Work Text:
The tones of Cole Porter bubbled over the wireless radio in the parlour. Phryne Fisher stared across the room at her conversational partner, and grinned through the tension between them.
"Could I interest you in … coffee?”
Jack Robinson was no stranger to the incessant teasing of Miss Fisher, but that look in her eyes was certainly different. There was a flush to her skin under the lace of her dress’s neckline. There was a certain sway to her unique feather boa that had him concerned. He raised his brow: “I … wouldn’t want to be up all night.”
Phryne’s voice dripped of insinuation as she sauntered over to his leaned posture by the mantle: “Perhaps … a cup of tea, then?”
“Oh, no … I … I should really be going,” Jack explained softly, straightening while he cleared his throat and blinked tired eyes. Cautious eyes.
“Oh, nonsense, Jack … at the very least you can stay to fix my busted tire.”
He had to chuckle to imagine she was intending for him to read into some sordid metaphor. But when he lifted his eyes, he noted she had been genuine.
“What …? Why are you looking at me like that?”
Then Jack laughed: “Because, Miss Fisher … With you, nothing is quite what it seems. Though I’m not sure why a busted tire should surprise me. After all, your driving has nearly caused a grown man to faint in his seat.”
“Who, Hugh Collins?” Phryne grinned over the rim of her glass, dying to take a sip but unwilling to do so and possibly miss the opportunity for an instant response.
Jack tried desperately not to let on that he found it all quite humorous – Hugh’s fear of Phryne’s maniacal driving tendencies. That anyone might be afraid of her … well, he thought he understood that. He had even been afraid of her at one time, but for entirely different reasons.
“Yes, that poor man …” Phryne teased, licking her lips slowly and deliciously. Reminding Jack of the time he had watched her indulge in the sweet taste of a lollipop in a seemingly harmless fashion. It was a scene which had revisited him many nights – a scene which he fought very hard to forget just then, standing in front of her.
“Miss Fisher …”
“Don’t leave just yet, Jack … please?” Phryne said in an octave dangerously lower than that of the quiet music filling the silence by the window ledge. Earlier, it had been used to tune in to one of Dot’s favorite shows, but since she had left the two detectives alone, it had become a tease between them. Phryne had lounged across the cushions in the bay window, tempting Jack to lean across her and switch off the radio program. Jack had resisted out of necessity, and grumbled all the way to his post at her mantle, thus distracting Phryne from turning the thing off herself.
It had been a quiet, dangerous night of stolen glances.
“I … can change that tire for you, but then … I’d better be on my way,” Jack explained as simply as he could, trying with great determination not to look down at Phryne’s perfect, cherry lips. They always seemed to turn redder in his presence. More vibrant.
“Good,” Phryne purred, taking Jack’s drink from his hand to set it down and turn to the parlour doors. She was out in the hallway, gesturing back to him when he saw fit to lift his eyes from her backside to her curiously-stunning eyes. “Follow me.”
He followed after the tantalizing roll of her hips.
Just when Jack was about to argue he wouldn’t need help finding her car, Phryne pivoted to start her way up the stairs. He stopped at the banister and furrowed his brows for the tenth time that evening. Oh, how she could confuse him.
“Where are you going, Miss Fisher …?” Certainly he wouldn’t be asked to follow her up the stairs?
“This way,” Phryne smirked – all but laughed – as she turned back to his hopeful yet cautious glance. “Oh, Jack. Are you afraid of me, too? That I might somehow disable you if I collect you in my room?”
He had no question about that. However, he was not about to admit it.
“I … You … You told me you needed your tire changed …?”
“We’ll get to the tire, but first I have something else for you to fix. Upstairs.”
Jack’s brows relaxed as he recognized that very specific glow to Phryne’s cheeks. She was glowing. She was winning him over, and she knew it.
“Miss Fisher …”
“Relax, Inspector … I’d like you to change a lightbulb. Just an innocent little light.”
“And you need me because …?” he challenged, knowing very well that Miss Fisher made a point of doing things on her own at every opportunity. When she laughed, he smiled.
“Oh, Jack. Quit making so much sense and help.”
Jack watched with a thumping beat in his chest as Phryne climbed the stairs in those white, flowing pants. The pants that had so often taunted him. The curves they hid.
“I’ll be waiting upstairs,” Phryne called down to him, hearing very well that he was not fast approaching. He was staring at her. She felt a rush of excitement at that, but said nothing to embarrass him. Instead, she kept on her way up the stairs, and down the hall.
Once Jack had finally managed the courage to follow her up the stairs, he stepped with one large pace into the hall, and turned his head to catch sight of Phryne sitting on the edge of her bed with legs crossed and feather boa discarded. She was softly lit from behind – every bat of her lashes magnified by the light color of her porcelain skin. She was leaning just slightly back, as if she expected him to march right in and climb on top of her. She was sitting in a way that revealed the left strap of a lace brassiere, and she clearly knew the effect her posture had on him.
Jack gulped.
“It’s in here, Inspector …” she hummed, openly admiring the stripes of his alluringly perfect tie from afar. “Come on … it’s right up there, and I’m afraid I can’t reach.”
“And you let a little thing like that stop you?” Jack quipped back, smirking at his own sassy remark. “I’m surprised.”
“Well, when I have a highly esteemed inspector at my disposal …”
Jack took another large step to stand in her doorway, scoffing at her equally feisty comment: “At your disposal?”
Phryne fought with great vigour to keep from walking right up to Jack then, and kissing him, but she somehow kept in control of the urge with a deep inhale.
Jack put his hands on his hips when he realized Phryne was having difficulty playing off the tension between them, taking in the light fixture above her bed. “And you don’t just have Mr. Butler do this because …?”
“He sees to my laundering, supplying me clean sheets – he won’t very well want to stand on them.”
“And I do …?”
Jack sized up the situation with a sharp inhale, gauging the distance from the bed to the lights. Gauging the risk in approaching her bed. And then an idea enticed him: “Show me. That you can’t reach.”
“You don’t trust me, Jack?” Phryne moaned shamelessly, doing as he asked because it had always aroused her to know he was staring at her. And he would be staring, if she had anything to say about it.
With more wriggle than necessary, Phryne stood on her bed and reached over for the top of the light fixture to show that she was – in fact – too short. Just by an inch or so. It must have been frustrating, Jack considered, much like the tension between them that often frustrated her. Poor, beautiful woman. So frustrated with no chance of release. Jack smirked. Now that was an appetizing thought, that he could offer her some satisfaction after all.
“Alright … enough.” Already he was shimmying out of his coat. “Hold this.”
It took Jack just a minute to take off his shoes and climb onto her bed with impressive balance over the mattress to reach the knob of the difficult light fixture. And it took just as long for Phryne to kneel there where he stood, staring up at him with trouble lit in her eyes.
“Don’t you dare,” Jack mumbled, his fingers slipping from the little knob when he felt Phryne’s weight shift closer to his legs. “Get me a tissue … I need something to pry this thing off with.”
It was almost too late when Jack noticed there were footsteps coming up the stairs – too late to close the door or even leap off of the bed. Too late to spend some more time teasing the most incorrigible woman he had ever known in the privacy of her aesthetically-appeasing bedroom. Wait – more time teasing her? What had come over him?
He slipped when a mischievous hand braced itself on his ankle, landing himself down on her bed with Phryne laughing and splayed over him in a tangle of limbs.
“Miss-“ Dot started, not having expected Phryne to have company. And yet before given the chance to shield her eyes, Dot recognized the bed partner – as surprising as it was to consider the insinuations. “Inspector R-Robinson …? I … I …”
Jack resisted the infuriating temptation to slide his hands down Phryne’s back or to pull her flush against him, and eased her laughing form off of him to clear his throat. Yet still she clung somehow to him – naturally and tenderly.
“I was … just going to change the burnt-out light,” Jack explained at last, fighting the stutter on his tongue at the way Phryne rested her hand softly over his chest. Beaming at him with joy and playfulness, curled up at his side. He had to remind himself to breathe and to keep his cheeks from flushing in the presence of the naïve Miss Williams. Hopefully she could believe him, but as Dorothy looked up to the light fixture, Jack realized with a humorous close of his eyes the flaw in his explanation.
“… What burnt-out light?”
He had been so distracted by Phryne that he hadn’t even realized there was nothing to fix. How had he been so blind?! It was then he realized the reason Phryne continued to giggle there at his side – he had fallen for perhaps the most ridiculous of reasons to find himself in her bed. And yet he couldn’t laugh with Miss Williams standing confused in the doorway, waiting for his response.
“He might have a leg cramp – poor man! I’m afraid this is all my fault,” Phryne admitted, taking pity at last on the lovely shoeless man lying in her bed. “I was causing trouble – I believe I owe the inspector a nice, warm dinner. Do you think Mr. Butler would mind my helping him tonight? To repay Jack’s helpfulness.”
“No … no, I don’t think he’d mind at all,” Dot responded with obvious astonishment. “You’re … cooking tonight, Miss Fisher?”
“Only if Jack will stay,” Phryne smiled, still with her knees bent up by Jack’s torso – playfully strewn across the width of the bed with him.
Jack promptly noted how they must have looked, still tangled together on the bed, and unfurled himself to sit, sliding to the bed’s edge. “Well … I suppose I could …”
“Oh, perfect!” Dot exclaimed, excusing herself to tell Mr. Butler while Jack felt Phryne’s hand on his wrist – keeping him perched there, on the edge of her mattress. With just the two of them left in the room, staring at each other, the air grew thick again with irrevocable sexual tension.
“So, Jack … do you want me to … cook for you?”
“Like you wanted me to change your light?” he asked – his lips lifting into a lop-sided smile.
“Yes … a little like that … but less mischief, perhaps.”
“LESS?” Jack emphasized teasingly, enjoying in the soft touch at his wrist. “I might stay if you promised me NO mischief.”
“Now now …” Phryne started in the low, sensuous voice that so often affected Jack’s brighter smiles. “Where would be the fun in that?”