My first Rizzoli & Isles fanfic, so any and all reviews / comments welcome! There's no episode tags in this but - since Angela is not yet living in the guesthouse - it's set season 1 sometime and will be a multi-chapter fic. Hope you enjoy!

'Ooh, God, that's driving me mad'.

Angela stopped in the hallway, her brow wrinkling as she heard her daughter's voice coming from behind the kitchen door. The craziness that was the weekly Rizzoli family Sunday lunch had not yet begun in earnest, and she had just been taking the chance to freshen herself up a little before she started cooking. Her husband and Frankie were in the garden, and she had thought Jane would be out there with them, but...well, it looked as if Jane was in the kitchen. She shrugged to herself, and was about to push open the door and bribe her into helping to prepare the food, when another voice stopped her.

'Would you like me to...?'

Maura.

Angela paused, and smiled. Maura Isles had become a regular fixture at these little family gatherings - in fact, she was becoming like a member of the family. And none of the Rizzolis would have had it any other way. She and Jane were good for each other. They were good together. And, although she was fairly sure that theirs was a close friendship and nothing more, Angela far preferred Maura to some of the guys that Jane had brought home in the past.

Now, the two of them had obviously left the menfolk to whatever they were doing and retreated inside for a while...so much the better. When it came to chopping vegetables, Angela reasoned that six hands were most definitely better than two.

'Yeah...ooh, right there. No, up a bit...God, Maura, would you just stop teasing?'

Angela's eyes widened, her hand resting on the door handle and her imagination going into overdrive. What were they doing in there?

Maybe she didn't want to know.

'Me? Teasing?'

A soft grunt, then Maura's voice again, slow and sexy and slightly amused.

'There'.

Was that a rustle of clothes?

'Ahh. Yeah, there. Right there'.

A low, satisfied sigh reached her ears, and Angela almost let out a squeak of nervous laughter. The last time she had heard a sound like that was...well. Best not to dwell on that. But it was definitely coming from Jane, and it made her wonder whether maybe, just maybe, she had been wrong about the 'close friends' thing.

Ah, hell. She needed to go in there because she needed to make the lunch. After all, that's what kitchens were designed for. Cooking. Not whatever they were doing. That, they could take upstairs. Telling herself that she really was a liberal minded mother who wouldn't care at all, she took a deep breath and pushed open the door.

'Oh my God'.

'Christ, Ma, don't do that!'

Angela pulled up short as soon as she walked through the door, the exclamation out of her mouth before she could stop it. By the way Jane was theatrically clutching a hand to her chest - and by the language she had used, which normally she would have been berated for - she guessed that she had made her daughter jump out of her skin, but right at that moment, she couldn't find much sympathy for her.

Jane and Maura were standing by the kitchen counter - standing so close that Maura's front was almost brushing against Jane's back. But Angela noticed that Maura, who normally was the first one to get flustered in an awkward situation, looked completely unfazed as she greeted her, even though she was pulling her hand back from Jane's top.

'Hi, Angela'.

Or, to be more precise, from under Jane's top.

'Uh, Ma? You ok?'

Jane was looking at her, smiling now that she had recovered from her shock, a quizzical look on her face...hell, no I'm not ok. I've just walked in on my daughter and her best friend starting to...don't go there. And how in God's name did they not even look embarrassed?

'Yeah, fine...no, not fine'.

Jane raised her eyebrows, and Maura looked concerned.

'Did I just...uh...interrupt...?'

For a brief moment, they both looked totally confused, but it was Jane who cottoned on first and a look of pure horror spread across her face.

'What? No! No, no, no. How could you even think that...?'

Uh-oh.

Had she just gone right in there with both feet?

'I mean...come on! It's Maura!'

Even as a growing sense of hot embarrassment began to steal over Angela, her daughter's furious denials made her feel like she should at least try and defend herself.

'Well, can you blame me?' She gestured indignantly to Maura's hand, the one that had recently emerged from under Jane's t-shirt. 'Anyway, there's no need to be so defensive, Maura's a beautiful girl. And your track record with men isn't so good, Janie, you know, I thought that maybe you'd decided to expand your horizons a little'.

Jane's mouth almost dropped open.

'I...what?'

'Besides'. Angela was beginning to get into her stride. 'If I was Maura, I think I would be pretty offended if my best friend had just reacted in that way to the idea of...well, you know. Even if she's not your type, it's very rude to say so'.

Jane threw up her hands in a gesture of defeat, and looked helplessly over at Maura, her pleading expression saying it all. Help me out here. But the honey blonde's worried look had cleared to leave a smile that looked like it might turn into laughter at any moment, and Angela felt a small sigh of relief escape her. Maura was often so serious, but this time it looked as though she was seeing the funny side.

'Oh, no, I'm not offended'.

'Great, that's alright then'.

Both Maura and Angela ignored Jane's sarcastic comment.

'But Jane just had a pruritus around the dorsal surface of the scapula, and I was helping her relieve the discomfort. It wasn't anything else'.

Angela blinked, and Jane now turned to Maura with a look that said she thought her friend had gone crazy.

'No, I had an itch that I couldn't get to, and you scratched it for me'.

Maura nodded, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

'Umm-hmm, that's what I said'.

'No, you said something about a putus and a scalpel. I don't want a scalpel anywhere near my back'.

'Scapula, Jane, not a scalpel, and it's your shoulder blade. Technically the area in between your shoulder blades'.

'Yeah, and do you know how annoying it is when you have a tiny critter bite there that you can't reach?' Jane wriggled her shoulders, as if the thought of it was making her itch all over again.

'Tabanidae, Jane. Horse flies. Blood sucking creatures that aren't really tiny at all. That's what bit you'.

The wriggling abruptly stopped as Jane's eyes widened.

'Great, so now you're telling me that a big thing's bitten my back and sucked the blood out? And please, Maura, sometimes it is ok to use plain English'.

Maura opened her mouth to retaliate, but Angela interrupted, holding up her hands and heading towards the fridge.

'Enough already! Either take this outside or give me a hand in here. Janie?'

Tempting as it was to let them argue on in her kitchen, she really needed to get going now, and she didn't want to draw attention back to the humiliating mistake she had just made. Trying to make herself feel slightly better as she grabbed bell peppers and onions, she told herself that anyone else would surely have come to the same conclusion. They were just lucky that it had been her that had walked in and not Frankie.

Jane rolled her eyes.

'Outside', she muttered. 'Away from this madness'.

Angela called after her rapidly retreating back.

'Then tell your father that he can get up off his backside and do something useful out there - he's been promising me to fix that old wooden deckchair'.

'So'.

Angela turned to see Maura smiling at her and drying her hands on a tea towel.

'Maura, I'm...'

'Don't worry about it'. Maura looked like she was trying not to laugh again, and Angela supposed that it was better than the alternative. She smiled back gratefully as Maura picked up a small knife and looked at her expectantly.

'What needs doing first?'

The following day, Jane couldn't concentrate. She was supposed to be finalising her report from the case they had just closed, and filling in the myriad of forms that all essentially said the same thing in slightly different ways - that they had arrested the guy and charged him with first-degree murder. She was supposed to be going over a different case that was due in court the following week, and looking online for a birthday present for Frankie, and double checking her credit card statement because she had no idea how, exactly, she had managed to spend five hundred dollars on it since last month, even with the car repair and the vet's bill for Jo Friday. In short, she had a hundred and one things that she was supposed to be doing.

Thinking about Maura was not one of them.

She sighed, and threw down her pen. Maura. Her mother. Her mother. Maura. The mistake her mother had made the previous day about her and Maura. Why her mother would have made such a mistake about her and Maura. And having gone over and over and over it, Jane had come to the conclusion that there could only be two possible explanations. One, her mother had finally gone mad. Or two, she had seen something between Jane and Maura that went beyond friendship.

When it came to asking which one of those explanations was more likely...well, that was a question that she found she couldn't answer. It was always possible - no, make that probable - that it was the first, and that her mother had lost the plot. But, the more she thought about it, the more she found herself guiltily, shamefully, hoping that it was the second.

Dammit.

It was as if her mother's comments had acted as some sort of trigger, and sparked some kind of reaction in her that she couldn't stop. Logically, her mother was right. Maura was beautiful. And Jane's track record with men wasn't just 'not so good'. It was crap. Hell, she had even told Maura once - admittedly when they were both drunk - that if she had been attracted to women, she would definitely be attracted to Maura. And Maura, unused to the effects of vodka cranberry, had returned the compliment. But it was only now that Jane was beginning to think seriously about it.

Maybe her mother had been wrong about one thing. If she had a 'type', then, despite the Google mouth, Maura would pretty much be it.

She didn't understand why she couldn't just laugh it off like Maura had done. It was doubtful that the other woman had been tossing and turning all night, worrying one minute about Angela's sanity and the next about whether she found her friend attractive or not, all of it accompanied by a slight throbbing sensation in between her legs as she wondered, in between the worrying, what it might have been like to have Maura's hands on her breasts instead of on her back, and...

Oh, crap.

Jane didn't realise that she had groaned out loud as she rested her elbows on her desk and put her forehead in her hands, and Korsak's concerned question took her momentarily by surprise.

'You ok?'

Sure. I'm fine. Just peachy. Realising I have sexual feelings towards my best friend has really made my day, thanks for asking.

'Uh...yeah, fine. Sorry'.

She saw the glance that Korsak exchanged with Frost, and understood that they were not going to let her get away with it that easily. So she came out with the only excuse that her fuddled, sleep-deprived brain could think of.

'Frankie's birthday'.

'Ah, you stuck for a present?'

She didn't even have to nod before Frost's face lit up.

'I got just the thing'.

Jane blinked, and raised her eyebrows as she saw Frost talking to Korsak, not her.

'See, the Red Sox have just launched this new merchandise range, Wally the Green Monster sweats and everything, it's...'

Korsak was nodding. He was looking interested. When she peered round to look at his computer screen, she saw that he was typing 'Red Sox shop' into Google.

Enough.

'No'. She pushed back her chair and stood up.

'Where are you going?'

That was a good question. Where was she going?

'Down to the lab'.

Nice one.

She thought again.

'The cafe'.

It was Korsak's turn to raise his eyebrows, and Jane shrugged.

'Anywhere to avoid looking at grown men going mad over Wally sweats'.

'Come on, he'll love it'. Frost looked absolutely convinced. 'Leave us your credit card and we'll get it sorted. They gift-wrap, you won't even have to see it...'.

'No. Definitely not. And I am out of here'.

'If you don't like Wally, Maura might have some ideas!' Korsak called after her.

Actually, he did have a point. Maura loved shopping, and she always knew exactly what to get. And since Frankie's birthday was on Wednesday, Jane needed a plan pretty damn quick if she didn't want to end up with green monster clothing.

She swore to herself as she found her finger hitting the elevator button that would take her down to the lab.

Get a serious, cast-iron grip, Rizzoli.

She wondered if her little brother would ever know exactly how much he owed her for this.

Maura Isles had barely slept a wink.

Sitting at her desk, her computer screen doing its best to entice her with Charlotte Olympia heels at thirty percent discount, she took another sip of coffee and tried to focus. She should have been signing off on autopsy reports. She should have been catching up on some journal reading, or booking her next series of yoga classes. She shouldn't really have been looking at the shoes, but it was a last-ditch attempt to get her mind back where she wanted it, since, for the past twenty two hours - or twenty hours and forty minutes, if you factored in the little time that she had actually spent asleep - it had been firmly fixed on Jane Rizzoli. And it was beginning to wear Maura out.

For some reason, Angela's faux pas the day before had stuck with Maura. It had made her think, and wonder, and question things that she wasn't sure she had any business questioning. Jane was her best friend, the first one that she had ever had. But, even considering her lack of experience in the field of female friendship, she was fairly sure that many of her thoughts and questions would be considered by most people to be inappropriate.

For example, it made sense to assume that Angela's mistake had not come out of nowhere. Maura reasoned that if she had come across Korsak with his hand on Jane's back, she would not have jumped to that conclusion, and so there must be something in the way that she and Jane were with each other that had made Angela think that they were...well. More than friends. That in itself wasn't so bad.

The inappropriate part came when Maura started wishing that Angela had been right.

She had laughed it off at the time. But, if she was honest with herself - and she couldn't very well be anything else - she would have admitted that she was attracted to Jane, and had been for some time. She hadn't immediately recognised it for what it was but, once she had (after reading a brilliant journal article on the subject of attraction and the role of monoamines in chimpanzees), she had pushed it very firmly away and into the compartment in her brain labeled 'Do Not Open - Danger of Mortal Embarrassment'. And Jane's reaction the previous day had convinced her that that was where it belonged. Unfortunately, getting it back in there now was proving very difficult.

The only good thing was that they had no cases on. Nothing had come in over the weekend, and there had been no calls that morning. So it was very unlikely that she would see Jane before lunch, which gave her approximately two hours and twenty minutes to get her act together.

She could do that.

If she could stop thinking about the feel of Jane's back under her fingers.

'Hi'.

The voice from the doorway made her start, and she tried not to let her surprise show too much.

It looked like her two hours and twenty minutes had just been cut to ten seconds.

'Hi yourself'. She had to work hard to keep her voice normal as Jane came round her desk to stand by her chair, and peered over her shoulder at the computer screen. 'What brings you down here?'

'Need your help with something...do people actually walk in those?'

Maura's eyes followed Jane's finger, which was pointing at a pair of sky-blue, six-inch stiletto heels with a rather cute flower stitched onto the upper leather.

'Of course'. Despite Jane's proximity, Maura found her brain was starting to work once more. 'Studies have shown that the ability to walk in heels is determined by...''

'Wait'. Jane held up a hand to silence her. 'You mean someone has actually been paid to watch women cripple themselves and call it a research study?'

Honestly. She could be so melodramatic sometimes.

'You wouldn't cripple yourself, Jane', Maura began patiently. 'It's all about the balance between...' She broke off as she looked up and saw Jane's expression. 'Never mind. What did you need my help for?'

The dark haired woman grimaced, and walked around to slump into Maura's other office chair.

'Frankie's birthday. Wednesday'.

'You don't know what to buy?'

'I have no idea what to buy'.

'Okay, well...' Maura paused. She was finding it hard to concentrate again now that Jane was directly in her line of sight, but brightened up as she was struck with what she considered to be a genius idea. Maybe her brain was functioning after all.

'I know. The Red Sox have just...'

'No'.

'But you don't even know what I was going to say'.

Jane raised her eyebrows.

'Wally?'

Maura nodded. It was perfect.

'No. Korsak and Frost already tried that one. I am the biggest Red Sox fan I know, and even I wouldn't wear Wally. Next?'

Maura sighed. She didn't actually have any more ideas. Not right now, anyway.

There was only one thing for it.

'I'll come down to the department store with you at lunchtime, we might see something there'.

'Ahh, no'. Jane moaned. 'You know I hate those places'.

Maura pushed the last of her inappropriate thoughts away and concentrated on the task in hand. This was, after all, about Jane's little brother.

'Tough'.

Jane looked astonished, and Maura shrugged.

'If it's for Frankie...?'

Jane sighed.

'Ok. But only since you're coming with me'. She stood up. 'Meet you at the entrance?'

'Sure'.

As soon as she was sure Jane had left, Maura blew out a heavy sigh and leaned back in her chair. She couldn't believe she had just done that.

After essentially spending the past twenty-four hours in a state of sexual frustration, she was - voluntarily - going to spend her lunchtime going shopping with the object of her fantasies.

Great.

She wondered if Frankie would ever know just how much he owed her for this.