"GAAH!... DAD!... Oh… No… Oh… I… laundry… I mean…" Alexis dropped her laundry and turned back around, bumping her forehead on the now closed front door. For extra measure she then pushed her palms firmly into her eyes, desperately trying to burn the image of her dad with his hand up his girlfriend's top out of her mind.

Never had Castle and Beckett been so out of sync as they tried to scramble off each other. Beckett yelped as Castle used the hand he had on her right breast to push himself up. This in turn caused her to twist suddenly connecting her left hip sharply with his groin. He let out that deep guttural moan that only men, hit there, have and fell stiffly back down pinning Beckett to the couch again. She tried sliding up out from under him but his hand, still in the back of her leggings, started to pull them down as she moved away. She finally stopped when she realised that the only way for them to get out of this was for her to stay still while he got off her. "Castle… Get… Up," she growled between clenched teeth.

He looked up at her with watery, pained eyes and slowly, deliberately removed his hands from Beckett's clothing, then pushed himself up from the couch. Taking a breath he schooled his features and tried to sound not quite so embarrassed.

"Hey… Alexis. We didn't um… I wasn't expecting you home… tonight." He looked to Beckett for reassurance on his choice of words and tone, but the now seated women had her face buried in her hands.

"Um, I just needed to do some laundry," Alexis mumbled into the front door but pointed behind her as if she was trying to prove how she had ended up in this mortifying situation.

"Sure, um, Sweetie. Well you should go ahead, I mean… we were just…" Castle stopped mid sentence, as he felt rather than saw Beckett glare at him, ordering him with her eyes to 'shut up right now.'

"Um, I'm just gonna go to the bathroom," Beckett almost spat out so that she could flee the room as quickly as possible. On the way, she gave Castle a look saying something which he wasn't quite sure how to read. It could have been 'I'm going to die of embarrassment,' 'I'm going to kill you' or 'I'm leaving the room so you can fix this.' He nodded blankly thinking that he was going to start with the third option and hope like hell they didn't get to the first two.

"Yeah, so Honey, there should be plenty of laundry soap. We… I mean I haven't really needed to use much this week." Castle spoke, desperately trying to find any words that would not connect back to what his daughter had just seen him doing with Beckett on the couch. He took two steps toward her, "Can I help you…"

"NO!" Alexis yelped as in one fluid movement she spun around, picked up her laundry and with her eyes glued to the laundry door walked speedily across the room.

Castle now found himself the sole occupant of a very vacant space trying to work out how on earth feeling up his girlfriend on his couch had gone so very, very wrong. He gazed slightly stunned from the couch to the laundry door then to his bedroom not sure where it was safe to go. Fortunately for him his phone chose that moment to ring. Fishing around in his pocket he pulled it out and looking at the screen chuckled. This had to be the first time in a very long time that taking a phone call from Gina was a less evil option. "Hi Gina," he answered and headed towards his office. The woman on the other end of the line asked if 'this was a good time' and then, not waiting for a response launched in to what Castle was sure was going to be an excruciatinglylong lecture on the lack of his Authorly work ethic. As he listened to her drone on he poured himself a rather large scotch, plonked himself down behind his desk and settled in for the onslaught.

Beckett continued to stare into the mirror in the bathroom until she wasn't even really looking at herself anymore. She was too busy playing Alexis' horrified look over and over in her mind while she tried to decide whether she felt more embarrassed for Castle's daughter or mortified for herself. "Uuurg,… His hand was on my boob," she said for at least the fifteenth time since she'd fled to the tiled sanctuary.

She wondered whether this was like walking in on your parents. She'd never actually done that, although she had heard them once. She hadn't realised what the soft moans coming through her bedroom wall meant at the time but… "Oh Crap! Now I've gotta get rid of that image too," she groaned.

Moments later she'd had enough and clapping her hands down on the counter she readied herself to brave the outside-of-the-bathroom world.

She slowly opened the door and padded across the bedroom, thinking as she walked that Castle must have had enough time to at least, maybe, apologise? She wasn't really sure what he could have said. What does a parent say to their child when they're caught groping their girlfriend? This was definitely unchartered territory for Beckett. All she knew was the next time she talked to Alexis was probably going to be the most awkward conversation she'd had since having to tell Captain Montgomery about their suspect getting plastic surgery 'down there.'

Stepping out into the kitchen she scanned the room for Castle and found not the elder, but the younger sitting at the dinning room table, absorbed in what appeared to be a very large textbook. Taking a deep breath Beckett pep-talked herself, whispering "For crying out loud Kate, you can interrogate serial killers, talking to an eighteen year old can't be worse. Even if she has just caught you underneath her father." She rolled her eyes but she was pretty sure that Alexis knew she had come in to the room, so there was no backing out now.

A/N

Hi everyone, thanks so much for the follows/alerts/favorites. To those of you who have reviewed... Wow, you're encouragement has been amazing. I'm having so much fun writing these awesome characters. Just thought I'd better state here that of course the usual Disclaimer applies. As much as I love playing with all these characters, they're not mine.