Chapter Text
Bond doesn’t think about that night too often. He wants to. He’d like to invoke it and all others he’s experienced with Barbara Mawdsley more than he does. But that would be stupid. He can’t indulge himself like that. He knows it would lead to creeping changes in how he approaches M, his work and everything else. It’s not difficult for him to imagine careless indulgent glances around the wrong people, half thought-out conversations in the wrong place and memories and wishes pushing their way to the front of his mind at the wrong time. Very possibly deadly. At the very least M would kill him if he ever put a foot out of place.
So he locks it up for most of his waking hours. But not tonight. Tonight, for now at least, he’s alone and in his apartment his thoughts are free to be his own. So when the memory of her wicked smile as she told him ‘I hardly think you’ll last long enough to make it worth my while’ floats to mind he lets it stay. Or the way the woman wasn’t the least bit abashed when he pulled her onto his lap and tossed the towel - the only thing she was wearing by then - to the floor, he keeps that one at the forefront of his thoughts too. He certainly can’t help a self-indulgent, half embarrassed grin as he remembers how they’d fucked on his couch and he’d almost proved her right.
He’s sitting on his sofa now half-heartedly leafing through the copy of Le Monde that he picked up in the Gare du Nord as he was waiting for the Eurostar to take him back to London. There’s nothing terribly interesting in it. Just the usual arsey politics and panicky economics but not a word about the other stuff. As it should be. No-one who doesn’t already know needs to learn anything about the goings on of European security or what has and hasn’t been agreed and signed.
Bond takes a sip of his coffee and turns the page. He really doesn’t like French, he finds it a bit dull as languages go and to him the notion that it’s the one that speaks to love is risible. He folds the paper and leaves it on his coffee table. Reading it is a pointless sham. He’s not passing idle time unwinding at the end of the day or brushing up on his French reading skills.
He’s waiting.
He’s killing time.
He’s on fucking tenterhooks waiting for a bloody woman.
There’s no guarantee that she’ll turn up at all. If the Prime Minister holds M and the Foreign Secretary in talks for too long, well, it’s been a long enough day already and sleep can be a valuable commodity. Bond was at St Pancras Station for the 0540 to Paris and when he boarded the carriage M was already there with Tanner. Now it’s a little before nine in the evening and Bond counts himself lucky he’s already home.
He knows he’s lucky for a whole lot more than that.
He’d be an idiot if he thought he deserved her or that he was entitled to everything that she gives up to him. He’s not that kind of fool. It’s a privilege and he’s smart enough to show it some fear. Christ almighty there’s not much else he could do. She’s stunning, absolutely stunning in her acquiescence. It dries his throat and soars his pulse. It makes him desperate for her and that will never do. He promised her he would be better than the rest. So he sits on his sofa staring at a newspaper he can’t be bothered to read and thinks about all the ways he can be.
It’s an hour more before M uses the key he gave her to open the front door and by the time she makes her way down his hallway Bond knows he has no choice other than to be worthy of the woman standing in front of him.
“How was the PM?”
“Talkative.”
He nods his head to the space beside him on the couch. “Sit down.”
M takes her seat then pulls Bond’s door key from her pocket. “Thank-you for the invitation.” She says and offers it back to him.
“Keep it.” He holds his voice flat and steady and stripped bare of desire but he’s still asking a question not giving an order. Not yet.
M hesitates, holding the key with a sort of delicacy and thinks about slipping it back into her raincoat. God knows she’d like to. It could be so easy to stuff it back in her pocket and give in completely. It could be but it isn’t of course. Except when he makes it so.
Bond gently clasps his right hand around her wrist then picks the metal from her fingers with his left and places the key on the coffee table.
“If you can’t say yes then the answer has to be no.” He says softly. “You know that.”
He’s still holding her wrist. Bond always has wonderfully warm hands. M likes them, she’ll admit that much. She can feel his scarred finger tips against her veins and the calluses on his palms prickle against her skin. She knows they’re not all from the job. She’s learned that he likes working with his hands. Honest work, apparently. His kitchen table, a vintage car he keeps tucked away somewhere, the hardwood flooring through his flat; they’ve all benefited from Bond’s touch.
Bond shifts and leans over, pulling M’s wrist towards his mouth and kisses her just above his grip. He can feel the thrum, the throb of her pulse quicken just enough to please him. “What about the other words? Can you say them?” He bites the soft fleshy ball of her hand, mindful of her thinner skin, but still leaves M marked with his teeth and kisses her wrist again. “Say them.” He flicks his eyes to her face to watch her speak.
“Sir.” She says with a trace of a smile on her lips.
He shakes his head slowly and moves himself completely around. He’s kneeling in front of her, clasping his hands around each of her narrow wrists and pushing them into the sofa. At a full stretch of his body he taps his lips at her mouth and takes his time drawing a kiss from her as he speaks. “Not that one, you teasing bitch, the other two.” He says and echoes the turn of her lips in his own faint smile.
He relaxes his grip on her wrists but M doesn’t want to move her hands from her sides as Bond starts to dance his fingers up her thighs, over the light material of her long, loose skirt.
“Bond.” She says as his fingers find the bump of the fasteners on her stockings. “Commander.” Every word forces her heart to beat a little faster. “James.” She feels so terribly light, as though she could float away if he wasn’t there to hold her down. “Bond.”
She’s rewarded for her words with another kiss but he moves his mouth lower and nips at her through her clothes enough to make her stiffen. “That’s for teasing.” He explains then quickly pinches her nipple with a fast hand that replaces his mouth and tightens his fingers until he can see the first delight of pain turning on M’s face. “And that’s for using more words than you needed to. I only asked for two.”
His hands go again to her thighs, but underneath the skirt this time, and back to the stocking tops. “I like these.”
“Well I’m glad you do.” She says.
“You don’t?” He’s inching her skirt up slowly, rolling it back exposing silk and skin.
M’s already fighting to keep her breath steady. Why does he have to be so bloody good with his hands? “Maybe back in the fifties but not now.”
He sits back on his haunches then leans in, parting M’s thighs just enough to let him kiss a trail across the inside of one. “If you start going on about being too old again,” he says, although his words are mumbled against her skin, “I’m going to change my plans for tonight.” He rests his chin against her and looks up. “Is that what you want?”
“No.”
“Good.” His thumbs are stroking back and forth just underneath the trim of her knickers. “Now I need to know you can say one more word.”
When she leans forward and whispers it to him Bond feels like he might just have had the world laid out before him for the taking.
He straightens up, takes his hands away from her and gets to his feet.
“Come on,” He says, “you’ve never seen my bedroom have you?”