Ficlet: Dangerous Attraction
Title: Dangerous Attraction
Author: badly_knitted
Characters: Gerald Carter, Harriet Derbyshire
Rating: G
Spoilers: To The Last Man, characters only.
Summary: Gerald considers the impact his feelings towards Harriet might have on both their careers.
Word Count: 250
Written For: My own prompt ‘Torchwood, Gerald, He can't deny his attraction to Harriet, but he's married to the job,’ at
fic_promptly.
Disclaimer: I don’t own Torchwood, or the characters. They belong to the BBC.
Miss Derbyshire is smiling at him the way she does when there’s no one else to see. Gerald is well aware that she finds him attractive. She’s only been working for him a few weeks, but efficient as she is, he already knows that she could disrupt the smooth running of the Hub.
Harriet is a very alluring woman, and Gerald is certainly not immune to her considerable charms. He’d be lying if he said that he doesn’t have feelings for her, however much he tries to repress his attraction.
However, he’s in charge of Torchwood’s Cardiff branch and Miss Derbyshire is his subordinate. The Institute is quite progressive in many ways, but the director and other senior members of the board don’t hold with fraternisation between agents, let alone between a head of branch and a junior agent. If anything indiscreet were to happen between them, they could both find themselves in serious trouble, facing disciplinary action, even termination of their employment, along with mandatory removal of their memories.
Could any woman be worth taking such a risk for? It bothers him that he would even be entertaining such thoughts, and it crosses his mind to be grateful that Torchwood’s experiments into telepathy have so far proved fruitless. He’s head of Torchwood Three, a loyal agent of the crown, married to his career, yet he can’t help but wonder if there might be more to life than work, and if Harriet herself might be the answer to that question.
The End