Just so lull and waves knows, their e-mail didn't show up in their review or else I would have written them.
Lyn didn't cook often. It was ironically out of respect of her fiancé. When she cooked the kitchen tended to explode in a multitude of, according to said fiancé, unnecessary plates, bowls, utensils, pans and so forth, all of them used and in need of washing and bits of ingredients strewn everywhere. The first time Roger came home while she decided to make dinner he, well, his accent got so thick she began to giggle which didn't help the situation at all. It was one of his quirks; he like things neat and ordered and he couldn't understand how someone so "willowy" and "delicate" could make so much chaos. To her relief he decided it was endearing.
But tonight she decided to break tradition and break out the kitchenware. She would just have to clean as she cooked. Ulch. Cleaning was not on her list of things she even moderately tolerated. But Roger was on the top of the list of things she loved with great intensity so she got over it.
Her brilliant plan to cook and clean for her future husband to soften him up was rudely interrupted by the man himself. Damn it, he was early.
"Hey, honey. Mmmm, that smells nice." Lyn heard the heavy, male footsteps stop before they entered the kitchen. The woman winced. "Ok, what did you do?" His voice was duly suspicious but when Lyn poked her head through the cut out she put on a hurt expression.
"What makes you think I did anything?" Roger ignored her and began to inspect the apartment.
"Did you clean? Dear god, Lyn, did you kill someone?"
Lyn's jaw dropped. "Roger!"
The aforementioned man threw up his hands in peace.
"What? You have to admit, it's suspicious."
Lyn rolled her eyes and decided to just tell him about the job, her buttering up plan had been effectively ruined.
"I was offered a six month contract with the FBI's White Collar division. I'd be working with Peter and his team."
Roger's eyebrows knit and he frowned. "I don't like you working there, it's dangerous."
Lyn suppressed the urge to roll her eyes. "Please, this is the White Collar division. I'll be profiling art snobs and rogue accountants." Actually, much more of Peter's cases involved gunfire than she had expected but her fiancé didn't need to know that.
"And what about the mysterious Peter? I've never met him. How am I supposed to entrust you to him if I don't know him?"
Entrust her to him? Lyn shook her head. This was not the time for a semantics battle. "God, Peter's not mysterious! You want to meet him? I'll send him an invitation to the wedding, you can meet him then."
"And this con man?" Lyn watched her fiancé roll his shoulders backwards, like he was trying to hide a much more telling physical reaction. "I don't have a good feeling about him. And you and him." If Lyn were a violent person she would have thrown the pan resting next to her hand at him. But she wasn't, and she reminded herself that she loved all of the blonde architect, even his irrational jealousy. Oh, and was he ever irrationally jealous.
"I will never fall in love with Neal Caffrey." She could want him, given that he catches her off guard, hell, after enough time she could probably like him, but Lyn would never love him.
Roger must have seen the conviction in her face and heard it in her voice because his southern traditionalist hackles smoothed down and he immediately looked guilty. He stepped forward and placed his hands on her upper arms and touched his forehead to hers.
"God, Lyn, I'm sorry. I know you are more than capable of doing this job and I trust you implicitly but I can't stand the idea of anything happening to you, of you running around with men I don't know and don't trust- I don't care if that upsets your wacky feminist views, it's how I feel."
Lyn tipped her head to give her lover, her friend, her fiancé a kiss.
"I know. I love you too."
With a low sigh Roger let go of her.
"I'll finish dinner, you can relax."
The tall man took to the kitchen and Lyn sat wearily on the couch. Fighting with Roger either fired her up for days or completely wiped her out. Looks like today was the latter. The redhead thought about what she had said about Caffrey to Roger and found now that she had calmed that it was still true.
Lyn was a settle down and have a couple of kids kind of girl. And you can't do either of those things with someone who was still a child. Caffrey was selfish and arrogant and narcissistic and ignorant of the consequences of his actions. He was also brilliant and sometimes downright heroic but he was far from a fully formed adult. For such a complex person, his psychological make-up was relatively simple. All it took was a little child psychology.
It was one of those rare nights where Peter was home on time and he resisted his compulsion to bring work with him. They were lounging on the couch, El resting on top of her beloved husband, back to chest; El didn't even care that Peter was yelling at the referees on television. He was absently rubbing his thumb in circles on her stomach and El melted a little more.
Everything would be perfect except for the fact she had been married to Peter too long. Not in the 'bud fell off the stem' kind of way, but in the 'becoming the same person' kind of way. The contentment was beginning to ebb away and El couldn't believe she actually missed hearing about the FBI at a time like this. But what had started out as a wonderful evening was slowly being ruined by the niggling need to know what had happened with Neal's evaluation. But El didn't want to ruin the moment so she stayed quiet, hoping that the compulsion to investigate would leave as suddenly as it had come.
Five minutes later it had intensified to the point El began to fidget in her unreasonably comfortable position. The thumb stopped its ministrations.
"El? You ok?" Peter's voice was slow and had a hint of teasing in it so she playfully elbowed him.
"I'm fine."
"El." His voice was knowing. Damn, the one time she wanted her husband to be oblivious. The woman felt his chest start to rumble in quiet laughter beneath her. "You want to know what Lyn said about Neal, don't you?"
El gave a dramatic sigh. "It's killing me." The quiet rumbling turned into full laughter. El knocked her head back on his chest to show her annoyance. "It's not funny!"
"No, of course it's not." El didn't think he sounded even remotely serious. Peter picked up the remote and muted the game. "It was a fair evaluation. Basically Neal's biggest issue is his sense of entitlement and he'd run given a good enough opportunity to be with Kate. But she thinks he can be rehabilitated." Peter chuckled.
"What's so funny?"
"It's just how Lyn described Neal when we were alone."
"And to think you were worried." El knew she probably spoke too soon but her curiosity had been sated and she didn't want to disrupt this precious alone time with her husband again. So she settled back for some quiet contemplation.
The woman considered Neal and sighed internally. Honestly, she worried about that boy. He was so dead set on finding Kate that El was afraid he would just bolt one day and break poor Peter's heart. Her husband had been afraid of bringing her and the loveable con man together out of fear that she would get too attached but El thought Peter should have been more concerned about himself. Under the strict, professional duties of being Neal's handler Peter had the biggest paternal soft spot for the younger man. After the glow of victory the guilty charge for bond forgery had faded from Peter's eyes El had seen clear as day that Peter honestly didn't like the idea of someone with so much potential, someone who under different circumstances would have been a friend was locked up for four years. Peter was a lawman to the core and believed that Neal should be punished for his crimes, but he had looked so frustrated and sad when he told El "that stupid, brilliant kid is ruining his life".
Maybe with Lyn's backup Peter would feel more secure about Neal. Poor baby, that con man isn't going to know what hit him. That is of course, if Peter was right and Lyn and Neal together wasn't anything to worry about. But El had a feeling it was about to get very interesting in the White Collar offices. Well, more interesting.
The first time Neal had seen Elizabeth Burke was in her and Peter's wedding announcement. When Peter had first stared pursuing him the con man was determined to learn just as much about the fed as the fed was learning about him. In one of his research session he had stumbled over a very nice color picture of Peter and his then bride to be. His first thought was that he and Peter had very similar tastes in women. Elizabeth could have been Kate's sister. He studied the picture a little longer and he could see that they were both insanely happy and equally insanely in love.
They had been married barely three years before Peter had been assigned his case and Neal knew that he was keeping the federal officer away from his fledgling marriage and lovely wife. The picture of the two of them in the newspaper popped up every once and a while in his mind's eye and Neal always felt an inexplicable stab of guilt. He had been planning on sending Elizabeth two dozen roses with a 'My Sincerest Apologies' card but Peter had gotten too close to him and Kate too fast and he never had time to put the plan in motion.
Neal had found himself comparing his and Kate's relationship against that beautiful photograph. Were they just as happy as the image the FBI agent and his wife presented? Were they just as in love? Neal was. Neal loved Kate. Neal worshiped Kate. Kate was his ideal, his fantasy, his soul mate. Their love was every passion filled word prose and poetry, every bold color and brushstroke, every glimmer and shine of every jewel. At least that's how Neal remembered it. But the fervor he felt in his search for his lost love told him that it wasn't a figment of his wild imagination, that it had been real, tangible, he just needed to find her and touch her again. He had spent almost four years straining to penetrate that half inch of plastic the separated their hands as they reached for each other. He had never succeeded. He would succeed now.
Honestly, Neal had expected Peter to be more sympathetic to his quest to find Kate. After all, Peter and Elizabeth's marriage had been his standard for love for the past seven years; surely the FBI agent knew what it was like to love with this kind of intensity. Instead Neal had found an ally in Peter's wife. After officially meeting the woman Neal could not figure out how his handler had ever convinced her to marry him but the con man was eternally grateful that he had. Elizabeth was classy, friendly, generous and perfectly willing to undermine her husband's authority. Kate would have adored her.
A soft knock on the door interrupted his somewhat angst-ridden thoughts. Only one person would knock so politely at this time of night. June's warm and smiling face at his doorway confirmed his thoughts. His landlady and pseudo caretaker was holding a tray of what smelled like hot chocolate and- were those chocolate chip cookies? God, if June kept this up he would never be able to leave.
"Good evening, dear. I couldn't sleep and saw your light."
Neal let a genuine smile show and stepped aside to let the lady in.
"You're always welcome, June. It is your house."
The two socialites, well one socialite and one ex-convict particularly good at pretending to be a socialite, sat at the table.
"No Harvesham tonight?"
"No, not tonight." Neal bit into a cookie- heavenly, just like they smelled- and then perched his chin on his hand, fixing the older, elegant lady with a lazy grin. "Tell me about how you and Byron met." June twittered and covered it up with a sip of hot chocolate.
"Oh, you don't want to hear about that."
Neal put on a mock offended expression, his hand to his heart and June laughed softly.
"Why, June, why would you deny me what is undoubtedly a wonderfully romantic story?" This elicited another laugh from his landlady, louder this time so Neal knew she would give in.
"Well, I was actually dating someone else at the time. His name was Jeremy Craven, a very nice man. He had taken me to this very swank dance club in the city. He had heard that Sinatra and his pack of friends frequented the place and wanted to impress me. I loved to dance and wasn't all that concerned with who was there or not." June let out a soft, delighted chuckle. "I was barely twenty. I just wanted to get on the floor. Well if Jeremy had one fault it was that he didn't have much stamina."
Neal wiggled his eyebrows at her suggestively and June swatted at him with one of the cloth napkins on the tray. "On the dance floor! Don't be fresh. Anyways, Jeremy and I were sitting at a table and this beautiful man saunters over from across the room and asks me to dance. I was a bit confused when Jermyn didn't put up a fight at all but then I saw he had come over from Sinatra's table and, well, Jeremy was a fan. Oh, Byron was a wonderful dancer. After the very first song he looked me straight in the eye and said: "Your boyfriend is going to be so sorry he let me dance with you; I plan on stealing you away from him." The older woman shook her head. "I laughed at him. I thought he was joking." June leaned back in her chair and gave a wistful sigh. "Oh, I loved him so very much." Neal watched her face fall from dreamy to sad and he covered one of her hands with his own. She was a kindred spirit, wounded by a lost love. The older lady put her other hand over his and smiled at him. "Thank you for insisting I tell you. Now drink your hot chocolate before it gets cold."
Lyn walked into her new office and set down her bag and green wool coat and inspected her new space. It was much smaller than Peter's, a loaner office but it would do just fine. The woman was testing out her chair when she spotted a lounging figure in her doorway. Neal Caffrey was standing with her door open, preparing to knock, which was a little unnecessary since he was already inside. Lyn fixed him with her friendliest smile.
"Good morning, Mr. Caffrey."
The con artist returned the smile.
"Good morning, Dr. Marrow. Peter wants to see us."
Lyn nodded and walked around her desk towards Caffrey's still lounging body. "Our first case together," the con man continued. "Are you ready to begin?"
Lyn couldn't help but let the ghost of a smirk to fall over her friendly smile.
"Absolutely."
