Guys, I had so much work yesterday I didn't even get to go near a FF, but shout outs...

To the awesome, awesome TeamCarlisleandEsme8, chris.c03, AzNeRd, torontogirl12, josiemausconn, lolaughoutloud123, Kikilia14, left my heart in Paris, alix33, ParisNeverEnded, DS2010, magiclover13, and ncisgirl2389, thank you so much for your lovely reviews. You're ever so kind :D

And to everyone who has favorited and/or put the story on alert so far, thank you as well. :)

Hugs!

"Jesus, they sound like an old married couple over there," Stan muttered of the muffled argument next door, casting a sideward glance toward the room of their resident red-head and her ex-Marine opponent.

The ride back to the hotel and the elevator ride to their floor had been almost suffocating with uncomfortable silence, and the Jenny and Gibbs had quite literally slammed the door to their room and started shouting.

Decker grunted in agreement, the blue light of the television dancing across his features in the dimly lit room. He had been trying to ignore the rather vocal quarrel for the past hour, and even more so the likely reasons for it.

"You think we should tell them?" Burley asked, conflicted; and Decker looked over at him skeptically, his arms crossed behind his head.

"Do you want to go over there?" he asked, raising both eyebrows at Stan, and the younger man quirked his brows in agreement.

The idea of interrupting the snapping red-head and barking Marine was less than alluring to say the least.

"Damn it, Jen!' Jethro barked. "This has a conflict of interest a mile wide, and you know it!"

She narrowed her eyes at him from the other side of the room, and made a sound somewhere between ironic laughter and an incredulous scoff.

"Is that why you're upset?" she demanded, her eyes widening as her eyes shot up in skepticism. "Or are you upset because someone managed to keep something from you, the almighty Leroy Jethro Gibbs?" she mocked ruthlessly. "Because you don't know everything about me you thought you did?"

"This isn't personal," he bit back, though his eyes told a different story. He advanced on her, his features contorted in rage, pointing an accusing finger. "This is work, and you put this case in jeopardy."

She narrowed her eyes at him.

"Really?" she demanded skeptically. "Because this feels personal," she hissed, scrunching her nose in ire with a curt nod, her eyes ablaze in rage. "There is no way in hell you would have been berating Burley or Decker for this long over a conflict of interest; and yet, here we are."

They stood there a moment, glaring at each other before Jethro broke the tense silence.

"You should have told me, Jenny," he growled, and she scoffed, smirking mirthlessly.

"Why?" she demanded viciously. "Because you always treated me so well, and never gave me any reason to mistrust you?" she spat harshly.

Her jaw jumped as she clenched her teeth in guilt at his nearly imperceptible flinch. She was wrong for that. He had treated her well, and she knew that.

"You kept things from me too, Jethro," she reminded him, though her voice was more muted. "I don't know a thing about your mother other than the fact that she died when you were seventeen."

His features darkened, and his snapped his spine up straight.

"Leave her out of this," he warned, his voice almost threatening, and Jenny laughed, the sound almost maniacal in her bewilderment at his ability to exhibit such hypocrisy.

"So, you get to harass me about my mommy issues, but I can't so much as bring yours into the conversation?" she demanded, her voice raising once more. She stopped, and her chest heaved with her deep intake and exhale of breath. "You knew your mother, Jethro. Schizophrenia stole mine from me before I got the chance to."

"Schizophrenia?" he asked, and Jenny rolled her eyes at the sympathy in his eyes and his voice.

She turned away from him, hugging her arms across her chest.

"Don't give me that look, Jethro," she snapped, gathering her hair up as if to tie it only to release it again and rake it back with her hands. "I came to terms with my childhood a long time ago."

"This," she breathed through clenched teeth, pointing a finger at his face violently, "is why I didn't tell you."

She wet her lips with her tongue before pursing them tightly.

"I knew you would look at me exactly as you are now," she insisted in a low voice.

She sighed in annoyance at his characteristic silence, and turned her back to him with one arm hugging her bust line, the other propped on that one with her chin in her hand.

As if there were ever a worse time for him to say nothing.

When he spoke she actually wished he had stuck to the whole silently brooding thing.

"I deserve to know what could affect my daughter, Jenny," he murmured, meeting her eyes with an intensely pointed stare and she laughed; but it was a humorless laugh, like she might cry if she hadn't picked the former.

"There it is," she murmured, her voice little more than a whisper. She looked at him sadly as if he had done exactly what she expected of him and it was a disappointment. "Are you crazy too?"

"I didn't say that. I didn't ask that," he insisted vehemently, his dark gaze pointed. "Don't put words in my mouth, Jenny."

"Well, then what are you saying, Jethro?" she asked, her words laced with finite skepticism. "You can't possibly be talking about genetics, because Kelly does not have one ounce of my DNA; so, please, enlighten me as to what you meant."

"You-" he stopped, struggling for words, and exhaled heavily. "Is she going to show up at some point and surprise the hell out of all of us?" he asked. "Does she know about Kelly?"

"No," Jenny nearly choked hoarsely, and he swore he detected a trace of fear in her eyes.

He had. She had never even entertained the idea of Kelly and her mother; and it terrified her now.

"My mother is mentally ill, Jethro," she stressed, her emotions strangling her voice as she dropped to sit on the bed. "She was a good mother when she was my mother."

She stopped mid-sentence and her features darkened before she looked up at him with the confusion, and hurt, and fresh pain of a childhood Jenny Shepard. She took a shaky breath.

"But they were never able to get her medication just right, and sometimes…God she was a different person," she whispered, as if speaking the words too loud would send her back to her childhood years, years that she was still trying to put behind her. "She was cruel, and she was...it was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde." The dazed nostalgia faded from her eyes and she met his with a fierce determination. "I won't have her around Kelly, ever. I won't put Kelly in jeopardy of seeing even a percentage of what I saw. Jethro, I won't. She would do better to have no grandmother at all than to have my mother for one."

He watched the strong woman before him starting to fray at the seams, and he realized just how deep her wounds had to go.

"What did she do to you, Jen?" he murmured.

She snapped her head in his direction, her eyes rapt with attention. She narrowed her eyes slightly and furrowed her brows.

He couldn't honestly think she wanted to go into that with him.

"This is not-" she broke off, pursing her lips. "We don't do this anymore, Jethro," she reminded him, though it sounded more like an order.

She cut her open hand through the air sharply.

"We don't talk about our feelings," she spat harshly. "We do our jobs." She cursed her voice as it broke hoarsely, and she inhaled sharply through her nose. "We do our jobs, and we keep our previous relationship out of it. If you want to keep me off this case because you sincerely think I will jeopardize it, fine; but we aren't talking about this," she said with finality.

He watched her back as she stormed away from him hurting and angry, her large, red curls catching the air, bouncing on her shoulders as she walked with purpose. She grabbed her purse and her keys from their place by the door and she wrenched said door open. In a split second decision he was at her side, shutting the door back firmly in place as he grasped her bicep firmly, spinning them so that she was farthest from the door.

"You're upset, you're angry. Don't drive," he ordered, still holding the door shut with his hand.

He towered over her without her heels, and he practically had her back pressed into the door he was so close.

"I am not upset," she contradicted him fiercely, glaring into his eyes pointedly. "Let me out." He didn't budge. "Jethro, I need to get out of this room."

"Go for a walk," he deadpanned, and she knocked her head back into the door in frustration.

"For God sakes, Jethro, I won't drive my car off a cliff!" she snapped darkly, and his hand fell from the door, but she didn't move from where she stood.

His face kept her there.

It was like a dark cast crossed his face. His jaw jumped, and his eyes-they held something she couldn't quite place.

She pulled her head back, eyeing him warily.

"Jethro?" she prodded apprehensively, her eyes searching his face with knit brows.

He took a step back his expression stony.

"Stay here, Jenny," he commanded, the genuine fearsome worry tainting his steely exterior barring no argument.

"Fine," she agreed softly. He looked like he was still reeling from the effects of something. She crossed her arms over her chest again in an attempt to put some kind of distance between them, "Are you alright?" she asked cautiously, not sure if she should move from her place at the door.

He brought hostility slicing back through the haze of caring that had fallen over them with his reply.

"We don't talk anymore, remember," he repeated her earlier words with the same biting undercurrent, quirking a brow slightly with a nod.

She pursed her lips, and simply brushed past him, deliberately knocking into his shoulder; and he took a small step to keep his balance, clenching his jaw as he sent an agitated look heavenward.

In the next room over, Burley had been listening intently since their argument had quieted down for any signs of noise. They were almost too quiet.

"You think they're done?" Stan asked, turning to his partner who was all but passed out on his bed with his NCIS cap over his eyes.

Decker mumbled something incoherent. He didn't really care as long as nobody got shot, and they had it worked out by the following morning. That, and he got some sleep.

"You think she finally killed him?" Burley asked warily, sparing the door connecting their rooms a glance one more. "I've never heard them that quiet before in my life."

Decker smirked in amusement, but shook his head in the negative.

"If she killed him, we'd know," Will mused groggily with a lazy smile. "I don't think she's exactly the 'smother him in his sleep, and run' type."

That may have been Decker's profile of her, and normally he'd be right; but in that instant, Jenny was very seriously debating holding a pillow over the former Marine's face or at least whacking him over the head with one.

She had yet to do either of those as of that moment, and so they laid in bed with their backs to each other as far from each other as humanly possible. Eventually, she got fed up with their petulant antics: he wasn't sleeping, and she knew that, she wasn't sleeping, and he knew that, but they wouldn't talk to each other.

She huffed in annoyance at the fact that she had to be the bigger person. She never had to be the bigger person. In fact, she rather liked her role of the small shrew in their arguments.

She shoved him none too gently and he rolled over onto his back as well. He looked over at her, though it was really more of a diluted glare, and she sighed with cantankerous contempt.

"Speak words," she deadpanned peevishly, her words laced with patronizing derision.

He said nothing for a several moments. He had been in conflict with himself while he had laid in bed beside her; and he finally came to the conclusion that if he wanted anything from her or wanted to have the right to feel deserving of anything, he would have to give her something first.

"My mother drove her car off a cliff," he stated bluntly.

She failed to suppress a sharp intake of breath and she nearly gave herself whiplash she turned to look at him so fast. That hadn't even been in her top one-hundred list of things she expected him to say.

"Running from my father," he elaborated, the aversion he still felt toward his father for that etched into his features. "After an argument. Never forgave him for it. He didn't forgive himself either, but he didn't drown himself in alcohol like a man; he drowned himself in women."

What did she say to that? She wasn't exactly prepared for an admission like that from him. She hadn't heard him say that many words about what he was feeling in all the years she had known him.

"Jethro," she whispered, utter despair etched into just that declaration of his name, tears springing to her eyes.

With his admission came immediate understanding for her. He was the way he was for a reason. He had experienced an unimaginable amount of loss, more than anyone should ever have to endure. Both times the woman that was at the center of his life had been violently ripped from him; first his mother, and then his wife.

She didn't know what to do. Did she try to comfort him? Did he even want it? She knew that he was telling her now because he wanted information from her, so she did the only thing she could do. She gave it to him.

She sat up in bed, clearing her throat loudly as she tucked her long locks behind her ears. She pursed her lips firmly and she swallowed thickly before she spoke.

"My mother was seventeen when I was born," she revealed. "My father joined the service to support her, and me, when her mother tossed her out on the street. I was a handful on my own, and then Heather came right behind me in less than two years. They kept things like mental illness under wraps then though."

Jenny leaned back against the headboard, closing her eyes briefly.

"She was a good mother, or at least I think she tried to be," Jenny mused, tugging the corner of her lip between her teeth. ". She always came up with these elaborate games to play with us. Most of the time you wouldn't have known she was anything but ordinary," she murmured with a dazed stare, nodding absently. "But she would have these…episodes. The smallest thing could set her off. She would hear things." Jenny paused. "Voices. Voices would literally drive her out of her mind."

She looked down at her hands, a short, harsh, mirthless laugh escaping her lips before she looked up again.

"She also had a habit of blaming other people for things that she had done. I was six, Heather was five; and we were baking cookies," Jenny sighed, rubbing a hand across her forehead, and she squinted her eyes as if the look into her past was causing her great exhaustion. "My mother, left, and she came back dressed in some ridiculous outfit. She was always rather eccentric. As a child, I loved it. We played dress-up every day."

She shook her head, realizing she had veered from her original recount.

"The cookies though, they were burning, and I remember she let out this awful, outraged scream of despair at something that small. She pulled the pan out with her bare hands, and she threw it at me." Jenny inhaled deeply through her nose, and she wallowed thickly before she spoke again, sending a teary glance upward, her voice softer. "She screamed at me 'look what you did, you stupid, stupid girl', and when I cried out, she laughed."

"Jenny," Jethro murmured, his voice comforting as he reached out for her only to have her flinch away from him.

She sniffed, pain etched into her features.

"That," she whispered. "That is when I started to realize that my mother was not just a little different. She didn't just have imaginary friends like I did. I still have the scars from that pan," she murmured, shaking her head.

He knew. He had seen the old, white scars on her arm as they laid in bed one night. When he had asked her about them, she had laughed it off with a flippant wave of the hand, recalling that she had set her arm on a hot stove as a child by accident.

He didn't want to hear anymore. He wished now that he had never made her go back into that. He also knew that he never would again.

"My father finally had her sent away when I was twelve after she threw herself out of a window following some hallucination . I haven't spoken to her in almost twenty years," Jenny breathed, and she turned her head to him, a lone tear spilling over onto her cheek. "And there is nothing I can do to help her."

Immediately, he realized what he had seen in her eyes that he couldn't place two days ago. It was guilt.

"Jenny, it's not your fault," he insisted, though he did not dare try to touch her again.

"I know," she sighed heavily. "But the only reason that I even know where she is now is because I had to know where to write the checks to keep her there after my father died. There has to be something wrong with that."

He grabbed her hand from between them, and held it to his lips briefly. She squeezed his hand, and let out a soft sigh as she allowed her head fall to his shoulder. They sat there a moment in silence, until a small laugh escaped her lips.

She still couldn't believe the profound irony in the fact that they were learning more about each other now, in a tiny hotel room in South Carolina with nothing more than a wall separating them from Decker and Burley, than they had in all eight and a half years they had known each other.

"We are two screwed up people," she murmured with wry humor, and the corner of his mouth quirked up in a lopsided smirk.

"Yeah," he laughed softly. "We are."

"Burley probably thinks you've murdered me by now," she murmured, grinning; and he laughed.

When Jenny woke the following morning it was to a rather loud and persistent knocking at the hotel door. She opened her eyes, squinting at the pestiferous light peeking in through the spaces between the blind slats.

"Three more minutes, Magda," she mumbled sluggishly, hugging her pillow tighter to her.

Jethro smirked as he walked out of the bathroom just in time to hear her lackadaisical mutterings. He grabbed his pillow from the bed and whacked her with it gently.

She shot up in bed, bracing her hands against the sheets with a sharp intake of breath.

"Jethro," she growled, eyeing him with a glare that was intended to be threatening; though her bed head and sleepy expression were less than helpful in that aspect.

"Wake up," he said, and she groaned theatrically, falling back into the covers, and she pulled her pillow over her head again.

Soon, she heard the voices of Stan and Will muffled by her pillow before Jethro's only half-joking declaration met her ears.

"…I'll dump cold water on her in a minute."

"You will not," she informed him ardently, and the floorboards creaked with footsteps and Stan was shaking her.

"Come on Red," he teased, assuming they were to forget yesterday's admission at least temporarily. "Early bird gets the worm."

"The early bird is also easy prey for the bigger bird," she shot back smartly, but she pulled the covers down from her face nonetheless despite the look of indignation on her face.

She finally sat up after a moment and tossed the covers back, setting her feet on the ground before pushing herself up. All three men's eyes immediately, instinctually shot to her very tight, very short pajama bottoms.

"Stop it," she demanded knowingly before shutting the bathroom door behind her.

Xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx

She threw the bathroom door open fifteen minutes later with wet hair, her face sans makeup with her robe tied tight around her waist; and she caught the beginning of Decker's statement and obviously the subject of their conversation-

"Her mother, she's-"

-before he stopped abruptly and all eyes were on her.

"Crazy?" she supplied, raising both eyebrows at him, a storm of anger forming behind her green eyes as she crossed her arms under her bust.

"Jenny," Decker started apologetically, but Jenny cut him off.

"No, she is," she admitted almost airily, but the hostility in her tone made it less so. She smiled, scrunching her nose at him indulgently as she clasped her hands together. "What did you want to know?" she asked, and her expression turned dark. "What? Does she scream all day? Pull her hair out?"

"Jenny," Will tried again in a strangled voice, but yet again Jenny did not let him finish.

"She does not, Agent Decker," she informed him sharply with intense acrimony. "However, should you have any more questions concerning my mother or her illness, I suggest you direct them at me rather than Agent Gibbs."

The ride to Hickerman Mental home was less than pleasant. Jenny was agitated, and Gibbs was on edge because of it; Decker looked like he was swinging between uncomfortable and regretful, and Burley was the picture of the uninvolved person caught up in an uncomfortable family argument.

When they strode into the lobby after an abrupt departure the previous day, the same young, chocolate-skinned receptionist looked up at them with kinds eyes.

"Oh, you're back so soon?" she mused politely in a sweet, Southern accent.

"We need to speak with Nancy Shepard," Gibbs informed her, but a look of sympathy crossed the young woman's face before a gentle determination settled there.

"I'm sorry, Agent…"

"Gibbs," he supplied, and she smiled apologetically.

"Agent Gibbs. You have to understand, Ms. Shepard has her good days, and her bad days. Today is not a good day. I'm sorry, but you can't speak with her. I don't think she would be of much help at the moment anyway."

"I'm her daughter," Jenny interjected, stepping forward; and the younger woman's eyes widened visibly in surprise. "Jennifer Shepard. My name is on the account."

The dark sinned woman's fingers flew across the keys presumably verifying the information, and she bit the inside of her lip.

"Well," the receptionist drawled reluctantly. "I suppose you could go in, but they have to stay here," she dictated adamantly in reference to the three men. Her brows furrowed and she cocked her head to the side curiously. "Ms. Shepard doesn't get visitors. Do you talk often?"

"I'd just like to see my mother please?" Jenny requested tersely, and the receptionist moved to her feet.

"Jenny," Gibbs growled in low protest.

"Do you want to find out what happened, or not?" Jenny bit out testily.

"You don't have to do this," he murmured, eyeing her pointedly, and she puckered her lips in vexation.

"What I have to do is get that Marine justice," she hissed. "That's my job. If this is the way I do it, then yes, Jethro, I do have to," she snapped before turning on her heel to follow behind the receptionist.

As they walked down the long hallway of the mental home, a million emotions danced through Jenny's brain: anger, fear, anticipation, uncertainty. She didn't know what to expect. She had left Jethro felling so competent and decidedly brazen, but as they came upon her mother's door, she had no idea what she was going to say.

"Her memory, it's a little fuzzy at times," the ebony beauty murmured, eyeing Jenny with apology. "She mixes things up every once in a while, so take what she says with a grain of salt, you know?"

"I do," Jenny agreed, nodding in the affirmative. Her mother: the storyteller.

The receptionist nodded, and knocked on the closed door. They waited a moment, and when they received no answer she simply pushed it open slowly, peeking around it as they entered the room.

Jenny had to bite back a gasp at what she saw. Her mother, who had once been so vibrantly, obviously full of voracious youth with bright red hair and crystal blue eyes now sat looking far beyond her forty-seven years. She sat in a cushioned armchair with a paisley shawl wrapped around her shoulders staring out of the window as if it was all she ever did; her once gleaming blue eyes were now a dull watchet color, and her fiery red locks were faded and ferruginous, streaked white and pulled back into a tight knot.

She looked…old.

"Ms. Shepard," the receptionist, called, identifying herself as Clarissa. "There's someone here to see you, your daughter."

Immediately, Nancy seemed to regains some life, and she rose from her chair with a hopeful smile; and Jenny allowed herself to feel a childish gleam of happiness at being wanted by her mother.

"Heather?" Nancy exclaimed, pulling Jenny into a hug, and the younger redhead tensed.

Of course she expected Heather. Heather had always been her mother's favorite, and no matter what she did, Heather had followed behind her like a trained puppy dog.

As she pulled back, Nancy seemed to realize her blunder at seeing Jenny's viridian eyes: Jasper Shepard's eyes.

"Jennifer?" Nancy half-asked, nodding her head with confidence.

Only her mother called her that. Her mother had always called her that, and it was part of the reason she had never allowed anyone else to; except Ducky. Ducky called her Jennifer, but only because it sounded like it was coming from an endearing grandfather rather than the silent judging it sounded like coming from everyone else.

"Ah," Nancy murmured softly, clearly disappointed; and it cut through Jenny like a knife.

The feeling was unexpected, and Jenny simply tried to shake it off, steeling her features as her mother's eyes lost their luminescence once more.

"I'll leave you two alone," Clarissa offered, ducking out gracefully.

"Mother," Jenny called with an air of wariness as she made her way toward the woman who seemed a shell of her former self. Jenny took a seat on the edge of the bed, trying to decide how best to start. "Mother, I need to know what happened in that room. Do you remember?"

Nancy said nothing, and Jenny sighed impatiently with exasperation. She had never truly learned how to deal with her mother's disease.

"Mother," she sighed heavily. "Will you please try to remember. The Marine, he was visiting his sister here, Lisa. Do you know her?" Again Nancy said nothing. "You were in the room. Did you see him fall? Did you notice anyone around him, maybe? Did someone fix a drink for him?"

Again, Nancy said nothing.

Jenny leaned forward, ready to try again when she realized that her mother was speaking, just not to her.

"Mom?" Jenny murmured, her eyes flooding with concern.

Nancy's mutterings grew more audible and she started to wring her hands anxiously.

"No," Nancy hissed, her eyes wide. "Stop. It wasn't my fault. I promised. I can't."

"Mom," Jenny breathed desperately, her eyes glistening with unshed tears. "Mom, please," she begged, but Nancy was lost.

"Stop, please stop," Jenny's mother cried softly, her torment clear in her voice. "Stop!" she shouted, and Jenny leaped from the bed as if were covered in hot rocks, backing away from her mother as she watched the woman fall apart in front of her for the first time in years. She stumbled from the room, and her mother's screams intensified.

"Help," she called. "God, someone help me!" she shouted, though it came out as a strangled growl of distress.

The receptionist, obviously a nurse herself, and two doctors came barreling into the room, quickly followed by Gibbs, Burley, and Decker.

Jethro was at Jenny's side in an instant, pulling her from the room as the doctor's attempted to calm her mother.

"You all have to leave," Clarissa informed them firmly over Nancy's increasingly erratic mutterings, the four of them were ushered the room and the door was slammed in their faces.

Jenny exhaled shakily, raking a hand through her hair; and she hardly registered Jethro sending Burley and Decker away on some ersatz errand.

She inhaled and exhaled heavily again in an attempt to calm herself, and he moved her down the hall away from her mother's room; but it was like on a loop in her head, her mother's words: 'It's not my fault. I promised. I can't.'

They were not nonsensical mutterings. She knew something about what had happened in that room.

When Burley and Decker returned some time later, Jenny stood with her back against the wall of the hallway with her hands crossed behind her back and her head bowed, a void expression on her face.

"Get the car," Gibbs instructed, and once again Will and Stan disappeared despite hesitating first, eyeing Jenny warily.

Gibbs turned his attention to her.

"You alright?" he asked with genuine concern, and she scoffed.

"Peachy," she laughed sardonically before pushing herself off the wall and set off with slow steps toward the exit.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Jenny woke from a well deserved nap around five. When they had gotten to the hotel she had dressed in her pajamas and quite literally collapsed into bed.

Jethro looked up as she approached the small table by the window where he sat. He slid his glass of bourbon toward her, sending a drop of the amber liquid sloshing over the rim. He watched her as she drank from the glass, wincing only slightly at the burn of the whiskey hitting her throat.

"I want to hate her," Jenny murmured. "I want to hate her so much, and I can't."

He didn't say anything, but she wasn't looking for a reply.

"She knows something, Jethro," she said, finally meeting his eyes.

"Drink," he advised. Under normal circumstances he probably would have taken the bottle from her, but these were not normal circumstances.

"I don't want to think about my mother. I want to..." She trailed off, exhaling heavily. She looked up at him, and he knew what she wanted.

He had seen that look time enough to know.

"Jenny, you're drunk," he stated matter-of-factly. Bourbon always went straight to her head.

"Buzzed," she aquiesced. "Jethro, I'm not drunk."

In other words: you aren't taking advantage of me.

"Not sober," he challenged with a pointed look, pushing himself out of his chair.

She managed a weak glare, but the alcohol casting a haze over her mind proved his point.

He held his hand out to help her up.

"Come on. Get back to bed," he advised, and she took the offered hand.

"Jethro, are you sure you're playing for the right team?" she teased suggestively, and he settled her with a mild glare.

"I just care if wake up and cut 'em off in the middle of the night," he shot back, but the underlying message was clear.

I care if you regret it or not.

She sighed, leaning against him as he walked her to the bed.

"You're a good guy, Jethro," she murmured, the slightest slur to her speech being the only real indication of her intoxication. "You're good to me."

"Too good," he teased, tucking the bed covers around her small frame, and she smiled.

"But that's why I love you," she murmured, and he paused.

He didn't know how he should take that. She was slightly inebriated and clearly exhausted. He was t sure if she was being facetious or simply speaking from her subconscious.

And so he replied teasingly.

"That'll be the day."

Oh! So close! Gibbs and his gentlemanly ways lol.

You guys, I hopped on this last Wednesday, but then I got caught up in school and a writing a UN proposal project and some 'Scandal'...mhmmm. I have been cheating on NCIS guys. Scandal is my Olivia Pope lol. If you watch you know what I'm talking about and it is addictive. If not then I'm just rambling and you probably want me to shut up :)

Okay, I hope you enjoyed this chapter, and feedback...I love it ;) Alright. I'm going to sleep.