Kate blinked and flipped open her cell phone. "New case, Gibbs?"
"Nope."
Shifting the device from one ear to the other, she set down her sketchpad and pulled the comforter up a little more over her pajama-covered torso. "All right… what's this about?"
His voice was almost strained as he spoke. "You shouldn't say stuff like you did today, Katie."
"You started it." It was easy to say, and true.
"I started—" He stopped in the middle of his protest, and she heard his slow inhale and exhale.
"Gibbs." She swallowed, herself. "Jethro. I don't—I have no intentions of playing the seductress. But it doesn't have to be like this."
There was a pause, and then: "Why'd you resign from the Secret Service, and then still take the job here, Kate?"
Frank honesty was an easy decision. "It was the right thing to do, but I also resigned because I didn't want to get fired. Once it got out that I had been seeing Major Kerry..." She didn't even bother finishing the sentence.
"But in the Secret Service, my job was to protect the president. My attention would have been divided when I was on duty with Tim, and in a life-or-death situation... Here, I figured it wouldn't be the worst thing to protect my fellow agents first and foremost."
"Is your attention divided here?" he barked.
"While we're on a case? Hardly. I can investigate just fine alongside someone I've slept with." She sat up a little more in the bed, almost insulted."Unlike, DiNozzo, I can control my libido. Is your attention divided?"
"Of course not."
She believed him. This was the legendary Special Agent Gibbs, after all.
"Then where is the problem? We work fine together. We can inform HR about the situation, if you want to be completely upfront about it. Are you going to start showing me some kind of partiality at work?"
"No." He sounded almost annoyed now. Good. Now he knew how it felt.
"Then what is your problem with seeing me?" She exhaled, loudly. "You know what? Forget it. I'm not going to try to drag you someplace you obviously don't want to go. But then stop making me think you want to go there."
"I'll be there in fifteen minutes." He hung up abruptly, leaving her with her mouth open and her heart racing.
Damn infuriating man. Well, she wasn't going to change clothes for him.
She did, however, deign to meet him at the door, even if he did already have a key.
He leaned down to kiss her the moment she opened the door, wrapping his arms around her. It was almost impossible not to melt, but she managed to not completely dissolve into a puddle at his feet.
She pulled away after a moment, setting a hand on his chest, the taste of bourbon bitter on his lips and hers. "Come in and close the door."
"I'm pretty damn terrible at relationships, Katie." It was low, and dark, with a dangerous amount of conviction.
"I figured. You hate to compromise and you're not used to thinking of anyone besides yourself on a personal level anymore." She turned back towards her bedroom, unbuttoning her top, and asked off-handedly, "Do you want anything to drink?"
"Not really, no." He paused, then came: "What do you mean, 'anymore'?"
She bit her lip, stopped walking, turned to look at him. "I imagine you were quite considerate towards your first wife and daughter—as much as is possible in the Marine Corps, but then you were going to retire, weren't you?"
His hand was on her shoulder, hot against her bare skin where the top had begun to slip off, and then he jerked it away as if he had been scalded.
His narrowed, storm-filled eyes flicked between her face and her partially bared chest, before she self-consciously fastened one of the top buttons again, and he turned his head away, swallowing.
"You think the Secret Service didn't go over your file and anything else we could get our hands on with a fine-toothed comb before we let you on Air Force One?"
She stood a step back to give him space and the wall was hard at her back. Straightening, she splayed her fingers over the smooth surface of the striped wallpaper she had never gotten around to replacing when she had moved in, almost bracing herself against it.
"I'm sorry. I never meant to bring it up before you did. If you ever did." She spoke softly.
He swallowed again, nodding. "I think I'll take that drink. Do you have any bourbon?"
"I can start stocking it." Her buttons didn't quite match up, and she had to undo the hastily fastened one from earlier, attempting to keep her voice steady. "Would cognac do for now?"
"Didn't peg you for the hard liquor type at all." His voice was low behind her as she pulled a glass out of the cabinet.
"Usually I'm not. But I kept some around for Tim."
On second thought, she got out another glass for herself. The bottle was already open from several weeks ago, when she had had a drink or two (and then been fucked senseless and spent the night at her future boss' house).
He downed half of the generous portion she gave him in one gulp, and leaned on the counter with one hand. "Thanks."
She nodded, filling the other glass with water for herself, watching him. "You're welcome."
"I wasn't expecting..."
"Of course not. I didn't mean to bring it up."
"You didn't really." He took a deep breath. "Why'd you ask me how many exes I had?"
"When did I do that?" She took a sip, trying to recall the conversation.
"First time we talked on the phone. You asked me how many ex-wives I'd had."
She was surprised he remembered, but then she really shouldn't have been. "I wanted to see what you'd tell me. Which was exactly nothing, as I recall."
"I'm not exactly a chatty person."
"No, really?" She offered him a smile to soften the nip of sarcasm. He returned a small one.
They both drank in silence, him sipping his liquor as she gulped her water, and then he set down his glass.
She took a deep breath and set hers down, too. "I'll try not to pry. I would have preferred to hear about everything from you—I still would like to hear it from you, whenever you're ready—but I can't un-know something."
He lifted one shoulder. "Makes things a little easier. I don't have to worry you don't really know who you're looking at."
"No, you don't."
It was a stupid decision, maybe, if she actually thought about it. But his lips on hers were soft and surprisingly gentle, and she didn't really care.