her head back, revealing a long expanse of neck. Her right leg rose and wrapped itself around his side.
He wasn't going to give in to such a simple distraction, not even when she smelled so wonderful. There was her fragrance yes, and beneath it soap, Pears, he thinks, rather than Sunshine, and something uniquely Adler.
"Yes, I would," said Holmes.
"If it was so important, he should have looked after it better."
"Adler, he could have hidden it in the strongest bank vault in the country and you would have found a way to get to it."
"Oh Holmes, you do say the nicest things." She kissed his jawline, straining against where his hands held hers against the wardrobe wall. There was the most delicious friction against the buttons of his trousers.
He kissed her, because really, at that point, what was the point of resisting - it might distract her as much as she was trying to distract him.
Of course it didn't, because that was what he loved about Adler, she never did what he predicted.
She was soft and yielding, when she wanted to be, and where she wanted to be, and led him a merry dance - every twirl another layer of clothes gone from one or the other of them. She whirled them away from the wardrobe, carefully past her luggage, which he'd already searched, around the two sets of drawers, which he'd also inspected, and down to the foot of her four-poster hotel bed.
He loved her because she was one of the people who made the world still for him. With Watson it was that there was nothing more to know, he was an open book, steadfast and unchanging, Holmes could focus on him and be safe. With Adler it was the opposite, there were no ends to her mysteries, she could keep him entranced for hours; the rest of the world paled beside her.
The very last of his clothes lay somewhere, probably disgracefully spread over the ottoman that was as far behind him as Adler was in front of him. She was also disgracefully spread, the white of her split drawers contrasting with the primrose of the hotel bedlinen. It's clear what she wanted and Holmes had always enjoyed obliging Adler.
His tongue began low, slow, fulsome strokes. She preferred that to begin with. He found that out when they'd spent three days trapped in a Milanese apartment by an unseasonal snowstorm. There had been nothing else to do but do, and they did, till they were shaking from it. He tried to remember what he'd learnt, when and how and how much pressure to apply where. Obviously, he didn't follow his memory by rote, rote would never do for Adler, and she was sharing her appreciation of his efforts, with her stockinged feet scrabbling over his shoulders for purchase and her left hand in his hair pulling him in and deeper and down.
Now was the time for darting, for stiffening his tongue and applying it with lightning precision. His shoulder would regret Adler's enthusiasm, and the way her heel bashed into his scapula, but he couldn't pretend he didn't appreciate her obvious enjoyment.
He could feel her quickening beneath him, using the grip on his hair to drive him on.
With a dreamy sigh she stilled, relaxing as all the tension that he had built in her ebbed away with every judder.
Holmes excitement had mounted, and he longed to find his release, but Adler remained a minx, dancing away from his touch to remove her drawers and her stockings. "You could keep them on."
Irene gasped, faking shock. She changed her voice back into that of the maid, "and you a gentleman and all!" Thankfully she dropped the accent. "Anyway, you still owe me a pair of stockings from Munich."
"They gave their life for science." And, if maybe a strip of what was left had made its way back to London, to a box in 221b Baker Street then, well these things happened.
God, how he missed her between meetings. He asked her to stay sometimes, or she asked him to leave with her, but they both knew it would never work, not without both of them changing beyond all recognition, but sometimes ...
He shouldn't be morose, not yet.
She must have noticed his turn to melancholy, Irene was perceptive, more so than most people, so she set about distracting him. It worked from the moment she unpinned her hair, before she even sat back down and beckoned him towards her.
He was careful as he entered her, ready though he has been for some time, deliciously aware that she would still be even more sensitive than usual. But she wasn't in the mood for careful, and she wrapped herself around him tightly, curving her back to give him greater ease, and so he could pay attention to the area around that most identifying mole.
They moved with a certain vigour, enough that Holmes noticed that they had travelled easily half way up the bed. Irene jerked, in a way that someone who knew her less well might think was her quickening come again. Holmes knew that it wasn't. He didn't know what it was though and was enjoyably puzzled.
She used the potential force in her position, and spun them over. Adler on top of him and astride, it isn't new, but the shock of her suddenly sheathing him fully took his breath away, and nearly his composure.
He felt the stones of the necklace before he saw them, the cool of gemstones against his chest, moving slowly up his chest as Irene rocked forwards. The stones followed the undulations of Irene's body, left and right, forwards and back. They rose and fell with her, but slightly out of step, as she leant far enough forward that chain pooled on his chest at her lowest point.
He knew it had to be the sapphire necklace. He also knew where she must have hidden the necklace for her to retrieve it so quickly from their present position. There had to have been a secret compartment in the bedframe, possibly in the headboard itself. She must have had an accomplice, or become significantly better at woodwork, because he had examined the bed himself during his fruitless search two days earlier. There had been no necklace, no sign of hidden panels, nothing.
How she had procured either replacement headboard, or created the compartment herself, while under surveillance was not the main question which tickled at his brain. What he desperately desired to know was where she'd hidden the necklace before then between stealing it and revealing it now. That was what thrilled him, not the sapphires, blue shadows cast against Irene's skin from where it sat around her neck, not even Adler's exquisite beauty, great thought it was, it was her mind, her marvellous intellect, one that rivalled his own, even if it spun along in a most illogical manner, it did mean she was often a step ahead of him as he tried to catch her.
He sat up, kissed her chest, in the space between the sapphires, where the gems and their blue light didn't touch. She curved away from him so he could cover more territory, every inch more valuable than any gemstone. Her hands curled into his hair again, pushing and demanding and as wonderful as the rest of Adler. It was his pleasure to do her bidding. They slid together, smoother now in their mounting excitement. She laughed, a deep, joyful breathy noise, and she had all his attention. He escaped noticing what soap the hotel uses on its linens and how long it has been since they were washed. With Adler he is free of himself.
There was an increasing urgency in his thrusts, and he could feel her walls clench around him, exhorting him to great heights, or depths rather. His world shrinks to her and him and need, more than that, want, and desire, and the look of delight in Adler's eyes.
They reach their crowning glories, if not together then at least closely. Adler is too composed to collapse into him, her training as a dancer long before she sang at La Scala meaning she held herself restrained even now. Still, she followed him down into the comfort of the feather-filled duvet.
They kissed for a while, or he thought they did, because he must have drifted off to sleep. He thought "must" as he woke to Irene still entwined with him, his very own rosy-fingered dawn. She was awake, but pretending not to be.
She hadn't removed necklace before they slept. Holmes fingered the sapphires as they lay against her chest, blue next to dusky pink nipples. "Irene, dearest?"
"Yes."
"You do know these sapphires are fakes."
"Of course. I can't imagine Herr __ hiring me to steal a real necklace."
That was unexpected information. He'd considered the possibility of the theft being an inside job, but discarded it due to the oil on the lock hinges, and the faint marks on the workings of a lock that had been, very professionally, picked. He hadn't considered this kind of inside involvement.
"He said," Irene carried on, "that the necklace was already paste when he became the director of the company. He would have come up with a tidier solution but, apparently, there is some question of an examination for valuation by the insurance company."
"And you believe him?"
Irene considered for a moment. "I think I do. I was paid enough that I don't care either way, but yes, I think I do." And that counted for something for Holmes. Herr __ was obviously an accomplished liar because Holmes hadn't suspected a thing. Well, he'd suspected several things, but none of them this. But Adler was a reasonable judge of character, so he was willing to believe that Herr __'s story was true. Holmes tried to recall what he knew of the history of the company, but his memory was not co-operating, and Adler attending to her stockings was not aiding the process. There was something about a brief period of financial difficulty some fifteen years ago, and possibly if it was a twenty-year insurance policy the timing could fit. Of course a businessman would sell the sapphires to save the company. That Herr __ preferred that people thought he had been bewitched by Adler who had then made off with the sapphires rather than think ill of the company, well, that was people behaving illogically.
Holmes had time to ponder this, and the precise method by which Adler had hidden the sapphires in the room, as he was unceremoniously pitched, along with his clothes, into the bathroom, with only a shout of "the room service with breakfast" from Adler as an explanation. It also explained the show of the putting on of the lady's clothes that he had been treated to, and why she had refused his assistance with her stays. They both knew that with his assistance it would take significantly longer, and, if Holmes had his way, would have featured at least one removal of said clothes before they were put back on again.
Adler let him out of the bathroom once the waiter had departed. They made a pretty pair, her dressed and him naked as a daisy, as she poured the tea and he stole more than half of the muffins from the plate.
"And Herr __ consulting me?"
"If the thing was to look like a real robbery, or rather, a robbery of real jewels, then he'd have to call in help. He wouldn't want the police called because of the position he was in but he would want the necklace found, so a private investigator would be the obvious choice. You are the perfect person. Herr __ can say he hired the best, and even the best was unable to stop Irene Adler."
"Most gratifying for you."
"Well of course."
"There is one problem, my dear, and that is that I don't think I can let you go. I too have my reputation to consider." While he had already made a name for himself, as Herr __'s choice demonstrated, professional pride (and personal because he was damned if Irene was going to beat him again) demanded he stop her.
"I had taken that into account."
"Hmpfh," was Holmes's only comment. He spent some moments wondering how Irene had planned to do it before he realised that the sluggishness of his thought process was not due to the previous night's exertions. "The tea again, Adler?" And he'd been so careful to swap the cups around when she poured.
"The teacup itself this time."
"This is an outrage." It would have sounded better if his tongue hadn't become numb and thickened in his mouth.
"I am sorry, but you must admit, it is better this way." It was the last thing he heard before it all went black. He would have argued about this being the better way were it not for the effects of the narcotic, and he would definitely have argued after the ear-piercing screams of the maid who found him.
Luckily Watson had returned at a reasonable hour from his rounds the day before, so was in a good enough frame of mind to bail Holmes from his place of bondage ... his second place of bondage, to be more accurate, given the state the maid found him in.
Watson was unnecessarily amused at Holmes's predicament.
"Why do you always fall for her schemes?"
"It's not always."
"It's near enough always." Watson was right, which probably made the feeling worse. But she was worth it, especially as the thrill of the chase was an attracting factor for both of them.
~~~~
End notes - This was the fic where I realised that something I had the characters do was physically impossible. Once I'd come up with a way round that, it was plain sailing.
