"Just a little of that goes a long way," he said before she even got the lid off.

Buffy looked at the bottle and then handed it to him. Dawn had created enough chaos in their old Sunnydale bathroom with bubbles and they never even had a hot tub. She didn't even want to think about the possibilities here, with all that air pumping through the water.

Giles poured a measured amount of the lavender liquid into the water and within seconds foam began to accumulate around them. He also reached across for the other two bottles and added salts or drops from each of them.

Buffy sighed happily, ignoring the stinging of her wounds and various and sundry other nicks and abrasions from the fighting. "God, it feels good."

"Indeed," he said softly, watching her and smiling a little.

Her chameleon eyes, now almost blue, flicked up to his, holding them for a long moment, then she was shifting so that she could curl her arms around his neck and kiss his mouth ferociously.

"Indeed, yourself," she teased when they parted. "Or better yet, 'indeed' me."

He stopped grinning for a second and stared at her, then gave a shout of laughter. "You really are an incorrigible hussy, Buffy Summers."

"Who me?" The mischievous grin faded. "Well, yeah, but we have a different name for it, here. Short word, right to the point," she added lightly enough, but Giles sensed the underlying recrimination.

"A word that could just as easily be used to describe me, using the criteria you obviously applied." Buffy looked terminally confused. "Those orgies you mentioned earlier...I rather enjoyed them all," he told her in deliberate aside, and finally drew a disbelieving grin from her.

"Giles the 'bad boy', huh?"

"I have been known," he conceded, still smiling.

"Okay, I'm confused. Are there two of you?"

The smiled faded. "In a manner of speaking," he conceded. "Although it might be more accurate to say that you've never really known the real me...only who you perceived me to be."

She frowned again. "Are we talking icebergs here...as in 'tip of'?"

It took a beat to follow her logic, but he smiled again and nodded. "You might say that. My past is part of who I am, for better and worse. It just happens that I chose to keep as much of the 'worse' from all of you as possible."

"Ex...cept for Eyghon, the drinking, Ethan..."

Giles coloured in a way that made Buffy regret the dig immediately, but she didn't quite know what to do about it. She changed the subject instead. "So how does it work...the contradiction?"

He looked up again, a divot in his brow. "Contradiction?"

"Sweet, stuttery, tweedy Giles and bad-ass magic Giles...not really seeing how they get to be the same guy, here."

"Circumstances change...and so do people. You must understand that being thrust into an American high school and all that entailed was as foreign to me as going to Oxford would be for you. I was the proverbial fish out of water, trying to fit in, flapping around in ungainly fashion and making an ass out of myself with monotonous regularity."

That, Buffy could identify with immediately. "That just leaves the dating thing. You were so-"

He rolled his eyes. "I know," he interrupted, then seem to consider something for a long moment before continuing. "It may surprise you to know that I'd never truly been in love before I met Jenny. I had no idea how to court someone with whom I was already thinking in terms of, well...a future. I'm well aware of how much of a prat I made of myself in the interim."

Buffy had a sudden urge to put her arms around him. It had never occurred to her before that someone like Giles...good looking, good body and good man, wouldn't have been in love, and loved, at least at some point in his life. Despite the horribleness of her own love life to date, it seemed awfully lonely to her to go through that much lifetime without ever...

Finally, she opted to walk softly. "You're right. Big surprise. I kinda always figured you for broken hearts from here to Coventry, being as cute as you are," she teased gently.

He half smiled, ducking his head self-consciously and reminding her so much of the old, tweedy Giles that it shot a pang of something very like regret through her, that their lives had changed so very much.

"Broken hearts there may be," he conceded, "but more so because I'd never cared enough to pursue any of them, rather than there being remnants of any great love affairs. My life, for as long as I can remember, has persistently precluded the possibility of long-term attachment, love...companionship..."

"But these last seven years...you've had me...I mean us...all of us," she replied, grasping at straws. She went on, shakily. "Good or bad, I always kinda thought we were family...dysfunctional, granted, but still...together."

Giles lifted an arm and Buffy slid around to snuggle into it, amused when she breathed bubbles up her nose and shifted closer to his chin to escape them. He dropped a kiss on her hair. "I don't really need to answer that, do I?"

After a pregnant silence, she sighed heavily. "No, you really don't."

Neither of them spoke for a long time. Eventually Giles frowned and shifted so that he could turn her face to his. Her eyes were red but he hadn't felt her weeping.

"Buffy?"

She shrugged, but her tone was unsteady and her eyes grew moist again. "Not easy taking a long hard look at your bad self with a magnifying glass the size of a small building."

He didn't say anything, just smiled and drew her back down into the hollow of his arm, where she curled up gratefully.

For a long time they soaked in silence, both of them blissfully absorbing the heat, and the soothing way the bubbling water massaged their knotted and bruised muscles.

As time passed, Buffy began to be more and more aware of the body she was curled up against, the chest her cheek was resting on...the man without whom, she realized, she could no longer contemplate existing.

When she finally moved, it was to turn and look at him. His eyes were closed. On impulse she brushed his lips with hers and then watched his lids open lazily.

"Feeling better?"

"Mmm. And feeling a little miffed that you're going to sleep when you've got a beautiful...naked...woman in the tub with you," she added dryly, though there was an undertone of puzzlement as well.

The lids lowered again, but he smiled. "Not sleeping, meditating. Not working, really," he said, shifting meaningfully and looking down at the bubbles.

On impulse Buffy slid a hand under the water...and turned beet red. "Oh."

"Exactly," he agreed, amused.

She continued the contact and the moment of awkwardness passed. A moment or two more of watching the pleasure on Giles' face, then she grinned mischievously and lifted herself so that she could slide a slender leg across both of his and straddle his lap, a manoeuvre which prompted the green eyes to fly open quite dramatically.

"Hey," she grinned. "You're not the only one who hasn't been laid in a very long time...and you're not the only one who gets to be ho..."

He pulled himself up and kissed her hard, then ran his hands down the length of her back and cupped the tender cheeks.

Her arms slid around his neck and she sought out the strong lips, inviting them to plunder hers again, which they obligingly did, long and languorously, while their hands explored, discovered and delighted.

Giles was caressing the small, full breasts when Buffy's groans became a growl and he felt her shift again. A moment later, he found himself sheathed inside the vice-like warmth of the woman he loved. He broke the kiss, gasping loudly enough to echo around the bathroom.

"God, Buffy," he finally rasped, unprepared for the staggering new onslaught of desire and arousal that followed.

She, too, was barely able to groan his name as she began to move, so aroused that their lovemaking quickly grew wild, demanding and noisy, water splashing over the sides of the tub and their cries echoing in the small bathroom, until Buffy's movements suddenly became frantic and her cries both strangled and ecstatic.

Both the sounds of absolute pleasure and the sensations of the wild throes of her release were more than enough to catch Giles and drive him, hurtling, over the edge after her.

By the time both of them collapsed back into the warm water, the bathroom was awash, though neither had noticed.

When Buffy snuggled close against him and rested her head on his shoulder, Giles closed a possessive arm around her and smiled at the sound of her very contented sigh.

"We're both going to pay for this tomorrow," he rumbled softly near her ear.

Buffy smiled into his shoulder. "Well, one of us anyway," she reminded him playfully and giggled at his harrumph when he remembered that she'd likely be completely healed by morning, whilst he was probably going to creak out of bed and hobble around like a ninety-five year old arthritic for the greater part of the day.

Everything ached...and muscles he had no idea he even had, much less ever used, were already complaining. His inner thighs hadn't been so sore since he first learned to ride.

"Don't worry," she said sleepily. "If you are stiff and sore tomorrow, Tara taught me a few massage tricks."

He harrumphed again then fell silent, imagining the many different ways an extremely dexterous Buffy [in his imagination at least] might go about the hypothetical massage.

Buffy hadn't heard him. She was already dozing.

For the longest time he simply watched her sleep, then, without realizing, drifted off again, himself, awash in a sea of contentment the like of which he'd never known before. The next time he knew consciousness, however, she was gone. He sat up as though a shot had been fired, then let out a curse as all the muscles in his back screamed blue murder.

"Is that you, Giles?"

"No, it's Margaret bloody Thatcher," he growled to himself, though his insides were traitorously jubilant at the confirmation that his world was still, indeed, a wonderful place.

A few moments later a blonde head appeared around the doorway, and with it a tray. Giles couldn't remember the last time he'd eaten breakfast in bed, much less been served it by someone he loved.

"Hey, gorgeous."

"Hello, love."

The use of the endearment brought a pleased flush to her cheeks. She'd never heard him utter one before, but this one had been said so naturally and in that impossibly sexy voice of his that it sent shivers of pleasure down her spine.

"So how are the war wounds?" She asked as she slid in alongside of him and set the tray on his lap.

He frowned and flexed a little, including bending his legs and wriggling his toes beneath the covers. "Back has registered a protest. The rest present and accounted for, but better than expected," he replied, genuinely surprised, and surveyed the bounty before him.

They ate heartily together, giggling their way through recollections of some of Buffy's worst culinary moments, and the unlikely success of her first Thanksgiving, despite the interruptions, both indigenous and un-dead, as they tackled cereal, toast, coffee, tea and fruit.

After breakfast resolutions to get up and go out together gave way to another session of love making, longer, slower and sweeter even than the night before.

"Are you happy?"

Buffy pulled herself up on one elbow to look at her lover, still lying where they'd sprawled out on the bed, much later, exhausted but sated once again.

A look at his expression made her shift her tone from playful to serious. "More than I can ever remember," she told him and reached out to smooth some of the soft, greying hair behind one of his ears. "More than I ever thought I'd be allowed to be."

He grinned then...an unselfconscious, truly happy grin. Buffy thought she'd never seen anything more beautiful as his long arm curled around her and drew her down for a long, slow kiss.

When she lifted her head again it was with a silly grin on her face. "Merry Christmas, Rupert Giles."

He grinned back, puzzled.

She trailed fingertips from the familiar lines at the corner of his eye down to the sensuous mouth and traced his lips before smiling even more widely, almost glowing with happiness and contentment.

"I think we both got our Christmas presents early this year."

The End