Author's Note: This is something of a transitional set-up chapter and I am not sure how well it turned out but I will leave that to you to decide.

Then Came Love

Chapter 44

Kate decided she would simply have to get over her aversion to reminders of Christmas, the decorations, all the talk of holiday shopping and vacations and (un)forced good cheer. Get over it–or more likely, since 'getting over it' hadn't happened in the last decade–ignore it, pretend she didn't feel it, anything so as not to dim Castle's own enjoyment in the season. She'd already gotten used to mostly tuning out and otherwise doing her best to ignore the holiday talk that went around the precinct–even cops talked about things like what gifts they were buying or what holiday plans they had. (Her all-about-business reputation and usual Detective Beckett shield at work helped as it generally minimized her co-workers trying to engage with her on the subject of the holidays so she was usually able to deflect any inquiries with cool, brief answers.)

Oddly–or not–it wasn't until now that she realized how much the Detective-Beckett façade she deployed while at work had softened lately, not only because of Castle but because of the baby. It was just… harder than usual to keep her true feelings about the holiday season hidden. But she had to, that was all there was to it.

As for the loft and its Christmas-store appearance, all she could think was that she would have to try to minimize the time she spent at the loft to the extent she could. Which wouldn't be at all easy, she knew. She knew enough about Castle and his parenting to know that he wouldn't be comfortable spending that many evenings and nights at her place so she couldn't really avoid the loft, short of avoiding spending time with Castle outside of the precinct and that wasn't going to happen. So that settled it. Getting over her issues with Christmas or just burying her emotions so deep they could never resurface were her best options.

And in the meantime, she would just have to try hard to limit the time she spent at the loft outside of Castle's wonderfully un-Christmas-y bedroom. Fortunately, that mental voice that sounded very like Lanie, commented, it wasn't a hardship to spend time in Castle's bed.

As for the actual days of Christmas Eve and Christmas, well, she had a couple weeks to prepare for that and if Montgomery didn't allow her to work the Christmas shift, she was considering suggesting to her dad that they go out to the cabin as he often did. Especially because she knew quite well she had enough overtime and vacation time built up that Montgomery would probably throw a party before pushing her physically out the door if she actually asked him to take an additional day or two off around then. Yes, she would do that if she couldn't work. For the moment, she clung to hope that Montgomery, knowing her tradition, would allow her to spend Christmas at the precinct, even with the admonition that she couldn't go out to a scene unless accompanied by whichever other cops pulled the short straw this year to get the Christmas shift. (The last few years, Espo had also volunteered for Christmas duty too–at least partially out of solidarity with her, she suspected, although he always insisted it was because he could use the holiday pay of time-and-a-half and in typical cop fashion, she'd pretended to believe him.)

The next evening, at least, she was allowed something of a reprieve because both Alexis and Martha had dinner plans and then Castle had arranged with Martha that she would be home after dinner to keep an eye on Alexis. (Kate had flushed, feeling self-conscious at knowing that Martha now knew exactly what she and Castle would be doing that night but tried not to dwell on it. Anyway, Martha was hardly some naive innocent.)

They didn't have an active case so she and Castle were able to leave the precinct at the end of her shift and returned to her undecorated apartment for dinner, a dinner of pasta and vegetables, which she and Castle worked together to prepare. It was such a domestic scene, an oddly intimate one, she couldn't help thinking, this kind of sharing and working together to prepare a meal. The only other person she'd ever cooked with had been… her mom, she realized with a quick pang–but not the usual sharp stab of loss the thought of her mom usually evoked at this time of year. And she suspected–no, she knew–that was because of Castle. The baby too, in a sense, but mostly because of Castle.

She slid a sideways glance at Castle, who was humming tunelessly to himself as he chopped up the vegetables with that surprising dexterity she had already noted. He was very good with his hands–and then flushed in spite of herself at the thought, the reminder–he was good with his hands in the kitchen and the bedroom. This dear, kind man, who irritated her at times, challenged her, supported her, and just… made her happy. Even at this hardest time of the year, even after being reminded, again, of cooking alongside her mom, she was, well, content.

She felt a sudden rush of warmth in her chest that had nothing (or very little) to do with lust and everything to do with emotion. And she could only hope that she could make him nearly as happy as he made her–she wasn't sure she could, with her issues, her painful past, her fears–but oh, she did hope she could make him happy.

But then, his tuneless humming resolved into a recognizable tune and something inside her clenched. It was "We Wish You a Merry Christmas," and even that ubiquitous holiday tune had her spirits dipping.

It was a reminder, not only of how much Castle clearly enjoyed the season, but of how much she, well, didn't. She hadn't had a merry Christmas in the last decade. The last time she and her dad had tried to "celebrate" Christmas in any real sense, with a tree and some form of a festive meal, had been the first Christmas after her mom's death and it had been a brutal failure. Her dad had drunk himself into a stupor; the meal she'd tried to make had ended up ruined because of her own inattention, and after manhandling her dad into bed to sleep off the alcohol, she'd ended the day curled up on the couch of her apartment sobbing.

The memory had her inwardly flinching and for a moment, she found herself wondering if this was a sign that she and Castle didn't really belong together, they were so different, not only in this but in other ways too. No, oh no, she couldn't think like this, didn't want to think like this. After all, as her dad had pointed out, he and her mom had been different people too and they had been happy together–so happy together.

She wanted to be with Castle, wanted to make it work, wanted to believe she could make it work.

And if that meant hiding all her dread of this season, the way her stomach twisted at the sight of Christmas decorations–well, she would do it. She would not–could not–allow herself to ruin this holiday season he so clearly loved. And from next Christmas on, she would have the Sprout to think about and she couldn't inflict her own issues on the baby. She remembered, oh so vividly and so poignantly, how much her own much-younger self had enjoyed Christmas and she wanted that for the baby too.

For about the millionth time, she thought that she was so glad to be doing this with Castle, so glad to know that the baby would have Castle as a father, Castle to inculcate all the wonder and sense of fun that was so much a part of him.

On a sudden impulse, she shifted closer to slide her arms around his waist, pressing a kiss to his shoulder blade through the fabric of his shirt.

He stiffened a little in surprise, his humming breaking off, but then immediately relaxed into her embrace, his hands stilling on the knife, one of his hands coming up to hold her arm. "Hey, you," he murmured. "What was that for?"

She gave him a small smirk. "Do I need a reason?"

He huffed a laugh. "No, you definitely don't. Just let me finish up with these vegetables and then we can make out."

She hid her smile against his shirt. "Very smooth, Castle."

"I try."

He suited action to the words, finishing cutting the vegetables and then washing his hands, before he turned back to her, looping his arms around her waist and dropping a kiss on her nose, teasingly, before he settled his mouth over hers.

Of course, because they were in the middle of making dinner, they couldn't actually kiss for long but it was hard to feel very disappointed because they did, after all, have the rest of the evening, to say nothing of the night.

They took advantage of the privacy of her apartment–the one benefit it had over the loft–as they exchanged kisses even as they ate dinner and curled up on the couch afterwards to watch some TV, some random program on the National Geographic channel about zebras, although Kate found her attention wandering, distracted by the way Castle was idly playing with her fingers, tracing her fingers with his and then drawing lazy patterns on her palm. It really was amazing and absurd, how she swore she could feel his touch radiating heat from her palm all the way through her body, settling low in her stomach. How could he do this to her, with just a touch to her hand?

She bit the inside of her lip and tried not to squirm or otherwise shift her weight or betray herself but then she glanced at him. Wait. His eyes were fixed on the TV but she knew him and she caught the faintest upward tilt at the corners of his lips, recognized the set of his jaw. Oh. Oh, the sneaky little… this wasn't some absent-minded caress; he was trying to get her worked up. And succeeding.

Well, two could play at that game.

She let her free hand drop casually onto his knee, feeling the faint quiver of reaction go through him. She let her hand rest on his knee, unmoving, for a few seconds but then she started making apparently idle patterns on his knee over the denim of his jeans, her nail tracing the inseam of his jeans.

She could feel the slight increase in tension in his body and sternly bit back a smile as she went on slowly, very slowly, trailing her finger up along the inseam of his jeans along his thigh. She'd only made it halfway up his thigh before he jerked. "Beckett," he managed in a half-strangled groan.

Ha, she'd won since he'd reacted first. She turned her head to look at him with as much of a show of innocence as she could muster. "Hmm?"

It didn't work as his eyes narrowed slightly. "You're evil, you know that."

"You started it, with your oh-so-idle caresses of my palms."

"I was being subtle but then you upped the ante!"

"What did you expect me to do?"

He opened his mouth and then closed it again and then they were both grinning and then laughing and then kissing and she had no idea if she'd made the first move or he had, not that it mattered since they were both winners at this game. And her last fuzzy thought before she stopped thinking altogether was that she'd never known that seduction, this kind of lovers' game, could be so fun. Never known that a relationship could include such silliness that somehow didn't feel all that silly after all.

And later, much later, as she lay in her bed, waiting for her heartbeat to slow, with Castle's recumbent form draped around her, she found herself thinking that at least when she was with Castle like this, she couldn't doubt that they fit together somehow. Maybe it was only about how (very) good the sex was but at least at that moment, she had to wonder if the rightness she felt when she was with Castle like this meant something. It had to mean something, didn't it? She wasn't sure and as she drifted to sleep, she was still wondering.


The next day proved to be another paperwork day and at the end of her shift, she gave in to Castle's pleading look and agreed to have dinner at the loft with him and his family. She could only hope that being forewarned about the explosion of Christmas decorations at the loft would help keep her emotional armor in place.

As it was, she was braced for the emotional impact of being in the loft again. Its very homey-ness, the warmth of its atmosphere in spite of the undeniable luxury of it, had always attracted her and rather pained her in somewhat equal measure but the addition of the Christmas decorations had tipped the scales towards pain. It was just this season, the winter chill, but more than that, the hectic nature and stress of the holidays that made crime rates go up at this time of year, and most of all, it was the thought of her mom, the memory of her mom, so much more poignant at this time of year with the anniversary of her mom's death fast approaching.

Because she was so focused on tamping down and hiding her roweling emotions, she knew her greetings to Alexis and Martha were rather stiffly formal, as if she were greeting people she was barely acquainted with rather than people she genuinely cared about and who had become important to her. She inwardly winced at the flicker of surprise followed by some reserve in Alexis's eyes as a consequence but could only be thankful, for once, for Martha's characteristic exuberance. Because the warmth of Martha's greeting more than made up for any stiffness in Kate's.

That evening especially, Kate found herself more than once grateful for Martha's presence because Martha was at her vibrant best, a magnet for attention. And when combined with Castle's usual teasing barbs at his mother mixed in with Alexis's milder rejoinders, there was hardly a chance for Kate herself to speak much and it was hard to dwell on her own emotions when surrounded by such a lively familial conversation.

They were still finishing up dinner when Kate's phone rang and she acknowledged Castle's rueful look with a small twist of her lips before she stood up, taking a few steps away from the table to answer the call. "Beckett."

She wasn't surprised to find that it was Dispatch calling about a body that had just been discovered, the scene in the process of being secured. She hadn't spoken much, only said, "Yes," a few times, but when she ended the call and turned back to the table, it was to find that Castle was already on his feet, apparently preparing to leave.

"We have a new case," she announced unnecessarily before adding apologetically to Alexis and Martha, "I'm sorry to have to run out like this."

"Don't worry about it," Alexis quickly assured and Martha too waved a dismissive hand. "Nonsense, Katherine, of course we understand about your work."

"You don't mind cleaning up, do you, pumpkin?" Castle asked more rhetorically than not, dropping a kiss on Alexis's hair.

Alexis gave her dad a reassuring little smile. "It's fine, Dad, I'll take care of it."

Thanks to Alexis's and Martha's understanding, she and Castle were able to get on their way to the crime scene in a matter of minutes.

"So, do we have any idea what we've got?"

"You know Dispatch doesn't provide details. All I know is that the body was discovered about two hours ago when a man was taking out the trash. The body had been hidden behind the trash can."

"Talk about an excuse to avoid taking out the trash ever again, the trauma alone would probably guarantee it," Castle commented.

She made a small moue of understanding but didn't comment. It was something that often got overlooked in the focus on the victims but typically for Castle, he didn't forget the collateral damage that was often done to the unlucky people who discovered the body. And as she of all people knew, the first sight of a dead body and one who'd died by violence, was not easily forgotten.

As usual, the flashing lights gave her warning of when they were nearing the crime scene and she parked just outside the police barricades that were set up roughly around the immediate canvassing area, nodding a greeting at the uniform as she flashed her badge, more out of habit than necessity since she recognized the uniform–Costello was his name–and he obviously knew who she was.

She swept her gaze around in automatic surveillance of the area, a little confused because she couldn't spot either Esposito or Lanie or even Perlmutter. She saw Ryan so she knew Espo had to be here but he wasn't visible.

"Where's Espo?" Castle muttered in an aside, as if he'd read her thoughts.

"I was just wondering that," she returned in a murmur as she headed towards Ryan, who looked over and nodded at them both before making a little gesture with his head that confused her until she drew closer and realized what he'd meant and why she hadn't seen Espo.

She and Castle stopped beside Ryan, finding herself looking down on the top of Lanie's head. The body had been found in one of those basement-level stoops that some of the older brownstones in the City had, this one clearly only used as a place for the trash cans. These basement-level entrances varied in depth but this one was clearly for a legitimate basement, a full flight of stairs down from the sidewalk.

The victim was a woman, she could see, but at that hour of the night and that distance, she couldn't tell much more than that. She took a step towards the staircase leading down but then paused, one hand immediately coming up to her stomach, as she felt the little fluttering sensation that was becoming more familiar to her.

Castle glanced at her. "Beckett, you okay?"

She looked up at him and reached out to grasp his hand, for once not caring that they were surrounded by cops. "She moved again."

His eyes brightened, dropping down to her stomach, his hand tightening around hers. "She did?"

She nodded, unable to keep from smiling, crime scene or not. She wondered if she'd ever reach a point where feeling the baby move wouldn't make her feel such a surge of emotion; she doubted it but at any rate, it certainly hadn't happened yet. It was still so new, an odd, surprising sensation, and this one was all the more surprising because it was the first time she'd really felt the baby move when she wasn't paying attention. Up until now, she'd only felt the baby move at night, when she was lying in bed, and while she wondered how much of it was a sign of the baby's nocturnal habits, she guessed, more prosaically, that it was also because that was when she was paying more attention. During the day, when she was working or otherwise, she was distracted, had other things on her mind so she could imagine that she might miss the little fluttering sensation, as faint as it still was.

"Yo, Beckett, you here to work or not?"

Espo's sardonic inquiry snapped her back to a remembrance of their surroundings and she blinked and again moved towards the staircase, keeping her hand in Castle's, partly because she was reluctant to let go immediately but also using the stairs as an excuse since her growing stomach was making her more ungainly, things like stairs more of a challenge.

"Nice of you to join us," Espo greeted them with a look at their joined hands but she knew him well enough by now to recognize he was hiding a smile and only keeping up with the usual cop routine.

She gave him a look before turning to Lanie. "What have we got?"

Lanie glanced up at her, her eyes landing on Kate's hand still holding Castle's and the faintest smirk just appeared at the tip of her lips, before she refocused on the body. "Vic's a Caucasian female, in her 40's, I'd estimate. Right now, my guess is there was a struggle of some sort and she was pushed and fell down the stairs." She carefully lifted the woman's head.

Kate inwardly grimaced as she slowly crouched down, another thing that was becoming much more of a challenge, so she needed to rely on Castle to help her keep her balance. As Lanie had noticed, the back of the victim's head was bloody, a pool of blood having formed on the concrete too, and Kate quickly averted her eyes as her stomach quailed. She focused on the rest of the victim's body, noting the signs of a struggle consistent with Lanie's guess, along with the absence of any jewelry, no watch either. "She's well-dressed," she observed.

"Her clothes are designer brands, expensive," Castle commented almost at the same time as if he'd read her thoughts.

She nodded in acknowledgment before glancing up at Espo. "Looks like a robbery too. Any sign of a purse, an ID to tell us who she is?"

"Unis are still canvassing," Espo answered her.

So that was a no. Kate returned her gaze to Lanie. "Anything else?"

"I'll know more when I get her back to the lab."

Castle stood up and Kate had to rely on his help to an irritating extent to get back upright herself. She didn't think she'd be able to crouch like this for much longer, something else that would make doing her job more difficult. Ugh.

She briefly spoke to the man who'd discovered the body, a Bryce Matson, but didn't spend more than a few minutes talking to him as it soon became clear that he really was just an unlucky bystander, was obviously distraught.

A Jane Doe case was always more difficult to start with but then, as Kate and Castle reached the top of the stairs, she heard one of the unis give a faint shout. Maybe if they were lucky… And they were.

The uniform–Menendez–came jogging up a minute later, holding up a wallet but no purse. The wallet, it turned out, had an ID but was otherwise empty, no cash or credit cards, so this had been a robbery, at least of some sort. The victim proved to be a Beatrice Schaeffer, 46 years old, with an address in the Upper West Side.

She met Castle's eyes. "One more stop before calling it a night?"

His lips lifted slightly. "You have to ask?"

She hid a smile and told the boys where they were heading while the boys continued to oversee the canvassing of the crime scene. But mindful of Montgomery's strictures, she asked Menendez to accompany her and Castle to the vic's apartment, although once they arrived, she directed him to knock on doors along the hallway where the vic lived. Knowing New Yorkers, she wasn't necessarily expecting he would learn much but maybe he would catch a lucky break.

But the moment the super let them into the vic's apartment, Kate found her steps almost faltering. Shit, she hadn't thought of this. The victim's apartment was decorated for Christmas too. She was usually better able to tamp down any of her automatic reaction to seeing a home decorated for Christmas but this year, she was finding it harder than usual. Maybe it was hormones or maybe it was this sense that time was running out for her to find a way to actually get over her negative reactions to Christmas and all the holiday trappings that made her emotions seem stronger this year.

She was working, damn it! And she was a grown-up and a homicide detective! She could not–flatly refused–to quail over something like Christmas decorations. She forced herself to enter the apartment. "Nice place," she commented, trying to make it seem as if her momentary pause had been her usual sweeping glance around. As it was, she did her initial sweep now, trying to focus on anything that might immediately jump out, aside from the Christmas decorations. Although that wasn't easy because the inevitable brightness of the decorations, the colors, made the Christmas tree and the festive silver garland draped around the windows the inevitable focal point.

"Whatever the victim did for a living, she was clearly not struggling," Castle agreed.

There was a small desk in one corner as a sort of makeshift home office and Kate headed there first, sternly ignoring the twisting of her stomach because the desk just had to be situated next to the Christmas tree. Someone's desk was always a good starting point to find out more about them–even if she didn't end up finding a murder weapon in it as she had last week in Jeremy Preswick's desk–and she wasn't going to change her routine now to cater to her own irrational, stupid emotions.

A look into a couple of the desk drawers revealed one important fact: the fact that the victim had been a nurse, working in a doctor's office, it looked like. "The vic was a nurse," she told Castle.

"Explains the medical references in her bookshelves," was his comment. Trust Castle to go first to the bookshelves.

"Mm," she gave a murmur in acknowledgment that got caught in her throat. Oh. Oh god. She stilled. In looking up from the desk drawers, one of the ornaments on the tree had caught her eye and she stared, feeling as if a cold hand had suddenly grasped her heart. And it was so… silly, such an absurd thing to react so strongly to because all it was, was an ornament, a cute ornament, of a ceramic teddy bear dressed in a Santa Claus outfit, without the beard, just the red clothes and hat, and holding a little sign that featured the legend, Have a Bear-y Merry Christmas.

Her family had the same ornament–or at least, this one looked basically identical to what she remembered of their ornament, considering she hadn't actually seen it in ten years. But she recognized it, remembered the ornament. Her mom had loved the ornament because it was one Kate's childish self had picked out herself. Kate found herself swamped with memories. She didn't really remember picking out the ornament herself but she knew the story well enough from her mom's retellings of it. She must have been around 6 or so at the time and her childish self had somehow found the play on words of the phrase, Bear-y Merry Christmas, to be hilarious, maybe because at the time her younger self had still been learning about word play and things like that–not that she supposed there needed to be a real logical reason for a child finding anything funny. Her mom had bought the ornament for the young Katie and every year afterwards, referred to that ornament as "Katie-bear's Special Ornament," making a show of having Kate be the one to hang it on the tree. It might have even been the start of her mom's using Katie-bear as a pet-name but Kate couldn't remember for sure.

But oh, she could picture it all so easily, picture her mom handing the ornament to her with one of her bright, whimsical smiles (that had edged into teasing as Kate grew older) and saying something like, "Time to hang your Special Ornament, Katie-bear." Kate had rebelled against being called Katie-bear when she'd been around 10 and after that, her mom had stopped using it, except sometimes, at Christmas, because of that ornament.

And oh god, she remembered now that the last Christmas she'd had with her mom, that Last Christmas Ever (as she thought of it), her parents had mostly decorated the tree already by the time she'd returned home for the holidays from Stanford but even so, that first evening at home, her mom had made a point of handing that ornament to her, saying, "We saved hanging your Special Ornament for you, Katie."

And she–she had been so annoyed and so bad-tempered about it, about being treated like a little kid when she was, as she'd believed, so much an adult, in college and all. She had huffed and scowled and not even tried to hide her disgruntlement as she'd reluctantly and carelessly hung the ornament on the tree, barely bothering to look at it. Her mom had sighed a little but then had changed the subject. Kate remembered it now with a sharp stab of guilt and grief–oh god, if she could have kicked her own younger self, she would have–because now, she thought, she would give everything she owned just to have her mom there, calling her Katie-bear and insisting she hang her "Special Ornament."

"Say, Beckett, why don't you decorate your place for Christmas?"

The question startled her–both too on point and too painful–and she reacted without thinking, her surprise and her struggle to keep her emotions in check making her tone sharp, sharper than she'd used with Castle since the earliest days of their working together. "Stop talking nonsense and focus on the case."

She caught a flash of mingled surprise and hurt flicker across his expression before he took her at her word. "I'm going to have a look in the bedroom," he told her, his tone more clipped than usual.

Shit. Kate blew out a breath, shutting her eyes for a moment against the stupid prick of tears at the back of her eyes. First the ornament and now, snapping at Castle–hurting Castle. And she was clear-headed enough to admit that she'd over-reacted, lashed out at him unfairly. It was just… the whole season, the memories of her mom, her struggle with her own emotions. Christmas, the decorations, the reminders of her mom–they were all an open wound and when someone, anyone, ventured too close to the sore spot, she lashed out like a wounded animal. She knew she did. It just… hurt and she missed her mom and her emotions were running much closer to the surface than they usually did these days, with the baby and the holidays and everything. It wasn't a justification but she also couldn't seem to stop it, even as she abruptly hated herself.

She'd told herself just the other night that she wanted to make Castle happy and now, what had she done? She would just have to make it up to him–and try harder to keep stern control over her emotions. She didn't want to do anything to diminish Castle's own enjoyment of the holidays–it wouldn't be fair to him–so she would just have to do better, that was all.

She took in and let out a few deep breaths, pulling up her usual Detective Beckett armor.

"Beckett, come take a look at this." She heard Castle's voice, recognized the note in it that said he'd found something that had set his brain to working. And as usual, it kindled an answering spark of intrigue inside her because when it came to cases, they did work well together.

She headed to the bedroom, noting quickly that it looked like the vic had left in a hurry earlier, with the closet door open. Castle was standing in front of the vanity, looking down at, she guessed, the victim's jewelry box.

She moved to join him, blinking a little at the glittering contents of the jewelry box. The victim had owned a lot of jewelry. But wait, how could she have afforded all this? Kate didn't know for sure how much nurses in a doctor's office made but she couldn't imagine most nurses grew wealthy from their jobs. Maybe the jewels were fake, a lot of flash without the actual monetary value?

But as if in answer to her thought, Castle bent and fingered a diamond bracelet at the top. "These are real and I'm guessing most, if not all, of the rest are real too."

"Are you sure?" she asked, more because she felt she needed to, considering the significance of the find, than because she doubted him.

He nodded, his lips twisting a little. "I've been married twice and that was almost as good as an apprenticeship in the jewelry business."

Oh. Well, that… said rather more about both his marriages than he'd ever revealed before. But now wasn't the time or place to comment so what she said was, "So the question is, how could she afford all this?"

"It does look like she's living above her means. So… family money or a rich boyfriend? Maybe she won the lottery?"

At any other time, she might have made some teasing quip about his winning-the-lottery suggestion but this time, she didn't. She gave him a small smile. "This was a good find, thanks. It gives us an angle to look into from tomorrow and money's always a good motive."

"I can be helpful."

She quickly reached out and hooked a couple of her fingers around his. "You are helpful, Castle. You help a lot." It was easier to tell him this truth and she hoped he understood that she meant the words as an apology too.

His expression softened, the set of his lips easing into something approaching his usual jaunty smirk and tone. "Well, I am pretty brilliant, if I do say so myself. I–"

But whatever he'd been about to say was cut off as they heard a knock on the door and then the sound of Officer Menendez's voice. "Detective Beckett?"

She briefly squeezed his fingers before releasing his hand as they both left the victim's bedroom, meeting Menendez at the door. "Any luck, Menendez?"

His report was negative–the victim had mostly kept to herself and many of the neighbors apparently hadn't so much as known the victim's name, in typical New Yorker fashion. She nodded and asked him to wait as she called CSU to come process the vic's apartment since they would need to take at least the jewelry into evidence as a possible red flag.

After that, she and Castle were finally ready to call it a night but considering her lingering upset over the victim's Christmas tree–and that ornament–she didn't feel quite able to face the excess of holiday decoration that was the loft and claimed tiredness, which was true enough, as her reason for not going back to the loft with him.

She softened the refusal with a kiss and was happy and relieved to see that his eyes were once again their usual deep, clear blue when the kiss ended.

But if she'd expected that returning home to her undecorated apartment would make the night easier, it didn't happen quite that way. It was only easier in the one sense of not having any holiday decorations to pain her but it wasn't entirely comfortable either. She just didn't like sleeping in her bed without Castle in it. Her bed felt too big, too cold. Which was ridiculous but somehow, after even just a small handful of nights with Castle, it felt different. She was different. And reluctantly, she had to admit that she slept better when she was with Castle. It was silly, absurd even, but for all that, it was also true.

~To be continued…~

A/N 2: As always, thank you to all readers and reviewers, especially the guest reviewers whom I can't thank directly.