"It's nothing."

Ned had accepted that light airy dismissal the third time, the fourth; the first time it had turned into an argument but he had backed down before it escalated into slammed doors and punched walls. The second time he had just stared at her, his jaw tight, head throbbing with the bizarre truth of it.

Nancy actually thought it was nothing, that her office mate (this one, specific, male, single, office mate) was allowed to take her out to lunch, to have in-jokes with her, to casually invite her to the bar after work while they were both shrugging into coats, checking their badges, snapping off lights for the night.

"You wouldn't be angry if he was a girl," she had shot back, during the argument, the one time he had screwed up. "You're just jealous."

And he was jealous, stupidly blindly jealous, that another man could link his finger and thumb around her wrist and cage her in bone, that another man's heart could rise when she tossed her head back and laughed with those wide blue eyes shining. She wouldn't hear it and there were no words for it, no way to convince her that, for any straight man, this level of attention would quickly demand repayment.

She was his and the thought of someone else...

He met her outside that night, her jacket open and her red-gold hair loose in the wind, with the cab waiting. For a second she paused, glancing from the open door to him, to the strange expression in his eyes, and then she was sliding in, her skirt hiking up an inch on her smooth leg, eyebrows asking the question more eloquently than words could. Her fingers were red from the weight of her briefcase, flesh gone tender. Her wedding ring.

He swung her over him in the seat, the cabbie's eyes flashing a warning, Nancy's own blue and curious. His fingers slid up under the hem of her skirt until his fingertips were under the waistband of her panties and her knees were sliding apart.

And there was nothing he could do about it.

"Mine," he told her, pulling her savagely against him, as the cab rocketed over a pothole and sent them both flying. He groaned when she deliberately ground against him, slow, their gazes still locked.

"Yeah," she sighed a little, and then she was staring at his mouth like they were teenagers again.

They didn't even make it to the hotel.