Disclaimer: They're not mine. I'm only borrowing them for the summer. Andrew Marlowe is doing a spectacular job. Way better than I could ever do.

Warning: Adult content

And All The Mornings Ever After

Chapter 11 – Promise Me

They don't have a nighttime routine.

No familiar ebb and flow of teeth brushing, face washing, undressing, or the shared folding down of comforters and sheets to ground them in an easy calm. They had none of that.

No. All they had was one memorable, frantic night together. A night when long-suppressed needs, and the raw anxiety floating right there on the surface finally overran them, those two feelings co-mingling in a tear-stained whirlwind of desire that left them clutching at one another, hearts beating wildly, fear and awe and surprise in their eyes and on their faces at what they'd just done.

In fact that was the thing Kate remembered most sharply about the previous night. The sound that had lodged in her brain when she woke up that morning - it was Castle's breathing. The short, shocked pants he had produced when she launched herself at him inside his front door. Then the fearful look in his eyes as he tried to hold himself away from her, his chest heaving with the effort while he forced her to explain her apparent sudden change of heart, his ragged breaths filling the space between them.

And then…oh, when the dam finally burst, his hot breath all over her; on her neck, her lips, in her mouth, on her breasts as he consumed her like a dying man gasping for air. Frantic, and needy, desperate, and passionate, all of it.

But tonight was different. The screaming panic had gone, subsided. They'd spent the day together, coping with Castle's daughter: her issues and concerns, tiptoeing around her mood. He'd nursed Kate's injuries, bathed her, held her when she fainted, put up with an inquisition from her best friend that she was sure she hadn't heard the worst of, and that was before you got to the domestic stuff – cooking dinner and laying the table together, the largely silent meal with Alexis, their heart-to-heart on his sofa, his painful need for reassurance through all of it.

So this was new for them, a gear change, a transition requiring careful handling. And now they were in his bedroom, the only light what was left of the day, filtering in through the blinds.

Castle walked to the nightstand, his back to her as he reached for the lamp.

Kate came up behind him, padding the wooden floor silently on bare feet. She molded herself to his back, drawing heat from his body into hers, slid one arm around his waist to splay her hand flat against his stomach, her mouth at his shoulder. With her other hand she reached past him to still his fingers on the switch, keeping the room in near darkness.

He turned in her arms to face her, his features strong and shadowed in the dim light of his very masculine bedroom.

"Kate, we don't have to do this tonight," he said quietly, his fingers lightly skimming her sides, making her shiver.

His eyes searched her face, loving and tender, without the desperate need she'd witnessed the night before.

"You might not," she said, staring up into his wide blue eyes, "but it's a little early to be speaking for both of us," she teased, burying her smile in the soft folds of his tee shirt.

She had tried for levity, but missed by a mile evidently, from the way he stared down at her then; his heart exposed, ripped wide open for her to see, eyes swimming with a mixture of love and pain and guilt.

"Kate, you're hurt," he murmured, pulling her to him, his hands sliding lightly over her bruised back to cradle her against him.

She turned her head to rest her cheek against his shoulder, allowing him to hold her there for a moment, breathing in time with him, aligning the rhythms of their hearts.

After a time, Kate pushed back a little, her hands on his waist as she twisted out of his embrace.

Confusion and hurt flared in his eyes, until Kate reached up on tiptoe and kissed his mouth, just once, gentle and reassuring, quelling his immediate assumption that she meant to reject him, or indeed that he had just rejected her by being too careful.

"Be right back," she said, patting his chest.

A flash of need flared inside her at the feel of his muscles under her hand. So good, what he could do to her, what she would let him do, what she wanted him to do. All of it, just so good.

In his office, on a couple of random shelves, she'd noticed two Diptyque candles when she'd lingered there earlier, studying his haven, the birthplace of Nikki Heat. She collected them now, gritting her teeth against the pain as she reached up for the higher of the two.

Figuier – The Fig Tree. She smiled to herself. It was just like Castle to ignore the traditional, for the exotic. No tuberose scent for him - too pedestrian, too obvious, lacking in imagination. That was the life she had let herself in for now, she realized with a jolt. A life filled with extraordinary. And how wonderfully appropriate that seemed.

When she reentered the bedroom with her loot, Castle had disappeared. The light under the bathroom door betrayed his location. Kate could hear the water running, and the quiet buzz of his electric toothbrush. He'd produced a spare for her last night – a spare head for his own toothbrush that was, rather than a manual one of her own. And the intimacy had seemed overwhelming at the time. Now she itched to get in there and bump hips and elbows with him as they worked around one another at his twin vanity.

Her need for space seemed to have evaporated along with her need for the job, for her badge and gun. 41319, 41319, she ran the familiar number around inside her head. We're more than a number. I'm more than a number, she thought, looking around the bedroom for some matches. She found a small, dark green and white matchbook from The Old Haunt lying in a bowl on the dresser, along with a set of Castle's cufflinks, a paperclip, and a single brass-collar stay.

She lit the candles quickly, putting one on his side of the bed, and then one on…hers? Did she already have a side? Kate pressed her lips together to suppress a smile. Maybe they were better at this than she feared.

When the bathroom door opened, and the light clicked off, Castle stopped on the threshold of the bedroom to stare.

Kate was sitting on the edge of the bed, still dressed, her hair falling loose around her shoulders, bare feet with pale toes stretched out in front of her.

The two candles sent shadows dancing across the walls and up over the ceiling of his room, turning it into a wonderful, exotically scented cocoon. She'd created this - a warm, intimate space in his cavernous, dark bedroom, and she'd done it all by herself…for them.

"Kate, this is…"

He looked around, blinking.

"Come here," she said, holding out her hands to him, standing as he approached her.

He came willingly, taking the hands she offered, before folding her up in his body entirely, his cheek resting against the top of her head, so warm and comforting.

"We haven't made the ideal start, and I can do nothing to change that. I can't alter the past, Castle," she breathed against his neck, pressing a kiss to his throat. "That's what I've learned over the last twenty-four hours. But the future starts now, and…and that I can do something about," she whispered, shivering against him.

"Make love to me?" she breathed, pressing her body against his as she stretched up to find his mouth, gentle and tender.

"Oh, Kate," he groaned, reaching down for her, his heart pounding as her warm, wet mouth opened over his.

Her lips were slick and soft. She slid them over his, startling him when her tongue slipped inside. His hips jerked at the wonderful, erotic stab of electricity that ran straight to his core. His reaction was instant, painful and brutal, and she felt it, his body's response to her. The things he had discovered she could do to him with just the brush of her lips, the wet heat of her mouth on his, they amazed him.

Kate stretched up once more, teasing his lower lip with her tongue. Then she allowed her body to slide down over his, capturing the moan that escaped his lips at the delicious friction of her pelvis brushing down over his arousal.

When she followed the motion with the stroke of her hand and the press of her fingers, his breath caught in his throat.

"My god, Kate. Slow down," he panted. "Slow down or this is gonna be over monumentally fast," he confessed, watching a wicked smile appear on her face.

"Fast, slow…we've got forever, Rick," she said, nipping at his earlobe as he walked her backwards until she sank down onto the bed.

"Yeah, and great as that sounds, I have my pride to think of. And I am not gonna have you reminding me forever how I couldn't keep it together long enough to get us both there on only our second time."

"Too much talk, Castle, not enough action. And far too many clothes," she added, plucking playfully at the waistband of his sweat pants.

Her chest heaved beneath her tee shirt as she slipped her fingers under his shirt to drag her nails over his skin. He shivered despite the heat flaring in his eyes.

"Are you sure about this because I totally…"

Kate smothered the rest of whatever it was he'd been about to say with another hard press of her mouth over his.

"Rick," she panted, pulling him down on top of her as she sank to the mattress, "I need this. Need you," she added, reaching up to gently stroke her fingers along the hard line of his jaw.

The weight of him on top of her was beyond anything she could remember. He nodded silently, kissing her eyelids one-by-one, her cheekbone, her jaw, her ear. His lashes brushed her skin, tickling, and she squirmed beneath him, feeling the sharp intake of breath as her hips circled his, pressing up against him, so that he rocked down to meet her.

Castle pulled back long enough to slide his hands underneath her shirt, gently skimming her ribs, trying to avoid the tender spots he had committed to memory earlier in the day.

"No, off," commanded Kate, arching her back so that he could tug the cotton shirt up over her head, leaving her in just her black lace bra. "Pants too," she muttered, lifting her hips for him, as her tongue worked circles against his neck, flicked his earlobe, and then her lips made contact with his clavicle, sucking lightly until he moaned out loud.

"Thank god for sweat pants," he mumbled, skimming her ass and thighs with the soft jersey fabric on their way to oblivion, in a heap on his bedroom floor.

"Now you," mumbled Kate, tugging at his pants again.

"In a hurry, Detective?" he teased, delighted by her need to get at him.

All this time, he'd hoped and prayed that he was reading this right – their chemistry, the looks they'd shared, the innuendo, the teasing. But this…this was amazing - a dynamite mixture of lust and love, knowledge and understanding; something far greater and more special than he had ever experienced before. Because their brains had connected before anything else. That spark between them had been there from the beginning, and now they'd ignited it, there would be no dimming that flame.

"Castle," she moaned, reaching for him as he pulled away to rid himself of his shirt, the cool air between them suddenly chilling her skin.

"Right here," he whispered in her ear, closing his body over her once more, while eerie shadows licked and flickered on the walls all around them.

Castle tugged at her bra strap with his teeth, sliding it down her arm slowly while looking into her eyes, a playfulness dancing there.

"Tease," she mouthed, sending her fingers skimming over the smooth, hard curve of his ass beneath the fabric of his boxer shorts, eliciting a moan of pleasure and a buck of his hips.

"God, Kate, you're gonna kill me," he husked.

"No, I have plans for you," she murmured back, forcing his shorts down his thighs.

He kicked them off the rest of the way, and then he turned his attention back to Kate, lying back on his bed dressed only in her black bra and a pair of his boxer shorts. Unbelievably stunning.

He gazed at her, smoothed his fingers through the softly waved hair at her temple, gentle and reverent.

Kate sighed and turned into his hand, pressed her lips to his palm and let her eyes drift closed. When he kissed her, her lashes fluttered open once more and she stared, unashamedly at him, his manhood; hard and aroused, pressed between them.

"Waiting for something?" she prompted, lifting her hips again in suggestion.

He grinned at her then, skimming his thumbs across her nipples, watching them stiffen under the lace of her bra, then he trailed his fingers down her torso, lightly brushing her stomach, so careful, so gentle that Kate moaned in frustration, and arched under his touch.

Castle took the hint, and flicked his tongue in a wide circle around her belly button, then captured the elastic of her shorts with his teeth and began the slow descent down over her hips. He dragged her underwear off smoothly, letting it drop to the floor beside his own, before crawling up over her body, where she lay submissively splayed against the mattress.

Her hair had fanned out over his dark, rust colored sheets, and her skin glowed a milky caramel in the warm light provided by the candles. She shivered as he skimmed his fingers over her stomach, close to the dark bruise on her left hand side, and he frowned, his eyes clouding at her pain.

"I won't break, Castle," she whispered, guiding him back down on top of her.

She moaned as he pushed the black lace fabric of her bra aside to circle her nipple with his tongue. The warm wetness of his mouth as he sucked lightly against her skin sent sparks showering behind her eyelids. Kate's fingers ran through his hair as she held his head there, over her breasts while he lavished them with attention. He kissed the scar between them gently, closing his eyes, fingers flexing on her waist as she set up a slow, writhing rhythm between them with her hips.

"Castle," she moaned in complaint.

He laughed.

"I get it, Kate. Such a bully," he muttered in amusement, rising up on his knees above her.

"Such a slacker," she fired back, running her hands up and down his naked back.

When she looked back down between them, there was no question that he was ready. None at all.

"Okay, maybe not such a slacker," she smirked, "just…please?" she whined.

"Are you begging me, Kate?" he teased, his mouth pressing hot little kisses against her chest.

She snorted out a laugh, turning her head away from him and he dived for her exposed neck, sucking lightly on her skin.

"Are you?" he repeated, nudging her legs apart with his knee, and then running his free hand up along the inside of her thigh, slowly, until he was tantalizingly close to the spot she ached for him to touch.

"Okay. Okay. I might be begging," she panted desperately, squirming. "But just a little, and if you tell anyone I said thaaaa…" she moaned, as Castle reached for her, two fingers stroking her silky smooth wetness, making her arch beneath him as he slipped them inside.

"Dear God," he breathed, feeling the urgency in her movement, and just how aroused she was for him. "Kate, you're beautiful," he said, studying her face as she writhed against him.

"Castle. Castle, please? Now. Please?" she begged.

Yes, definitely begging now.

He didn't have to be asked twice. He lowered onto this elbows and guided himself inside her, gently, breathing out as he felt her tighten around him. He closed his eyes, just holding them there, still, wanting to feel everything. Everything that they'd been too rushed, too desperate, too broken to feel the night before in their haste to make things right between them.

Kate's fingers brushed his cheek, startling his eyes back open, and her smile set his heart soaring. She clenched her muscles around him, slowly arching her hips up towards him, the warm, lazy grin on her face making him twitch inside of her.

"You're extraordinary, Kate Beckett," he whispered against her mouth, sliding up over her body to a grateful moan.

They started to move together, building the tension between them at an achingly slow pace, watching each other through dark eyes. Kate's fingers roamed the muscles of Castle's back, skimming the twin mounds of his buttocks, and back up again, pressing him down into her when he became too careful with her bruised body.

The buzzing, aching need in her core tightened with every stroke, and she opened her legs wider to draw him in deeper.

Castle slid over her body, sweat slicking the skin between them as his mouth once more found her breast. He sucked at her nipple while Kate wound her arms around his neck, holding him there against her while he filled all of her, over and over again.

"I love you," she whispered in his ear, drawing him deeper inside of her, "I love you, Castle," she breathed, stunning him.

"God, you have no idea how much I love you," he croaked, assaulting her mouth with his lips, tongue, teeth nipping at her jaw, hands roaming all over her skin, frenzied and searing.

"Show me," she whispered in the flickering darkness.

So he did.

They began to move faster, building the rhythm, their breathing ragged and hearts pounding. Every thrust of Castle's hips drew a strangled moan from Kate's lips, the ache and the need reaching uncontrollable levels.

"So close," she gasped against his shoulder. "So close."

"Oh…oh god," moaned Castle. "You're…oh god, Kate. You're amazing," he choked, as she gripped him tighter.

"Castle, oh…I'm…oh god."

He pulled back to look into her eyes.

"Kate, love, let go," he whispered, feeling her tighten around him, her breathing ragged, her chest heaving as she clutched onto him, riding a wave of ecstasy that finally broke over her at the words he whispered in her ear.

Her eyes slammed shut, and she stilled her movement as the orgasm hit her, rising up to meet him again, once, twice, guiding him with her hands to prolong her own pleasure.

After several seconds, Castle felt the fluttering subside, and he rocked gently into her, brushing his lips over her brow and across her cheekbone until she opened her eyes for him, slowly coming down from her high.

Kate grinned, so pleased with herself, her cheeks flushed pink making her look younger and so very relaxed.

"Your turn," she murmured, arching up to press her lips to his mouth, teasing the crease of his lips with her hot, pink tongue. "Castle, come for me," she implored him, smoothing her hands back over the firm curved muscles of his buttocks, pressing him up and into her as their rhythm increased once more to the rocking of her hips.

In the end, her tongue was his undoing. The wicked way she pushed it inside his mouth and swirled it one way and then the next, mimicking the circling motion of her hips beneath him.

He flexed his fingers at her shoulders, and Kate bit back the gasp of pain that threatened to escape her throat at the pressure he unconsciously applied to a tender spot he accidently found on a particularly deep thrust. She squeezed her eyes shut, soothing herself with the smooth softness of Castle's skin under her fingertips, and the soft puffs of his breath feathering the skin next to her ear.

"Oh god, Kate."

His strangled cry told her he was there now. One thrust, then two, and then he stopped, holding his breath as he came, eyes screwed tightly closed, his lower lip pulled between his teeth, his face contorted in ecstasy while he completely lost control.

His hair flopped down over his forehead, and sweat glistened along the strong line of his neck and shoulders. His cheeks were flushed from the exertion, and Kate could see his heart pounding in his chest. He looked beautiful, and sexy, and adorable, and just so…indescribably handsome, that she thought she'd never get enough of seeing him like this. Coming apart in her arms and then bringing himself back down to earth until they were back together, fully aware of one another and their surroundings.

"Hey," whispered Kate, brushing the hair off his face. "Okay?" she asked tenderly, as Castle lowered himself gently over her, to press a kiss to her shoulder.

"Okay?" he panted, arching an eyebrow at her. "I might be a little older than you, Beckett. But there's life in the old dog yet," he grinned, yelping in surprise as she tightened her muscles around him once more.

"Show off," he muttered, giving her a delighted look.

"How about you? You okay?" he asked, rolling onto his side to lie next to her.

"Couldn't be better," replied Kate, reaching down to find his hand, lacing their fingers together and then lifting their joined hands to press a kiss to his knuckles.

"Thank you," she muttered, tugging the sheet up over their naked, rapidly cooling bodies as a shiver ran through her.

"You're seriously thanking me for that?" laughed Castle, in surprise.

"Shut up," huffed Kate. "I think you drugged me. I'm…a little out of it."

"Don't worry. Nothing you say can or will be taken in evidence," he parroted, earning himself a sideways glare from Kate and a tweak of his nipple.

"Oh, so now you've got me naked you're progressing from ears and noses to nipples. Ahhh, ah, Kate!" he squeaked, rolling away from her to protect his tender chest.

Kate followed him, curling her body around him, pressing her chest to his back, and her thighs down the line of his legs, wrapping her arms around his waist.

"That's better," he mumbled from the depths of his pillow, wriggling back against her to get the best fit.

"I love you," Kate said spontaneously, surprising herself.

She laughed. "And evidently I can't stop saying it," she grinned, cheeks flushing in the dark.

"I will never tire of hearing you say that. So please, don't ever stop," said Castle, rolling over in bed to face her.

"We're doing okay at this, aren't we?" he asked a little shyly, watching Kate's mouth curl into a broad smile.

"Oh, I'd say we're doing better than okay. But maybe I'm a little biased. I'm an unreliable witness right now, Mr. Castle," she murmured, leaning forward to kiss his smooth chest.

"Speaking of," said Castle carefully, watching her face. "Your resignation. We haven't really talked about that."

Kate's smile faded, not completely, but her expression became more neutral.

"Rick, please? Not tonight," she said quietly, running her hand up and down his arm.

"Okay, not tonight. But I want us to talk about it, Kate," he said, smoothing the pad of his thumb across her eyebrow, then along the curve of her lips.

"Deal," said Kate, kissing him gently. "We'll talk about everything. I promise. Just…let's have tonight. It'll all still be there in the morning," she said wisely, kissing him again.

Castle smiled at her, so thankful for her willingness to do this properly from now on.

"Hey, have I told you how much I love you?" he asked, grinning at her until she grinned back.

"If you're making fun of me I'll…" she squealed as he lunged for her, burying his mouth in her neck to blow a raspberry against her skin.

They fell apart laughing and panting onto their backs.

"I'll never make fun of you for loving me," he said, clutching at her hand. "Never, Kate. Do you hear?" he said earnestly.

"Me neither," she replied solemnly, humming to herself as the surge of endorphins subsided, and a drugging dose of oxytocin flooded her bloodstream, making her feel warm, and heavy, and sleepy.

"Best thing that ever happened to me. Falling in love with you," she murmured, snuggling into his side.

Castle kissed the top of her head, as a tear slipped down his cheek and he quickly swiped it away.

"Me too," he whispered, holding her close, listening to her breathing slow until she finally fell asleep beside him.

A/N: Thank you for the great reviews. Love to hear if you enjoyed that chapter too.