Author's Note: Sincerest apologies about the delay between chapters of my fics, I've been quite ill myself, and I don't mean the flu. All I can say is, Dresden Files readers are the best readers who don't send threatening messages over delays, you guys rock.

This chapter is longer because a) I felt bad about the delay and b) I didn't have to write it under drabble constrictions, hope you guys don't mind the break from style. Though I did use the prompt of a picture of candy conversation hearts, but that was like...this time last year and now I feel really bad.

I have the next chapter, several other stories and chapters of stories under construction and open on my desktop right now, bear with me.

Brace yourselves for FLIRTING. Harry is never too sick not to snark. Jeez.

Murph's place. What can I say? It's comfy and cozy and so surreally cute that I always have to remind myself it's the home of a woman who makes her own bullets.

She reached up, grabbed the collar of my duster and dragged it off of me. It had started to snow again between the time we left the dog park and arriving at her house, and a flurry of flakes drifted from my shoulders toward the floor.

"Karrin Murphy," I said, gesturing grandly with the hand that wasn't in the sleeve she was pulling on. "Because foreplay is for amateurs."

"Sit." She pushed me towards a recliner and I sort of collapsed into it. Mouse nudged the lever on the side of the chair with his nose and it unfolded, and then Murph tossed a blue plaid blanket over me. "Stay."

"Roll over. Play dead," I grumbled. "Good boy, Harry."

"Come on, Mouse, let's go outside."

Mouse was wearing a doggy grin as she scratched his ears. My dog gets a lot more action than I do. Makes sense – I'm nowhere near that cuddly.

He gave me a guilty look.

"Go ahead," I said, and he padded out of the room on her heels.

I was sniffling again and huddled under the blanket when she came back.

"Oh, lord," Karrin said, and dropped a box of Kleenex in my hands.

"You buy the good kind."

"Wouldn't it be more cost-effective to just get a girlfriend?" She grinned and handed me a Gatorade and two little green gel pills.

"Ouch. You know, it's not absolutely necessary to drug me if you want to take advantage of me," I said, attempting to open the bottle. "I'm down for whatever."

"In your state, 'whatever' would probably kill you."

"C'mon, Murph. Do the right thing and put me out of my misery."

"Nope." She sat down on the arm of the sofa and picked up the remote. "Not done making fun of you yet. You're not going to blow up my TV, are you? I don't want a repeat of what happened at the World Series thing last year, Dresden. Your picture is still on the wall of People Not Allowed in that bar."

I shrugged. "Too tired. Barely managed to get the wards back online when we left."

Murph gave me a worried look and scanned through a few channels before settling on a drama about two brothers who drive around the country hunting monsters.

"You watch this?" I asked.

"I point out what they do wrong. Like that with the vampires? That would never work in real life." Karrin put a hand on my forehead, frowned and tossed another blanket over me before settling down on the couch. It wasn't long before I was down for the count.

A hand on my shoulder gently shook me awake. Maybe it speaks for the amount of time I spend alone, but another person waking me up kind of freaked me out. I twitched. The recliner almost flipped over.

"Call the chief," Murphy said to Mouse, who blinked. "We've got a live one."

There was a TV tray in front of me and a bowl of suspiciously homemade-looking chicken soup.

"Eat," she said, pointing commandingly toward the spoon.

"This doesn't have arsenic in it, too?"

"It was echinacea." She sat down on the close end of the sofa with her own dinner and pulled her feet up underneath her. "And no. Recipe didn't call for it."

"You can cook?" I asked. Okay, demanded. Bewilderedly.

Murph narrowed her eyes at me.

"It's just… cooking definitely isn't something I can picture you doing. Not that I picture you doing anything. 'Cause I don't—"

"Eat," she ordered again. "Gonna need your strength to dig yourself out of that hole."

I did. It was pretty good. Although most homemade food is good, considering my diet consists mainly of things that end in –O's and come in brightly colored, easy-for-bachelors-to-open packaging.

"Hell's bells, if I'd known you could shoot and cook like this, I would've popped the question years ago."

"And why haven't you?" Karrin questioned, blue eyes sparkling. "You're not getting any younger."

"I was waiting for you to ask me."

She snorted.

I sniffled. "What? This is the twenty-first century. Cops can ask wizards now, it's perfectly acceptable—"

She threw a saltine cracker at me, laughing so hard she started coughing, and I suddenly felt even more guilty for letting her take care of me when she clearly wasn't as over the flu as she claimed.

"Come on," she said, taking my hand, pulling me to me feet. "You can't sleep in the recliner. You don't fit. One good snore and it'll fall over."

"Where are we going? I don't snore— wait. Murph?" I stopped in the middle of the hall, grinning. "...Are you taking me to bed?"

She kicked me in the shin, but it was a perfunctory kick, and shouldered a door open. "I'm taking one for the team. Do you know what will happen to my department if I let our golden moose die of the flu?"

I put a hand over my heart. "You wound me."

"Not yet, I haven't. Here." She pushed me toward her bed, which was an interesting concept. Her room was girly; it was done in pale colors and floral print and it smelled nice, but there were some very Murphy touches, like the black shotgun poking out from under the bed, and the antique rifle above the door. "And for the record, your brother is a terrible nurse. He'd be in there, doing some fake-tits jogger on your sofa while you're dying in your Spiderman sheets."

"For the last time, Karrin, I do not have Spiderman sheets. If you would just come over and check—"

"Right. That doesn't sound like a trap at all."

"And this isn't?" I asked, looking around.

One blonde brow arched wickedly. "You're the one who followed me in here."

"If you kidnapped me and brought me here to be your slave," I said, "I'm okay with that. But I'm not wearing the Princess Leia costume. I have standards."

She laughed and pushed me. My legs gave out and I landed on a bed much softer than my own.

"Get comfortable, Stilts." Murphy tossed a blanket over me, sat on the edge of the bed and put a cold hand on my forehead. "You're still feverish."

"Lieutenant, if I'm not dead in a few hours and you still want to take advantage of me, go for it."

"I don't think you realize what you're signing yourself up for."

"A mercy killing." The second my head hit the pillow, my eyes slammed shut like garage doors. "You could be my tiny little angel of death."

Murph patted me on the cheek. "Grow a pair, Dresden, it's just the flu." I heard her yawn. "I think I'm gonna sit down...just for a minute."

I felt her settle down, a slight weight next to me. I hadn't been in the same bed as a woman in longer than I wanted to think about, not that I was doing very much thinking in a brain-aching, half-conscious daze.

When I opened my eyes an hour later, my tiny little angel of death was snoring with a Terry Pratchett book on her face. I moved the book – that took all the energy I had left – and she grabbed my hand and mumbled my name, something about vampires and being out of ammo and stop laughing, Dresden, you'll give away our position.

I grinned. She didn't let go of my hand.

I woke again to a black room, a "What the fuck!", the sound of the hammer of a gun being drawn and a slender female form flattening herself against my chest. I woke with a start, tearing the amulet from my neck with the hand that wasn't holding the woman against me, calling light to it.

I kind of...overdid it.

The ceiling light lit up for a split-second and went out with an audible pop, even though it wasn't on. In the brief flash I saw a shadowy form at the foot of the bed and Karrin, pointing a snubnose revolver at it, her back against my chest. The clock radio on the bedside table squawked to life. A car alarm went off next door, wailing pitifully for a few seconds before dying.

The shadowy form at the foot of the bed barked, eyes glowing in the blue light of the amulet, and leapt onto the bed, standing over both of us.

It licked Karrin's face and then mine.

"Dammit, Mouse! Look at your life. Look at your choices!"

"Oh god," said Murphy, cringing and laughing at the same time. "It's just the dog."

"Wow." I shooed Mouse off the bed, took the gun out of her hand and let the hammer down. "I'm so glad you're here to protect me from the big bad...cuddly puppy."

"He licked my foot. And then my face."

I shrugged. "He likes you."

"Oh," she said, slipping away from me. She sat next to me for a moment, tense. We didn't look at each other. And then we did.

"I'm gonna—" She wiped at her face with one hand and then headed for the bathroom.

I ruffled Mouse's ears and he followed me down the hall into dark kitchen. I let him out the back door, reached for the phone and dialed a number, then put on my boots and coat and got his leash out of a pocket.

He was still running in circles in the backyard so I leaned on the doorframe and watched. The light in the alley cast a blueish hue to the snow. It was brighter outside than inside.

Karrin snuck up on me. I don't think she meant to. I twitched when she put a hand on my arm.

"I'm sorry. I must have passed out while I was reading." Her punky hair was rumpled and she was still blinking and sleepy. It was cute. She looked me over. "You're not leaving, are you?"

…Which my libido immediately mistranslated as 'take me to bed or lose me forever,' because it obviously took a goddamn correspondence course in understanding women.

I glanced at the red LED clock on the microwave. It flickered nervously. "It's three in the morning."

"Holy shit."

"Yeah."

"I guess I was more tired than I thought."

"I guess so."

She stared up at me, sleepily. She wet her lips.

I had a momentary urge to pick her up and carry her back to bed, except it wasn't so momentary and a little bit more than an urge.

Mouse – I peered out the door at him – was still running in excited, snowy circles. He stopped, shook, barked once and started running again.

I could leave him out there for a while. He'd be okay, he's from Tibet or somewhere.

The light spilling through the open door rendered everything in Casablanca grayscale. Karrin was still looking up at me, blue eyes drowsy.

Unthinking, I reached out and brushed her hair from her eyes, tucking the long strands behind her ear. She turned into my hand but looked away, down, pale eyelashes against moonlit skin. I knew her face almost as well as my own, if not better, since I try not to look in the mirror too often. There was a dimple in her left cheek, even when she isn't smiling. Laugh lines at the corners of her eyes. A few freckles at her temple. It was starting to sound like a list of places to kiss. It was starting to sound like an interesting idea.

I thought about it a second too long and the sound of a car horn made us both jump.

She glanced toward the door.

"I called a cab," I said.

Belay that cab, screamed my sad and neglected sex life.

"Oh." Rapid-fire emotion flickered across her features – something that might have been disappointment, a mask of neutrality, a concerned smile. Karrin bit her lip. "Well, don't let Thomas give you any medication, he'd probably get it mixed-up and give you X or something."

"...Yeah, that sounds about right."

She took Mouse's leash from my hand and let him in. "If he does, call me, because that's bound to be hilarious before ...you know, you actually need a cop."

We both smiled. She stepped into the space between us and hugged me, arms slipping beneath my coat, she leaned her forehead against my chest. We stood that way for a while. I'm not sure how long.

The driver of the cab honked again and I pulled away.

"Feel better," she said, handing me the box of Kleenex. "I'll call you."

Mouse and I trudged outside, through the naked rosebushes in the front yard, out the gate and to the waiting cab. I gave the driver my address.

He eyed me and my giant puppy and my box of tissues in the mirror.

"Valentine's date didn't go like ya planned, huh?"

I blinked at him.

"Valenti—oh, for the love of—" I groaned and slumped against the window. "Was that today?"

The cabbie was laughing at me. Mouse made an unsurprised huffing noise. I turned a narrow-eyed stare toward him.

"You know, you could have said something."

He thumped his tail against the seat and stared solemnly at me, as if to say, "I tried."

be my reviewing valentine?