Full Summary : Molly was happy with her life. She's got a job she loves, a nice flat, her cat, and she's even begun dating again (now that she's over her infatuation with Sherlock, mostly). Then Sherlock dragged her out for a few hours of dress up and undercover work, and everything started to go to hell in a hand-basket.

She agreed to accompany him to one more event, purely as a distraction; and in the process ended up with an unwanted house guest (Sherlock's ex Janine), the attentions of a vengeful stalker, and a return of those pesky feelings for Sherlock Holmes.

Written for the 2015 Sherlolly Big Bang on Ao3.

A Vicious Motivator

Bitterness is a paralytic. Love is a much more vicious motivator.

- Sherlock Holmes (Series 1, episode 1 - A Study in Pink)

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

Molly Hooper deliberately ignored the brief vibration and chime that issued from her purse.

Her blind date, a nice man named Harry, who looked nothing like Sherlock Holmes (she'd checked before agreeing to meet him), didn't. He frowned in the direction of the noise that once again interrupted their conversation and asked, "Are you sure you don't want to check that?"

Molly's answering smile was a bit forced as she shook her head no. "Nope. It's not important."

"Are you sure? I only ask because this is the fourth or fifth time you've got a text since we sat down to dinner."

It was the seventh, actually. There'd been two while he'd been in the loo, but Molly didn't feel the need to tell him that.

"Aren't you curious about who's buzzing you?"

She knew exactly who it was. She'd checked the first few because they'd come from an unknown number. Luckily for her, the persistent jerk had done her the courtesy of signing them in his usual way. That's when she'd realized he must have borrowed someone's mobile again.

At Barts. Where are you? SH

How long until you get here? SH

Why aren't you answering? Ditch the idiot. Need your assistance. Now. SH

She was so certain the rest were in a similar vein that she didn't bother looking at her phone after the first three. Molly was positive that if there had been a real emergency she would have received a call from one of Sherlock's usual minders. Since there was no voice mail from John, Greg, anyone at Barts, or Sherlock's brother, she felt safe in assuming the consulting detective's increasingly annoying texts were nothing more than a whim on his part.

"It's fine, really. Just an old friend. Terrible gossip. Dying to share some bit of news, I imagine. Probably forgot I said I'd be out tonight. You were telling me about your job?"

Sherlock really was a bit of a gossip. Always rattling off someone else's business to the room at large, as if he had no filter between his brain and his mouth.

"Right. Well, as I was saying earlier, I'm a systems analyst for-"

Molly somehow managed to fake her way through the appropriate first date small talk for another twenty minutes; however, a small part of her mind was wondering what Sherlock needed this time. She nodded and smiled as her date told what he probably thought was a very amusing anecdote about a client; but she couldn't help feeling guilty at her desire to be home watching telly in her jammies, with Toby curled up in a warm purring ball on her lap. Or the even more damning desire to be at the morgue watching Sherlock deducing something, anything.

Once again her phone made noise, only this time it wasn't the generic text message alert. In the time it took Molly to recognize the tune and scramble to dig her phone out of her purse, it managed to play "I'm too sexy for my shirt, too sexy for my shirt, so sexy it hurts" just loud enough for her date and at least one of the surrounding tables to hear.

Sherlock so rarely bothered to use his own mobile to contact her that she'd actually managed to forget she'd changed his text alert and ringtone to Right Said Fred's I'm Too Sexy on a dare. Somehow Meena had talked her into it on a Girl's Night Out, after what was probably far too many pints. They'd both thought it was utterly hilarious at the time. Now? Not so much.

Her smile was extremely forced. "Sorry. Can you give me just a moment?"

Harry sighed and signalled for the waiter to refill his glass of wine.

She skipped down to the read the latest text.

Got tired of waiting. At Baker Street. Come NOW. SH

Molly quickly typed a reply.

Is there a body? There had better be a body. MH

Seconds later the phone began to chirp again, but she managed to silence it after the first word or two.

Yes. SH

Is it dead? MH

Technically, no. But he might be by the time you get here at this rate. Now, Molly. SH

There was something off, something she couldn't put her finger on. The absence of a phone call from Greg told her Sherlock's problem wasn't a police matter. At least not yet. That still left a wide range of trouble that he could have got himself into.

Be there soon. Have to call a cab. MH

Already done. It's waiting outside. Have Mrs H let you in. SH

Molly groaned and hesitated before shoving the phone back in her purse.

It didn't surprise her that he knew where she was. She'd stopped trying to figure out how he knew the things he knew a few months after they'd met. Given enough time he never could resist showing off and explaining everything anyway, so there was no reason to ask.

She looked at her date and struggled to come up with an explanation that wouldn't sound morbid or insane.

Harry waved his half empty wine glass in her direction. "Let me guess, you need to go."

"Well, yes. I'm so sorry. I was having a lovely time."

"No. No, it's fine. Meena warned me something like this might happen. Said you had an eccentric friend who called on you at all hours, needing your help for this or that."

She was about to deny it, but then she remembered Sherlock pounding on her door at four a.m. the week before. He'd insisted he needed to use her cook-top for an experiment as the pilot had gone out on his, and it was too early to bother Mrs Hudson. Not too early to travel across town and wake her up, she'd noted. At the time, she just stepped out of the way, told him he knew where the kitchen was, and went back to bed. He'd been gone when she woke up, but the smell of whatever he'd been up to had lingered. She'd had to leave the windows open all day.

"Yeah. Sorry. He does do that." She stood and gathered up her coat and bag. "Listen, Harold-"

"Harry."

Molly grimaced, Sherlock was definitely rubbing off on her. "Right. Harry. I knew that. So, any interest in doing this again?"

He drained the last of his wine and stood up as well. "Nope. Not really."

"I didn't think so. No hard feelings?"

"None. Walk you out?"

"That'd be great, thanks."

Harry tucked her into the waiting cab with a genial wave. Molly went ahead and sent a text to Meena to let her know the evening had been a bust. Meena had insisted that she'd need to hear all the gory details at work the next day, and Molly knew she was in for a grilling guaranteed to rival anything Greg could manage with a suspect.

As the cab crept down the London streets, she wondered if Sherlock's summons had to do with the Moriarty telecast.

Things had been very strange leading up to it. Even stranger than one would have expected considering Sherlock had been shot not too long prior. Tense would be the word she would have used if anyone had bothered to ask her (which they hadn't). From Christmas until the telecast, she'd barely spoken to anyone associated with Sherlock. When she had, they had all acted as if they were threads drawn so taut they were threatening to snap.

She'd only seen Sherlock himself once in that time frame, very briefly. Barely five minutes, really. He'd come to the lab to drop off a small box of various pieces of equipment he had pilfered over the years. She could see someone standing just outside the room, through the little window in the door. She'd thought that strange. She'd almost asked Sherlock why he didn't invite them in, but something had made her hold her tongue. He'd placed the box on the table closest to her and simply said, "Goodbye, Molly Hooper." Her breath had frozen in her lungs at his words. Her chest had literally ached, Molly remembered that quite clearly. She also remembered thinking that it was goodbye.

A real goodbye.

A final goodbye.

Like the one he'd given her after the Fall, minutes before Mycroft had him whisked off to who-knew-where for two years.

But that couldn't have been right; because he'd shown up at the morgue two days later, as if nothing strange had happened at all. Well, nothing stranger than the image of a dead man being broadcast over every channel in London, that was.

As far as she was aware, there hadn't been another sign of Moriarty (or, much more likely, his impersonator) since; but the chances of anyone discussing that sort of thing with her where very small. The Really Important Cases (as she thought of them) tended to be Need To Know only, and Molly very rarely needed to know. Until there was a body to be examined, or a call for her help in the lab, she wasn't brought into the loop.

Which made her wonder, once again, why he'd asked her to come to Baker Street.

Twenty minutes later she was climbing the staircase to Sherlock's rooms. As expected, she only had to stand on the stoop for a moment before Mrs Hudson answered her knock and told her to go on up.

The door to his flat was wide open, which wasn't terribly surprising. He knew she was coming, after all.

It was a bit strange that he wasn't in the sitting room, though.

Molly dropped her purse onto John's chair and began to unbutton her coat. "All right, where's the body?"

He wasn't in the kitchen, either.

"Sherlock?"

"In here."

She draped her coat over the back of the chair, and followed the sound of his voice to the bathroom. That door was only slightly ajar rather than wide open.

"Don't just stand out there all night, come in," he snapped, impatient as always when someone wasn't rushing to do his bidding.

Molly eased the door open and found him sitting on the edge of the tub, clutching a blood stained kitchen towel full of ice over his right eye.

"What happened? Where's the body? What did you do, Sherlock?" She eased into the bathroom, which really wasn't big enough for two, and glanced into the tub to make sure there wasn't a corpse in it. She wouldn't put it past him to have one stored on ice in there. Stranger things had happened.

"Isn't it obvious? I'm the body."

There it was. The 'I'm smarter than you' voice he used when he thought someone was being particularly dense.

She was going to kill him. Going to kill him, and then there really would be a body in the flat. No one would blame her. Greg and Anderson might even be willing to help her cover everything up if Sherlock had been particularly Sherlockish recently. Perhaps not Anderson, not anymore. Donovan would probably volunteer, though.

"I'll ask again, what happened?" Molly carefully pulled his hand and the makeshift ice pack away from his face. She couldn't help but notice that she'd been forced to stand between his spread legs to get close enough to inspect the nasty cut on his temple and the bruising around his eye.

Now is not the time, Molly.

"I fell." He grimaced as her fingers carefully explored the cut.

"You-you fell?" Sherlock was rarely clumsy unless he was chemically compromised-Drunk or high, Molly. Don't sugar coat it.-or attempting to play the fool for a case.

"Pushed would be the more precise term. Brief altercation with the ex of a former client. He was smuggling drugs in the wheel well of her car, you know how these things go. Police called in. Drugs confiscated. I'm called in to testify at a hearing. Idiot goes to jail for a short period of time. He's judged suitably reformed, and released back onto the streets to do it all again. End result was my face connecting with a phone box and his shoulder is most likely dislocated. We agreed to disagree on the matter, and went our separate ways. Judging from the bleeding, I may need stitches."

Molly leaned closer and gently ghosted her fingers across his temple. She could feel his warm breath against her neck, and once again cursed her involuntary reaction to this man. "I doubt it. Head wounds always bleed excessively."

She forced herself to concentrate on the problem at hand, not the man himself and how he made her feel. "It looks like the actual cut itself is relatively small, you can probably make do with some Steristrips to hold it together, and a bit of gauze to keep it clean if you're planning to get filthy in the next few days. It is going to hurt a lot, though. I'm more worried about the swelling around your eye. Any loss of vision?"

"No. None. This isn't my first black eye and I'm sure it won't be the last. I do know what signs to look for." He smirked. "So to speak."

"Funny." The tone of her voice made it clear that his little quip was anything but. She awkwardly twisted to reach for the hand towel hanging beside the sink. When she started to tilt, Sherlock's free arm wrapped around her waist to hold her upright.

Molly ignored the surge of utterly inappropriate warmth emanating from the contact, and wet the towel under the tap.

"We, umm, we need to get you cleaned up, and then off to hospital."

Sherlock shook his head and winced. "Nope. Don't have time for that. They'll ask questions I don't care to answer, there will be tedious paperwork, and probably a police interview. I'm on a case, and now it's doubly important that you help me. There are sticking plasters in the medicine cabinet."

He kept his arm around her even though she had begun to dab the blood away and was no longer at risk for overbalancing.

"You went to Barts so I could clean you up? You do remember that John deals with the living patients. I don't usually get my hands on them until they've died. Sorry." Molly winced in sympathy as he jerked his head away from her. The hand that had been around her waist fisted around the bottom hem of her cardigan so hard his knuckles turned white.

"Three things. One, I have been forbidden from distracting John with anything less than a request from the Queen herself for the next few weeks since the baby has finally made her appearance. Two, it's a good thing your patients are already dead because that hurts like hell. Three, I didn't get injured until I was already on my way home from Barts. I'd gone there because I needed your help with the case I'm working on, but you weren't there." Even though she couldn't see his expression clearly, she could tell he was annoyed about that.

Molly finished cleaning the blood off his face and tossed the soiled towel into the sink. She tried to take a step away so she could dig through the medicine cabinet, but Sherlock still had a tight hold on her cardigan. Molly sighed and tapped the back of his hand. "Let go."

He looked surprised, as if he'd been unaware of what he had been doing. He quickly released her and transferred the offending hand to his own thigh, digging his nails into the fabric of his trousers.

"If there's no body, no real body, and you needed me before you decided to pick a fight-"

"I didn't start it."

"Before you decided to participate in a fight." She set a tube of antibiotic ointment, some cotton wipes, and a box of sticking plasters on the rim of the sink. "Then what did you need?"

"A distraction." Sherlock began to explain as she patched him up. "I need to speak with a gentleman, if you can call him that, regarding my current case. He's agreed to meet with me, but only on his terms. Unfortunately, the bar he chose for our meeting is owned and operated by the brother of a woman I helped send to prison. I would prefer not to be recognized, and that means I need to divert the barman's attention away from myself, and force his focus on to my distraction. You."

"Stop squirming. You get injured often enough, this should be old hat by now." Molly carefully put the last plaster in place and leaned back to inspect her handiwork. "All done. I still think John would be more help. With your injury, and at the bar."

"He would, normally. But he's not the right sort of distraction for tonight. It's not that kind of a bar."

Sherlock began to stand and she quickly backed into the hall and out of his way. He paused to look at his reflection in the mirror, fiddling with his curls to try to camouflage some of the damage to his temple.

"Pardon?"

"He's not the type to hold the barman's interest for long. He has a clear preference: brunette, petite, attractive, and-the biggest strike against John-female. I think you'll agree that John won't do this time."

She wasn't absolutely positive, because it didn't seem to be the sort of thing Sherlock would do, but Molly thought he may have just implied that she was attractive. Or, at least, attractive enough to meet tonight's criteria. It brought a tiny smile to her lips.

He gestured to his face. "Thanks to this, it's even more important that you keep the barman occupied until I've got the information I need."

Sherlock followed her into the short hall, forcing her to retreat into the kitchen. He gave her appearance a critical once over that set her teeth on edge even before he bothered opening his mouth.

"What you're wearing won't do. Did you really go on a date like that?"

Once again she wondered if Greg would be willing to help her cover up a murder. Something drawn out and painful, perhaps involving tiny little needles or thumbscrews. Where would one would even find thumbscrews in this day and age?

"I'd say it was a first date. Set up through a friend. You would have made more of an effort if it was someone you'd met and exchanged contact information with on your own. That's one of your less hideous cardigans, true, but still frumpy. You've got better, more attractive clothing. I've been through your wardrobe, I know it's there. But you chose not to wear any of it. Why?"

"Sherlock." Molly's voice carried a note of warning, which he ignored because he was Sherlock Bloody Holmes.

"You didn't want to go out to dinner tonight. Was it because of your date specifically, or just a general malaise?" He tilted his head, studying her once more. "The date, I think. Your friend told you about him before hand and you already suspected it wouldn't work out. Earlier, I assumed he was an idiot, practically everyone is, but this one must have been particularly dull and boring; hence your willingness to abandon him so early in the evening."

She huffed. "You said there was a body. What else was I supposed to do?"

"You aren't denying he was boring." He waited a moment to see if she would, but Molly bit her lower lip and kept silent.

"He helped you with your coat. There's blond hair on your shoulder. Taller than you, but only just. I noticed no lingering scent of aftershave or cologne when we were in the bathroom, your hair is still neat, and your lipstick isn't smudged. That indicates there was no goodnight kiss. Probably very little, if any, physical contact at all. I'm uncertain as to why you would agree to meet him in the first place since he clearly is nothing like-"

Something in her expression must have finally got through to him because he quickly slipped past her to stand in the sitting room. "He's nothing like Tom," he finished once he was safely out of reach.

They both knew that he hadn't been about to compare her date to her ex-fiancé.

"As I was saying, you won't do at all. Right now you look nothing like the kind of woman that usually approaches your mark. I need you to hold his attention, but not make him suspicious. You'll have to change."

"What?" The quick switch of topic from her dull date (damn him for being right) back to her appearance momentarily threw her.

"Your clothes. Take them off."

"Wha-What?! Have you lost your mind?" Yes, there had been a time when she would have loved to have heard those words coming from his lips-several times, if she was feeling totally honest, which she really wasn't at the moment-but this wasn't anything like she'd imagined it.

And she was over Sherlock, anyway. Mostly. Sort of.

Shite.

"There isn't enough time to go shopping. We'll have to make do with what I can find here. I wonder if Mrs Hudson still has anything left over from her days as an exotic dancer?"

He disappeared out the door and down the stairs before she could do more than repeat "What?" for the third time.

Left alone in the kitchen for several minutes, Molly debated grabbing her things and trying to sneak out of the building.

It occurred to her that another option would be calling John. Sherlock had said that he was forbidden from bothering John, but nobody had told her she couldn't. She actually had her mobile phone out and was thumbing through her contacts when Sherlock returned.

"She wasn't home. I couldn't find anything from her dancing career, but I did find these." Sherlock had returned with a wad of black material in one hand and a pair of heels in the other. "They're a bit big, judging from what little I've seen of your figure recently. It's difficult to tell under the jumpers and ill-fitting trousers you favour. Why haven't you undressed?"

There were so many things wrong with what he'd just said, it took Molly a moment to decide which to touch on first. "Did you really just break into Mrs Hudson's flat to ransack through her clothes?"

He began to herd her back toward the bathroom. "I don't think it counts as breaking in if the flat owner has given you a key for emergencies."

"Yes. I'm pretty sure it does."

"Really? Hmm." Sherlock dumped a skirt, a pretty black silk scarf that glittered in the light, and the shoes on the toilet lid; then disappeared into his room for a moment before emerging with a white, men's button down shirt. "Here, take this. I'm fairly certain I've got some safety pins, somewhere. We should be able to pin the skirt tight enough to keep it from falling off. What colour is your brassier?"

Molly realized he was staring at her chest, which she found highly disconcerting.

"Never mind. Nothing of Mrs Hudson's would fit you anyway, she's at least a cup size larger than you. Whatever you've got on will have to work."

The calculating look on his face flustered her so much that she blurted out the first thought that came to mind.

"For someone who has no interest, you spend an awful lot of time contemplating the size of my breasts."

It was a rare thing, indeed, to see Sherlock Holmes utterly flummoxed. Molly grinned, pleased to know that she wasn't the only one feeling out of their depth. It was difficult to be certain, but she thought there might even have been a slight pinkish hue blossoming on his cheeks.

He harrumphed and looked anywhere but at her. "You are clearly mistaken."

Old Molly would have let it drop and quickly changed the topic; but the new, bolder, post-the-Fall Molly, who was still annoyed at being dragged away from her boring date with a nice if terminally boring man by the pillock of a consulting detective standing before her, refused to keep her mouth shut. Later she would wonder where her self-preservation skills had temporarily run off to, but by then it was too late.

"Mistaken about what? The amount of time you've thought about my breasts, or your lack of interest?"

His face went blank. Rather than answer her, he turned and left the room. She heard him rummaging through drawers in the kitchen before his head came back into view around the door. "We're running behind. Don't just stand there, woman. Strip."

இڿڰۣ-ڰۣ—

Mrs Hudson's heels, while lovely and a tiny bit racy, were definitely too big. They'd been forced to stuff wads of toilet tissue into the toes. She could tell that her entire gait had been thrown off. Getting down the stairs from Sherlock's flat had been a nightmare. She'd almost fallen at one point. Most likely would have if it hadn't been for his hands grabbing her waist to keep her steady. He'd even commented on her clumsiness, and something else about the strange sway of her hips drawing too much attention to how the skirt outlined her bum.

"I'm not the one who insisted I needed to wear a skirt. My trousers are upstairs, I can have my annoying bum and strange hips covered up in a matter of minutes," she'd snapped back.

That earned her an admonishment to stop being childish and hurry up.

Sherlock had asked the cabbie to drop them off a block away from the bar. After a failed attempt to scoot herself out of the cab in her borrowed clothes and shoes, he'd huffed and reached in to grasp her hand and haul her out.

Molly started to carefully make her way toward the bar when Sherlock grabbed her arm and pulled her into the mouth of a nearby alley.

"Stand still," he ordered.

She struggled not to fidget as he inspected her poorly put together disguise.

Back at his flat, Sherlock had told her to hold the shirt up out of his way; then dropped to his knees to pin the skirt around her waist. More than once she'd felt the brush of his fingers against the skin of her back and stomach, and it had taken everything she had to keep from gasping at the contact. He'd stood, smoothed the shirt down around her hips, and wrapped the scarf around her as a belt. After that, he'd yanked the tie from her hair and told her to see if she could make it look less flat and bland.

Just like that, any lingering tingles from his touch were gone and her earlier irritation with him was back. She'd padded, barefoot, into his bathroom and spent several minutes teasing and torturing her hair into having some semblance of volume. It really was the best she could do with only his comb and no hairpins or product to hold it in place.

While she'd been fixing her hair, he had been going through her purse. He appeared at the bathroom door with her mascara, lip gloss, and a small bottle of her favourite perfume in hand.

"It's not ideal, but it's a step in the right direction," he had proclaimed once she'd finished touching up her makeup; and she had wanted to kick him with the pointy toe of Mrs Hudson's purloined heel. "Or misdirection, in this case."

Molly sighed and rubbed her hands up and down her arms, wondering why they were still standing in the alley. There was a chill in the air and he'd refused to let her bring the coat she'd been wearing when she arrived at Baker Street.

"Do you remember what I told you?"

She rolled her eyes. They'd gone over this in the cab. "You want me to enter the bar first, look around and make eye contact with as many patrons as I can. Then I'm supposed to go up to the bar, distract the bartender, and wait for your signal to let me know when you're done."

"That's a bit of an over simplification, but you've got most of it. Do whatever you need to keep the barman's attention on you as much as possible: order drinks, flirt, complain that your date is running late and you think he may have stood you up. Whatever women do to attract the attention of a potential mate. Try to appear available, chat him up."

How was she supposed to know what other women did to attract men. It wasn't as if she made a habit of hitting the clubs to pull on a Saturday night, was it? She couldn't even get Sherlock to notice she was a female the majority of the time, and she'd been tilting at that particular windmill on and off for years. The few times she'd tried had always ended embarrassingly poorly. "How exactly does one go about looking available? Should I write a note that reads 'I'm a sure thing, ask me out' on a coaster?"

"I don't think it will have to come to that, but you may want to keep it in mind."

She growled at him through clenched teeth, "Can we just go? I'm freezing to death out here."

"Almost." Sherlock mussed the hair around her face a bit, draping it just so with a critical eye. Then he reached down and quickly unbuttoned the first two buttons on her shirt.

She gasped, shocked at his actions and at the way he was intently staring at her bosom. Again. Her breath came faster, shallower. It only took a second for her to realize he didn't have the expression of a man who desired a woman (she'd been engaged, she recognized it when she saw it, no matter what some people might think); rather he had the same expression he usually wore when examining a particularly interesting mould specimen under the microscope.

He hesitated a moment, his hand hovering in front of her cleavage, then unfastened a third button before Molly slapped his hand away.

"Off limits to you, Mister Not-Interested." Molly glared and poked him in the chest with her finger. "You owe me big for this, Sherlock Holmes. Big."

She shouldered past him and made a point to put even more sway into her "strange" hips, just to annoy him.

Once in the bar, Molly thought she could sense him quietly slip through the door behind her. With a deep breath that only served to remind her of how uncomfortably on display she felt, she did as he'd instructed.

Molly walked further into the bar. She put her hand on her cocked hip as she looked around the room, searching for her non-existent missing boyfriend, before pouting and swaying her way to the bar.

She felt utterly ridiculous, but the appreciative looks she received as she slid onto a bar stool and crossed her legs helped ease her apprehension a bit.

At one point she glanced around while Shaun, the extremely attractive man behind the counter, left to fill another customer's drink order. She saw Sherlock talking intently with a dark man in one of the booths; so he'd found the man he had been looking for. Molly quickly looked away and smiled at Shaun when he came back.

She had no idea exactly how long she'd been perched on the tall bar stool; long enough to stop worrying that someone was going to figure out she was a fraud, at least. Her job was to keep Shaun distracted, which really wasn't that much of a hardship after the first drink or so. Regular old boring Molly felt very out of place; but tonight she was playing a part and didn't have to worry about embarrassing herself or meeting someone 'appropriate'. Tonight she flirted and batted her eyelashes, and had gone so far as to blown Shaun a kiss the last time he'd walked by and handed her a little plastic skewer of cherries. He'd smirked and winked when she'd daintily pulled the first one off with her teeth.

Obviously she'd been there long enough to think it was a good idea to accept another drink from the decent looking gentleman sitting next to her. He put his hand on her exposed knee and leaned close to whisper a request for her phone number into her ear. It was tempting. It had been ages since someone had looked at her like that; the last had been Tom, just after Mary and John's wedding. Before the jealousy, the ultimatum, and the rather anticlimactic end of her engagement.

But that wasn't what she was there for. She had a job to do. Before she could come up with an appropriate excuse to put him off, someone inserted himself between her and her admirer. The newcomer kept his back to the bar and Shaun. "Hello, luv. Sorry to keep you waitin'. This guy botherin' you?"

It took Molly several seconds to realize the man with the slicked back hair, slouched shoulders, black eye, telltale sticking plasters on his temple, and a nearly overpowering aroma of gin wafting about him was Sherlock Holmes.

Molly grinned at her deduction, inordinately pleased with her observational skills, and overbalanced toward him on the stool. "Sher-"

Suddenly there is a strong hand behind her neck, pulling her even closer and on to her feet. Sherlock forcefully pressed his closed lips against hers, cutting off his name before she could finish saying it. Her eyes fluttered closed, hands sliding up his chest and around his neck to plaster herself against him. Her lips parted on a sigh, and Sherlock caught the lower one between his teeth just hard enough to bring her back to her senses.

"Ready to go home, luv?" His voice was even deeper than usual, huskier. Molly wondered if it was simply Sherlock playing the part of an amorous boyfriend, or if it were a reaction to the kiss. She honestly didn't know which she'd prefer.

"Dying to, pumpkin." Molly began to giggle again, this time at the absurdity of his scowling reaction to the pet name.

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a bill, barely glancing at it before tossing it on the bar behind him.

When he led her out of the bar, the combination of drink and the borrowed heels made her cling to his side like a limpet. Sherlock flagged down a cab and helped her in. Poured her in, really. She felt strangely fluid as she slid onto the backseat. Molly realized he'd never get into the cab if she didn't move over, so she awkwardly crawled across the seat on her hands and knees until she could press her cheek against the cool glass on the other side. That felt heavenly, and her eyes momentarily closed. Someone tugged on her ankle and Molly belatedly remembered she was making room for Sherlock. With a bit of manoeuvring, she plopped down on her half of the seat. She thought she caught the cabbie giving her the eye in the rearview mirror, and considered sticking her tongue out at him. She definitely saw the glare Sherlock aimed at the driver, almost as if he were silently defending her honour, and that made her feel warm and strangely tingly.

Sherlock gave the cabbie her address. Then he pulled his phone out of his pocket and started texting someone, muttering to himself. "It will be faster if Lestrade meets me at Baker Street. He should be there by the time I return from dropping you off. There's one or two things I need to pick up before he arrests the-"

His words came to an abrupt halt in mid-stream when Molly reached out and squeezed his knee. "Could you think . . . quieter?"

He leaned back and away from her, shifting his leg out from under her hand, and frowned at her. "How much did you have to drink?"

She knew this. Or she thought she knew this. Molly held up four fingers and very confidently said, "Three."

The cool window glass beckoned again. She closed her eyes and leaned her forehead against it.

"We were in there no more than an hour. Three, no four. Definitely four alcoholic drinks in an hour, with your slight body mass. You, Molly Hooper, are pissed off your rocker."

"I would say that is a valid hypothesis, Mr Holmes." Molly giggled again, then made the mistake of opening her eyes to look out the window as London rolled by. Her stomach started to rebel, and she was a little afraid that she was going to be ill all over the taxi and Mrs Hudson's shoes.

She pulled sharply away from the window, and ended up propped up against Sherlock's arm. "I don't feel so well. Bit dizzy."

"Yes, well, no surprise there. Why on Earth did you drink so much if you can't handle it?"

Molly tilted her head up until she could see the bottom of his chin. "You told me to keep Shaun distracted, and I did."

"Shaun?"

"Hot bartender."

"Ah. Well, I didn't tell you to drink the place dry." He looked down at her, frowning.

"It was that or the coaster and I don't think I could fake being a coaster kind of girl." Her eyes slowly closed as she slumped against him.

"Molly."

"Hmmm?"

"John's going to blame me for this, isn't he?"

"Nooooo, he wouldn't do that. Would he? Wait. Yes. Yes, he definitely would." She blindly reached up and patted in the general direction of his cheek, then sing-songed, "You're going to be in trouble."

With an irritated sigh, Sherlock leaned forward to tap the partition between them and the cab driver, nearly dislodging her in the process. "Change of plans. Take us to 221B Baker Street."

The driver grumbled something about stupid drunks not being able to make up their mind. She could feel the cab slow and turn, then nothing more until Sherlock shook her arm.

"Wake up. We're here."

"Wasn't asleep. Just restin' my eyes."

"Of course you were."

She didn't think he really believed her.

He had already exited the cab, and she gratefully let him help her out. She waited on the stoop as he paid the driver, then unlocked the door to his building. "I'm thirsty."

Sherlock began to push her up the stairs. "I'll get you some water in a minute. Up we go, there's a good girl."

Once they were in his flat, he left her standing in the middle of the sitting room and went to fetch her promised glass of water.

"Am I staying the night?"

Even from behind, she could see him tense as he filled a glass at the sink. "I thought that might be for the best."

She frowned, unsure as to why he was acting so strange, when it occurred to her that he might think that she was going to assume that he was . . . And then Molly's head spun for a moment, forcing her to rather abruptly sit on the sofa.

He was afraid she was going to get the wrong idea. Molly snorted to herself. Sherlock Holmes was unarguably an arsehole, but he wasn't the sort of arsehole to take physical advantage of someone who was clearly inebriated and unable to give informed consent. She was apparently drunk as a skunk and even she knew that. That wasn't to say he wouldn't wheedle information out of someone with alcohol loosened lips, because he definitely would do that. Which was a reminder that she needed to be extra careful to keep her babbling mouth shut.

She reached up and flipped an invisible key against her lips. Then Molly giggled as it occurred to her that if she wasn't completely over him-which she was-then it would be more likely that she would try to accost him. Which wasn't going to happen. Because she was over lusting after Sherlock Holmes.

Except for when he was wearing that purple shirt, because that was her favourite. And really, who would fault her for admiring him in that? Even Mary thought he was attractive. And Mary was a married woman. Oh, and when he billowed into the morgue in that coat of his, acting as if he owned the place. That was more than a bit sexy. Oh, oh, and then there was the way he . . .

Why was it so hot all of the sudden?

Molly tipped the rest of the way over onto the closest available surface (which was squishy and comfortable, thankfully) and fanned herself.

By the time he turned around, glass of water in hand, she'd kicked off Mrs Hudson's heels and was curled up on the sofa, barely awake.

"Can I have a pillow?" She sounded pitiful, even to herself.

Sherlock put the glass on the low table nearby and reached down to haul her up off the sofa. "Lestrade is coming and I've got work to do. You'll just be in the way out here. Come on, off to bed."

She let him guide her down the hall to his room, and then gently push her onto the unmade bed. Molly fell over backward, causing the mattress to bounce a bit, and laughed. This entire evening was just too surreal to believe.

The room was barely lit by the soft glow of street lamps and the muted light from the sitting room down the hall. It took a second for her eyes to adjust before she saw Sherlock standing over her with a disapproving frown.

She ignored him and twisted her head this way and that to try to see as much of his room as possible. "I don't think I've ever been in here before. Have I? Sherlock's bedroom. It's so . . . normal. Nothing like I imagined. Nothing like your Janine implied in all those kiss-and-tell interviews. I wonder how many other women have been in here before. Probably lots."

Sherlock leaned over her and started to untie the scarf around her waist. Once he'd pulled the material out from under her, Molly lifted herself up on her elbows and looked at him very seriously. "Do you? Have lots of women in here?"

"Not as many as you seem to think, no." He carefully rolled her sideways and pushed the borrowed shirt up her back just enough to get to the safety pins holding her skirt together. Once she was pin free, she felt the skirt zip slide down, and then she was on her back again. He flipped the sheet over her lower half, then reached under it to grab the hem of her skirt. As soon as she figured out what he was up to, she lifted her bum to help, and the skirt slid down her legs and off.

"Do you want to sleep in your bra, or can you manage that on your own?"

It took her less than two seconds to think that through. "Turn 'round." She pointed toward the wall behind him.

He did turn, thankfully. She had no clue what she would have done if he hadn't. Probably slept in the damn thing since she was far too chicken to remove it while he watched, even when tipsy. Drunk, Molly. You're drunk.

"You said it's nothing like you imagined."

"Hmm?" Molly struggled with the shirt and the clasp of her bra, attempting to do that thing that most women instinctively seemed to figure out early on. The thing where their bra comes off while the outer garment stays on. She'd never had a problem before; but then again, she'd never tried to do it while Sherlock was standing a few feet away, either.

"You've imagined my bedroom?"

She crowed in success as she pulled the annoying underwire torture device out of the neck of the shirt and flung it away, narrowly missing hitting him in the back. Wrestling with it had taken more effort than she'd expected, and that's when Molly decided it was probably time to take a little nap.

She peeked up at him as he helped her scoot into place with her head on a pillow. "Of course I have. I'm a woman and you're Sherlock Holmes, with the hair and the cheek bones and that smile and that voice. We both know I had a little crush on you." She looked sad as she continued. "Everyone knows I had a crush on you. It's a little humiliating when you think about it. I don't like thinking about it."

She brightened again, and flashed a beautiful smile in his direction. "But I don't have a crush on you anymore because that would be stupid; and no matter what you think, I am not a stupid girl. I'm not. I'm smart, and very good at my job, and some people even think I'm pretty."

Molly's eyes drifted closed, but a small trace of her smile remained on her lips.

She thought she imagined his voice-deliciously soft and deep-whisper, "Yes, they do." Then she was asleep.