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Honey Trap
by leiascully
He dropped into the seat at the green baize table with a practiced ease, maneuvering around his bad leg and hooking the cane over the table edge. Without even looking, he knew she was hovering behind the person two seats to his left, working her way to him. She was probably wearing that little black number with the ruffles; they hadn't coordinated ahead of time, but she liked it, she knew he liked it, it was appropriate to the dress code of the casino, and the ruffles would disguise any trace of the dagger she had strapped to the inside of her slim thigh. He arranged the piles of chips in front of him with overly conscientious particularity. He'd been out of fieldwork for a long time but it was easy to fall back into being someone else.
Her perfume wafted over him as she brushed past, pretending not to know him. He inhaled deeply and let his eyes linger on her ass appreciatively for a moment, as if he were any other wealthy lech with too much money on his hands and no one waiting in the bedroom. She was wearing the ruffly thing just as he'd predicted, and the way it cupped her ass and emphasized her curves and breasts was really rather stunning. He approved mentally, giving her a couple of points on his personal scoreboard. He liked Cuddy. He'd always liked her, for all they fought like cats and dogs. In fact, that might have been what he liked about her, the way she fought him, but that was for another time. For now, he had to play poker, and he had to play it very badly for a while, and it took a lot of effort not to clean a load of idiots out of their ill-earned cash.
He played, and he watched. Tonight wasn't anything real, just recon. He was to keep an eye on the businessmen at the table, try to get them talking. It was never difficult to get men talking when there was plenty of money and plenty of alcohol around. He invented some pitiful legend of his own about a skyrocketing career and a young wife who stepped around, accepted a cigar and a pat on the back, and listened to their tales of woe.
"So what's with the cane?" one of them said after a while, the one he'd secretly dubbed Oscar for the earnest way the guy had of leaning on his elbows and looking straight at you. At least the wit hadn't gone the way of the leg.
"In the wrong place at the wrong time," House said, curt enough not to invite further questions but jovial enough not to kill the mood. "You know how it goes."
They all nodded. House made notes on the ones who'd winced: ex-Army, he thought for one, and the other had been in the Marines and had a nice scar across his forehead. He sat back from his cards a little and glanced across the table. She was standing there behind the dealer, far enough back to be subtle, sipping a martini and looking at him across the rim of her glass as she flirted with someone. He let his mouth quirk as he looked at her, any other jackass gazing at a pretty woman, and she licked her lips and tipped her head, and for a second it was like the old days when they were out hunting together, wrapped in the joy and the adrenaline of it all.
Then his thigh twinged and he gripped it, coming back to the game. Suddenly he was tired of everything. He beckoned to the waiter and ordered a neat whiskey, ignoring the almost unnoticeable shift in the set of Cuddy's shoulders halfway across the room. He didn't care if she didn't approve. She still had a chance: if she wasn't so active these days, it was more her choice and less that she was permanently benched. He downed the whiskey and won a couple of rounds, playing reckless enough to draw her attention, but nothing that looked like more than luck, and she lifted her chin towards the poor schmuck she was toying with.
When he'd collected a nice little pile of chips, he let the others win a couple of thousand back off him, then he feigned a yawn and motioned to the hovering waiter to scoop his chips up and cash out. "Room 1809," he said. "I'll pick it up tomorrow."
"Very good, sir," said the concierge implacably, and House gave an internal nod to the man's comportment. These guys had to be even better at their job than he had been. Once upon a time, he thought bitterly, and limped to the elevators. When he keyed open the door with the card, she was already there, her shoes discarded beside the door.
"Ah," he said, "room service. I didn't order any hookers for this evening. Come back later."
She shot him a look as she pulled her earrings out and dropped them onto the bathroom counter. "Don't start with me, House."
She'd been with him a long time. She'd known him before the leg, when he was still a real agent, not some desk lackey (because however high up he was, the desk didn't get respect the way the pistol had, and there were days he hated coming to work). These days he was all logistics and she was teaching the new generation. "Mata Hari 101: Honeypots for Beginners," he had joked to make her roll her eyes. These days everything was different; he saw her a couple of times a week, maybe, and she was different and he was different and it was all shit. He sat heavily on the bed, tossed his cane away but within reach, and toed off his shoes. He pulled off the bow tie and the cummerbund, checked the tiny mic hidden in the pleats, and turned it off. In the bathroom, she knotted up her hair and started to wash her face, stroking the washcloth over her cheekbones. The mascara came away from her eyes in long smudges. It was oddly intimate, watching her. He leaned back on his elbows and stared at the nape of her neck.
"You're going to ruin that washcloth," he said.
"It's a hotel," she said, muffled by the fabric. "They have more."
"Getting careless in your old age," he said.
She wrung out the washcloth and slung it over the rack, wiping a last smudge from underneath her eye with one corner of the cloth. "Wasteful, perhaps. Careless, never."
He hooked his cane with his foot and tossed it to himself, twirling it in the air above his face. "Close enough."
"It isn't and you know it," she said.
"What do I know at all anymore?" he said.
"Where did you go?" she said, sitting on the bed beside him. He sat up and dropped the cane on the bed. Her face was pink and clean from the heat of washing, and her hair made ringlets at her temples.
"Nowhere," he said. "I'm right here."
"You know what I mean," she said, turning her big blue eyes on him with that compassionate look that must have knocked a thousand targets off their feet. Poor sons of bitches, he thought, they'd never had a chance. He knew it was an act and still something was thawing inside him as she looked at him, her pink lips twisted up in a little worried frown.
"You know where I went," he said, resisting her, looking down her dress instead of into her eyes. "I went to the hospital. I went to a desk."
"You're somewhere else," she said, "and I want you back."
"Is that why we're here?" he said, still not looking into her eyes. "Not just some crumb that they throw me to keep me from taking the whole place down out of boredom? You got sent along because they're afraid I'll go rogue? You of all people know I haven't got the mobility. I'm not even good for a cobbler. This is a pity errand and you know it."
"I sent myself," she said, and he was startled enough to glance up for a second, and then he was caught in that blue gaze. "I sent both of us. It was the best I could arrange."
"Why?" he murmured, and somehow the summer sky in her eyes was reminding him how close she was, how thin the fabric of her dress was. She shifted closer.
"I want you back, House."
"So I'm your floater?" He made his voice as sharp as he could, but the depth of her eyes did something to him, took the edges off his words.
"I brought you in in the first place," she said. "I did it for a reason. Maybe you can't play the game with the kids anymore, but you're not finished. You're a strategist and you've still got something to give and I want you back."
"You're quite the lady," he said. "And I mean that in the worst sense of the word. Getting you to seduce me into staying? That's low even for Them."
"They didn't send me, House," she said. "And if They had, it sure as hell wouldn't have included this. I've got better things to do and you know it."
"God, you're good," he said, and watched as pain narrowed her eyes.
"Greg," she said, "shut up for one damn second and listen. This isn't Cuddy talking to House. This is me talking to you. Remember Wilson?"
She never called him Greg.
He turned his head away. As if he could have forgotten Wilson, or the paroles they'd always used, the three of them. "Remember Wilson," she said, and he remembered everything, the whole goddamn mess, and the way she'd always been there. He could still feel her close to him: when she breathed in, her breasts almost brushed his arm, and her knee was pressed into his. "So this is my own personal honey trap?" he asked, his voice low. "Not company business?"
She paused. "If that's the way you want to think of it." Her words were heavy with disappointment. She shifted and started to get up and he caught at her wrist and pulled her back down. She resisted him, twisting, and ended up falling across him, knocking them both onto the bed. He rolled on top of her, holding her wrists over her head. She breathed a little faster, but lay easy under him, watching him. He shifted his leg, slid his hand up her thigh to find the dagger, flicked open the catch on the sheath with one thumb, and tossed it across the room.
"Can we talk now?" she asked dryly.
"We can talk now," he said, not moving off her. She smiled, a quick flash of sharp white teeth, and did something, so fast he couldn't even understand it: there was just a flash of pain in his thigh, a not-so-painful jab in the ribs, a sensation of her body lithe and flexing under his, and then he was on his back, looking at the ceiling, and she was straddling his hips and pressing his wrists into the mattress.
"This," she said, "is not anyone's business but yours and mine. This isn't window dressing. This is me, talking to you. I might have been your access agent, but this is your friend."
He was quiet for a long moment, remembering the fire in her eyes the day she'd invited him out for a coffee and told him she had an offer for him. It was always like this between them: the fight all teeth and claws, the bitterness, and then the sudden dtente. The bitterness was new since Wilson had died. There was no one to bandage the wounds that words made without Wilson, no one to soothe the ruffled tempers. They would have to learn to find or make their own solace. "Provocateur," he said. "You always were."
"Not in the way you think," she said with a crooked smile.
"Lost your objectivity?"
"I have my own system of values," she said. Her hair was slipping from its perfunctory knot and her curls tickled his cheeks. "That's why I got all those promotions first." Her skirt rode high on her thighs as she crouched over him, and she was low enough that he could feel the heat building between them.
"So when do we get to the honey part?" he murmured, barely able to focus on her parted lips.
"You do know it's not a bag job if I'm aware of what you're planning on doing?" she murmured back, her mouth brushing over his chin and lips.
"The real question is whether it's a blowback," he mumbled, his fingers stroking her breast through her dress. He reached back for the zipper of her dress and slid it down, his fingers drifting over the knobbed bones of her spine.
"Only time will tell," she said, and bent the last centimeter to kiss him as his hand dipped into her bra to lift her breast out. "But there might be blowing, if you're lucky."
"It's like you're reading my mind," he said.
She sat up a bit and started unbuttoning his shirt with those efficient hands that he'd admired many a time before, watching her put together a gun and thinking of the possibilities of her nimble fingers. He rubbed his fingers in small circles over her smooth thighs, with the mark where the sheath had been strapped. She was silk over steel, this one. He liked that about her. Her fingernails scraped softly over his chest and he arched into her caress, his hips seeking hers. He had given up on women after the leg, mostly, and it was oddly moving to be touched again, touched by her of all people, while she looked at him with those eyes. She was the last person left who knew him, he thought, and that was chilling. If this was a a dirty trick, something to black-flag him, then he was dead.
"I don't need to cross you," she said quietly, watching him, and her voice was the breeze in the leaves on a summer night. "I outrank you. Stop overthinking."
"It's eerie when you do that," he said.
She slide down his body with a grin. "That's why I'm Mata Hari number one."
"I think Mata Hari was Mata Hari number one," he said, "you're just in charge of the 101's."
"God, is there no way to make you shut up?" she asked, her eyebrow crooked up, and she unbuttoned his pants and slid her hand down around his cock.
"Looks like you figured out a way," he said, and then did shut up as her lips closed over his head. Her mouth was hot and wet and her tongue flickered over his head and down his shaft as her hand curled around the base and squeezed gently.
"Oh," he said, his blood rushing rapidly from his brain to his groin, and then "You, oh," and she smiled around the mouthful of his cock, the lifted corners of her lips letting a little cool air in to tickle the skin. With her free hand, she slid his pants and boxer briefs down his thighs, working around the scar, and he kicked at the pants impatiently. The fast play of her tongue was astounding: no wonder she was so good at her job. All of his thoughts had dissolved into sparks. At that moment, he would have told her anything. Her fingers rolled over his shaft and his balls and it had been a long time since anything had felt like this. He was alarmingly close to tears.
And then she stopped and raised her head, licking her lips. "I hope you haven't got horrible diseases," she said matter-of-factly. "Not that I think anyone comes near you, with your reputation for devouring people whole."
"I could say the same for you," he said, his cock so hard it was aching, her saliva gleaming on his head. "But I'm clean."
"Good," she said, and climbed off the bed with so much grace and composure that it was absurd. It was almost surreal to be sleeping with someone whose job was to coax information out of people using her body and her wiles, but then she looked up at him with that same crooked smile and he remembered it was her, it was Cuddy, and he knew her the way she knew him, even if it had been years since they'd worked together. You didn't forget the people who had watched your back through executive actions and E&Es, couldn't unlearn the things you learned in that kind of a situation. It was Cuddy, whom he'd even called Lisa a few times, but not since Wilson died. She was his ears only. He smiled back as best as he could remember how. She fished in her purse and came up with a condom and then sauntered back to the bed, her ruffles askew and the one nipple rosy against the black dress and the cream of her breast where he'd rearranged her underthings. "Now for the good part."
"Nothing like a little reciprocity," he said suggestively as she straddled him again, and he pushed his hands up under her skirt. "Mouth-to-mouth, so to speak. You minx. No knickers?"
"They ruin the line of the dress," she said calmly. "As for reciprocity, you'll get your chance later. Right now I just want you in me."
His cock twitched as she grinned her fierce grin and ripped open the condom packet with deft fingers. She rolled the latex down over him and he slipped two fingers into her, fishing gently. She was damp and got wetter as he stroked her, her hips shifting involuntarily. He touched her clit and she whimpered a little.
"You put on a good show," he said.
"Tradecraft," she said. "Mine comes in handy after hours even if yours doesn't. But there'd be no point in faking it with you. I want you to work for it. Now shut up and fuck me."
He slid his fingers into her and pushed his hips up, and she had her hand there to guide him in. Her skirt fell over both of their hips and she bit her lip as she sank down over him, her eyes clouding with pleasure. "Ah," she said, a long satisfied sound. "That's better."
"I want to see you," he said urgently, and she crossed her arms over her front to grasp the hem of her dress and lifted it over her head with one smooth motion. Her hips moved in pleasant counterpoint: he was buried to the hilt in her, not in control, but not worried about it either. He trusted her. She rolled against him and it was good, so damn good, and she was slick and hot and it really had been too long. Her breast was still half out of the black lacy cup of her bra and she reached back and deftly unhooked the thing and flung it onto the heap that was dress and tux.
"Good?" she asked.
"Couldn't be better."
"Yeah? How about now?" she asked, doing something with her inner muscles and a movement of her hips that was just astounding. His entire consciousness seemed to be in his cock and balls, thrumming for release.
"I was wrong," he managed to say, but only barely: the letters floated in front of his eyes as he said the words, rearranging themselves into nonsense.
"That's what I thought," she said in a satisfied tone.
"Fuck," he said.
"I told you," she said, and to shut her up with all that smugness, he slipped his hand between them and drew calculated circles around her clit. She smiled a lazy, pleased smile and leaned down, her breast touching his lips, and he took his nipple into her mouth, his fingers still moving, and she rocked over him. All his understanding of the universe, every fact he'd ever learned, had migrated to his balls, and he understood global warming, because it was hotter in the room than it had ever been anywhere. And she was whimpering, moaning, and the vibrations of the sound went straight from his eardrums to his cock, sizzling along the pathways of his nerves.
"Come on," she urged in that low rippling voice, "it's all right," and she was the sun setting on a summer evening over fields of barley, she was the innocence of an old world, and all the knowledge of the world was there in his tightening balls, rushing out of his body into the latex of the condom. He groaned around her nipple and sucked at it blindly, his fingers working furiously over her clit as she ground down on the momentary firmness of his failing erection. His other hand squeezed her ass, holding her hard to him, and after a second she tipped her head back, gasping, and he felt the ripple around his softening cock as her nipple pulled out of his mouth with a pop. She flung her leg over him and fell onto the bed on her back before curling over to lay on her side, her back to him and her ribs heaving. He fumbled the condom off and reached for the tissues on the nightstand, bundling up the discarded latex and wiping himself down. She panted for a moment and then swung her legs off the bed and went into the bathroom. He could see her calves trembling as she walked, and when she came back, she still had the flush over her chest. This time when she slid into the bed, she didn't turn away. He looked away, reached over, and pulled her against him.
"Didn't have you pegged for a cuddler," she murmured.
"Learn something new every day," he said. "Be sure to note it in my file. Biographical leverage."
"I'm beginning to think you like suspicion just for suspicion's sake," she said. "Ass." But she put her head on his chest, and let her legs tangle with his good leg.
"I always liked your assets," he said drowsily, cupping her breast in one hand.
"You're one of them," she murmured into his shoulder. "Now shut the hell up. I'm asleep."
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Legal Disclaimer: The authors published here make no claims on the ownership of Dr. Gregory House and the other fictional residents of Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital. Like the television show House (and quite possibly Dr. Wilson's pocket protector), they are the property of NBC/Universal, David Shore and undoubtedly other individuals of whom I am only peripherally aware. The fan fiction authors published here receive no monetary benefit from their work and intend no copyright infringement nor slight to the actual owners. We love the characters and we love the show, otherwise we wouldn't be here.
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