Part One: Exposed
Wine glass in-hand, Richard Castle settled into the sofa, stuffed a pillow behind him, and kicked up his feet. His partner's rather foreboding farewell loomed behind in her absence like a waft of tangy perfume, but he let it roll off of him. His intentions for staying the night in her living room were strictly protective.
From his vantage point on her sofa, Castle could stare down the front door, where she had just recently pre-empted his knock and scared the bejeezus out of him by pointing a gun at him. Way to greet your night guard, Beckett. She'd stood down upon recognizing him, and he'd held out the bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape as a peace offering and essentially invited himself inside.
Shame that she hadn't lingered to finish her wine. He'd freely poured it into his own glass before she'd even left the room.
Now he swished it around, glanced dutifully at the large windows over the kitchen area to his far right, and let his gaze sweep around the apartment. He repeated this inspection a number of times, finished a few glasses of wine, and began to feel his eyelids grow heavy. Well-tested tolerance level be damned, perhaps alcohol was not the wisest choice of beverage for a sworn guard on duty.
He set down his glass and stood, hoping that a perimeter check might rouse him.
He declared the living room safe, wandered to the bathroom which he declared safe and then utilized, and returned to clear the kitchen and living area once more. Finally, he stood a short distance from Beckett's bedroom door, content that it was quiet inside her room and unwilling to risk either startling her or making her doubt his agenda.
He turned and considered the wine, still deciding whether he would attempt to sleep or keep a wakeful post through the night.
Suddenly distracted by the bookcase near the entryway, he strode over to it, as though to observe the intricacies of a work of art at the MoMA or the Met.
So this was the library of Katherine Beckett.
He fingered the bindings, feeling a charge of energy in the pit of his stomach as he imagined Beckett holding these same books; clutching them to her heart; sinking into her bed with them; running her eyes over their pages, line by line and word by word.
He had just worked himself back down from the natural thought progression when he settled on a title that intrigued him, a hardbound novel from none other than one of his old poker buddies. But when he slid it off the shelf, a slender book wedged beside it slipped out, bumped the picture frame on the wooden bureau, and fell to the floor with barely more than the sound of rustling pages.
He stooped for it, all the while looking over his shoulder as though certain that the disturbance in the fixed environment (if not the noise) would have Beckett armed and at an open bedroom door by now, but she didn't emerge.
He straightened, still holding the novel, but turning the mysterious tagalong over in his hands for inspection. It was a notebook, a fairly cheap one that screamed, "Mine me for scrap paper!" more than it might have screamed, "Private Property: Trespassers will be shot," so he didn't actually give it much thought before opening it.
At least, he liked to think later on that he had no reason to suspect that it was anything personal. It was stuffed onto this shelf, after all, and it wasn't like it looked much like a diary or a scrapbook.
That was because it was neither.
At first, it was fragments of Beckett's handwriting. Lots of phrases grouped in haphazard word clouds, some strewn about and isolated like raindrops and puddles. Wordplay, imagery, metaphors and similes, funny little idioms, locations, and proper names—they were simply verbal sketches of silhouettes without further content or context, just waiting to be illuminated and connected.
Eventually the pages of fragments turned to wildly edited lines of poetry.Lyrics, Castle realized, deciphering the notations for musical chords on some of them. He smiled to himself at the thought of sexy Kate Beckett slinging a guitar strap over her shoulder or plucking at the stringed instrument on her lap; of her loosening up enough to sing aloud; of him winding her up good and tight before loosening her right back up enough to make her sing.
He felt the blood rush from his head and knew he needed to cool it. Since a cold shower was not currently a viable option—and since the fleeting thought of using Beckett's bathtub was inherently counter-productive—he resolved to sit back on the sofa and stare down the door again.
He didn't make it.
Absentmindedly, he'd opened the notebook a number of pages ahead. The words leapt out to him, and as he breathed them in, they clung heavily to his insides.
As though accentuating the fact that they were entirely alone, Detective Heat kicked the door closed behind her with the heel of her boot, never breaking their eye contact.
It could have gone either way, but something told Castle that this line did not describe an investigative interview. His Sexy-Sense was tingling, and it wasn't the only one.
The words came at him faster and faster until he was barely making sense of the full sentences. Phrases like "bra straps" and "clasp," "belt" and "waistband" managed to make his rugged face flush with heat. His more constricted extremities became sore with anticipation. A few suggestive adjectives decidedly not limited to subtle innuendo only worsened his condition.
He was drawn back to the moment he knew that he would write about Nikki Heat—except that he hadn't known the character's name just yet. At that point, it was just about Beckett. She fascinated him. She excited him—and not just in "that" way. She played hard-to-get, but she also played along.
To celebrate closing their first case, he'd suggested dinner and, ahem, collaborative debriefing.
With a wry smile, she'd asked, "Why, Castle? So I can be another one of your conquests?" He'd loved the way she'd punctuated her sentence by raising her brows; wondered whether she did it on purpose or if her twitches were involuntary.
"Or I could be one of yours." He could tell that he had surprised her with that one.
She had rebounded and politely taken his hand, a signal of the end of the conversation without the promise of another. "It was nice to meet you, Mr. Castle."
He'd let the hint of a smolder grace his features, an expression he'd practiced plenty of times before. "Too bad," he'd lamented earnestly. "It would have been great."
Biting her lower lip—whether to censor herself or to taunt him, he couldn't be sure—she'd leaned in close, her breath warm at his ear: "You have no idea."
But Beckett herself certainly seemed to have had some idea. Apparently, Beckett had lots of ideas—and she had actually put pen to paper about them. He never would have guessed. He was usually too busy noticing her and needling her to consider, really consider, that he might not be the only one to experience their banter as verbal foreplay.
Of course, Jordan Shaw—the Jordan Shaw—had suspected more of them than that. "So," she'd asked Beckett, "if you're not sleeping together, why do you keep him around?"
All right, so it wasn't the most flattering way she could have said it.
Having quashed the romantic accusation, Beckett nonchalantly defended his helpfulness. And the fact that Shaw sensed something at all gave Castle hope. She was rarely wrong about her profiling. Perhaps in this case, her clairvoyance simply meant seeing a vision of their future.
Or perhaps she'd gotten a hold of Kate Beckett's writings. Yowza, this stuff was not so discreetly coded.
Rook was caught up in her proximity and her scent. "You smell like cherries," he said.
Where had he heard that before? Trust the cop to write what she knew, even in a fantasy.
Not a fantasy, Castle corrected himself. Just fiction. Some part of him maintained the distinction.
Inevitably, and irreparably, Castle thought about page 105 of Heat Waveand, more to the point, page 106, when Nikki told Rook that she kept protection in the nightstand. Rook replied that she wouldn't need a gun; he'd be "a perfect gentleman," but Nikki insisted, "You'd better not" before she mauled him. He'd written it that way; it was the closest he dared to come to narrating his dreams.
Protection. Castle was here for her protection. Oh, damn the double entendres.