Title: Baring It All
Author: Tom's gg
Chapter: 4/?
Chapter Title: Apologize
Characters: Brennan/ Booth
Rating: M - Strong Sexual Content
Spoilers: none

I do not own the characters- that distinction belongs to FOX… but God I wish I did!

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Ho Ho Ho… and a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. (Can you tell I'm off work?! Big Smile)

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Temperance Brennan was snapped back to reality by a throbbing in her right jaw. She felt the sting as another blow landed squarely.

"You stupid bitch… who the hell are you? Are you a cop?" a darkened figure loomed over her administering the blows in between his expletive filled diatribe.

"We're fucking surrounded. It looks like they've got the fucking cavalry out there," he raged. He moved away from her chair and began to pace the darkened room, careful to avoid the windows.

Brennan attempted to keep as still as possible while digging through the recesses of her mind for an explanation to her predicament. She remembered having dinner with Booth on the balcony of the hotel; then… a night of passion. The thought of it made her flush even in her present state. She had woken to find him gone. Where was Booth? One minute he'd been lying next to her and the next she was being gagged and drugged.

Her heart began to race as the vision of Booth lying unconscious or dead on the bedroom floor burned itself into her eyelids. She would kill this bastard.

She began to try to work at the ropes that were binding her when the figure approached again. He must have noticed the movement, or the change in the rhythm of her breathing. As he ripped the tape from her mouth Brennan let out a sob.

"Where is my friend?" she hissed.

"Your friend- HA," he smirked, "he left you in the middle of the night. They all leave you. You always go for the pretty boys. I offer you love, and you give yourself to them. They use you and they throw you away."

Brennan barely comprehended most of what he was saying… Booth left? How was that possible? Booth wouldn't just leave her in the middle of the night. "What did you do to my friend," she repeated.

"Who the hell are you?" he growled, smacking her across the face again with his left hand.

"I'm your worst fucking nightmare," Brennan taunted. It was times like this that Booth would tell her not to provoke the lunatic. It was times like this that he would be here to protect her.

She knew in her heart that, unless he was dead, he was looking for her right now.

As the strangers hand careened off her face again she felt the pop of her jaw shifting out of place. Brennan realized that with a couple of more smacks like that her jaw would be broken.

The phone in the corner of the room began to ring. The stranger eyed it as though it were a coiled snake ready to strike. He yanked the cord from the wall, cutting it off in mid-ring.

"You should talk to them," Tempe said calmly. "I work with the FBI, and so does my friend… my partner. If you hurt him you're never gonna make it out of here alive. You need to tell them where Booth is." Her calm façade broke as the strain of desperation became apparent in her voice.

The stranger approached her again. "You don't get it do you," he hissed in her face. "He left you… they all leave you. That's what I've been telling you all along."

Brennan glimpsed the insanity behind the black irises, and for the first time she was truly afraid. She was afraid of all the things she hadn't had the chance to say yet… afraid that it was too late.

As the stranger pulled back his hand to hit her again a shot rang out in the darkness. The stranger gasped in surprise and fell to the floor. Tempe could feel the warm, stickiness of the blood that had spattered across her face. She felt the calm silence of fear creep across her body until he appeared from the darkness. Suddenly, she knew that everything was alright and she began to sob. Every muscled collapse in on itself, and she could no longer keep herself upright.

Booth ran to steady her before her chair toppled. He hadn't wanted to scare her, but he couldn't allow that lunatic to touch her one more time. She collapsed into him and sobbed, releasing all the tension that had built up.

Suddenly the room was swarming with bodies. Booth was being pulled away from her while the EMT checked her over. Another man spoke to Booth and took his gun. Brennan never took hers eyes off him. She couldn't believe he was standing there; he looked unharmed.

Booth didn't want to leave her side. He knew he had to explain everything that had happened. He knew that chances were she wouldn't understand. He'd done the only thing he knew to do… what he had to do, he'd protected her. All he wanted now was to be able to hold her again.

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Her silence was more frightening than the assault he had feared. He had expected her to rail at him for his betrayal. Instead she had listened in silence as he explained his manipulations.

He had known that the only way to keep her safe was to get the perp to strike sooner rather than later. Booth had engineered their little dinner rendezvous in hopes that he'd be watching. There had been five FBI units stationed close by, and the place had been wired.

Shortly after they went to bed Booth had made his move. He'd wanted to be sure the perp would see him leaving; and then he waited. It didn't take long. They'd been on top of the guy as soon as the window alarm was triggered. They watched scrupulously as he took Brennan out of the apartment, following closely.

When Booth set this up, the previous afternoon at the lab, he was told they would need to allow the perp to take her. They needed to know were he'd taken the other women in hopes of gaining more physical evidence.

With no viable witnesses, this case was going to hinge on the physical evidence they were able to gather. They needed to be able to link this case to the others so they could send this lunatic away.

It was definitely the same guy. Reports were already coming in of trophies from the other victims being found by the crime scene unit. Not to mention the blood that had lit up the room like a disco under luminal and black light.

"How could you be sure he wouldn't lose your tail," Brennan finally said, her voice was barely above a whisper.

They were driving back to the apartment after a brief trip to the ER. The doctors had wanted to keep her overnight for observation, but she'd refused. Booth reached towards her and she flinched. Her reaction broke his heart in a way that no words could. He gently pulled a small button from the inside collar of her t-shirt.

"I tagged you before I left," he replied. "We had you on GPS the whole time."

They fell into the uncomfortable silence again.

A million thoughts raced through Brennan's mind, but they always came back to settle on the same image… his words to her in the bath made her blood run cold. She had thought he was just being sensitive… it turned out to be the most honest thing he'd said to her. It was all an illusion, and she'd completely missed the magician switching the shell under the cups.

When they got back to the apartment she'd told Booth she was exhausted and needed to lie down. She hadn't intended to fall asleep, but, despite the fact that it was still light out, she did soon after her head hit the pillow.

When Brennan awoke with a start she found that Booth was sitting next to her bed in a chair he'd obviously pulled in from the other room. She pulled the covers up around her and looked at him for the first time with rage instead of fear in her eyes.

"Are you okay?" he whispered. Brennan laughed. Not the kind of laugh that made his mouth want to join hers, but the kind of laugh that showed someone was barely holding on to the edge reason.

"No Booth. I'd say it was pretty certain that I'm not okay, and I'd rather you not be nice to me right now. I'd rather you not be in here at all."

"I… I," he searched for something to say; something that would take the pain from behind her gaze. "I understand," was all he could muster.

As he left the room Brennan began to replay the events of the last twenty-four hours in her head again; her eyes wandered to the bathroom door. How could she not have known he was playing a game? Why had it all seemed so real to her? Could it be because she wanted it so badly?

'You're being irrational,' the voice scolded. 'He used you to accomplish a purpose. You should know better than to count on people. People will always let you down Temperance.'

'Not Booth.' Her heart screamed back… doing its best to drown out the voice of reason that was creating a racket behind her left temple. 'Booth doesn't play games and he doesn't use people… he'd never use you.'

'All evidence to the contrary,' the voice mocked.

Brennan pulled her knees up to her chest and prayed for both voices to still inside her. She prayed to a God she didn't believe in that somehow this could all be washed away and Booth could be holding her again.

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When Brennan finally emerged from her room, the house was too quiet. The door to the other bedroom was open, so she knew Booth wasn't asleep. She felt an instance of panic at the thought that he might have gone… left her alone… when she noticed that the balcony door was open. She made her way quietly to the doorway when she was startled by a voice behind her.

"Are you okay?" he whispered. Booth had been sitting in the darkened living room castigating himself for letting her down. He knew better than anyone Temperance Brennan's history. For him to betray her the way every other person in her life had was going to affect her in ways he couldn't even begin to imagine… although his mind had been giving him some pretty vivid mental images in the past few hours.

He had to stop himself a million times from going back to her bedroom and trying to explain one more time. He wanted to tell her he'd only done what he thought he had to in order to keep her safe. When she was determined to do something there was just no stopping her, safety be damned. She had to come to Florida to help her friend, she had to go undercover, she had to dance, she had to provoke him into kissing her, and she'd been determined to go back.

"Booth, I …" she stopped, her eyes dropped to the carpet. "I was hungry. I thought I'd try to find something soft to eat," she said as her hand self-consciously moved across her now swollen, purple jaw line.

"I ordered some Thai Food while you were sleeping," he said, jumping up from the chair and heading for the kitchen. "Let me warm it up for you."

"Stop!" she shouted, effectively freezing him in mid-step. "Stop being so nice and polite and caring. I don't want you to pretend to care for me any more. Don't you see that's what hurts. That's what hurts the most."

Her hands gripped and released at her side. She was caught between hurt and rage; trying desperately to hold on to the rage so that the hurt didn't consume her.

"Bones… I."

"Don't call me Bones," she hissed. "Don't you dare call me that." The rage was back.

"Temperance… I'm sorry. I'm sorry that you think I betrayed you. I had to stop him. I had to stop him before he hurt you," Booth's voice begged for understanding.

Her hand went to her jaw again. "What do you call this Booth, a minor inconvenience?"

Booth eyed her thoughtfully. "Do you think I wouldn't give my right arm to take that pain from you? Do you think it was easy for me to allow him to lay his hands on you? Do you think for even one minute that I didn't want to kill him the second he did?"

"You could have told me Booth. You could have told me your plan."

"I can't talk to you when you let a case get to you like this. You don't listen to reason. You want to do things your way and to Hell with the consequences. You always need to be right in the middle of things. You never stop to think about how you're putting yourself in danger."

As he spoke, he inched his way toward her till they were face to face. She could feel the heat of his breath on her cheek. They had gone at each other a thousand times in the past 3 years, but now the image of his body pumping into hers was all that she could see. Before either of them knew what was happening she grabbed him and pulled his lips to hers, yelping from the pain in her jaw.

He wanted to resist her… to force her to talk to him; but, his body responded to her touch as naturally as the ice melting in his scotch. His hands came up to her neck to cradle her head as his lips moved to find her jaw and plant tiny kissed across its swollen surface.

Brennan pushed him back into a waiting chair. She didn't want his tenderness right now. She needed his heat. She ripped at his shirt, sending the buttons flying. Her lips attacked his chest biting at his flesh; at the same time her fingers worked at his belt and zipper in order to release the one part of him that she could count on to give her comfort.

Booth pulled her t-shirt over her head and began to fondle her breasts with the same intensity she had been giving his chest. He stopped only long enough to help her remove his pants. When his erection was fully exposed between them, she climbed onto his lap and positioned herself above him. She lowered herself onto his shaft with a satisfied moan, and slowly began to ride him.

"God Damn you Seeley… God damn you for making this feel so good," she moaned as she rode his cock, allowing it to fill her completely before pulling up.

"Bones… I'm so sorry! I'm so sorry…" he pleaded.

She brought her lips down to cover his words. Their kiss was salty. Brennan wasn't sure if it was her tears or his, or perhaps both, that danced on their tongues. She wanted to tell him it was okay… but she knew that that would be a lie as much as what was happening between them now was the truth.

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Ok… hold your fire!! Please don't send the hate mail yet! Wait until Chapter 5 is posted, and if you still hate it, then you can give it to me with all barrels loaded.

I've tried to make it clear with my author's notes that this is not going to be like my other story. I want to have fun! I want some Angst! And, I want hot steamy sex! If you are looking for fluff, please see my other stories… most of them could melt your teeth from their sweetness. No… this is not going to be a "slash" piece. (I have never read one… but I guarantee that is not what I'm about.) I just want to make them (B/B) and therefore us (you & me) work for it a bit harder this time.

Chap. 1 Author notes: "So- pull out your favorite comfy T and snuggle in! I have a feeling this is going to be a very LONG and CHAOTIC ride."

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One Republic - Apologize