"You want your own bed." he murmurs it over her quietly, studying how thinly dark her eyelids are as she tugs and twists the corner of a pillow farther under her head.

"This is fine." she just shrugs it deeper into the mattress he'd cleared off and quick stripped before laying down fresher sheets.

Her eyes go wide open to the darkened ceiling of his bedroom and he can still feel a tension in the frame of her as she wipes her fingers along her forehead, pressing into smooth skin. She hadn't asked why he'd had to toss his bed clean for her, just given him a familiar tip of the head that said she knew he spent too much time on his couch. He'd given her a boyish shrug and banked a shoulder in her direction – end of discussion. No questions later. And she'd graciously accepted a non-response as its very own response.

"Then close your eyes."

Her lips press together like she's not going to respond but he can see in the half shadows that she just can't seem to help herself, "Earlier you were telling me to keep them open."

"Stop fighting it." he rumbles a low laugh over her stubbornness, tapping against her nose playfully and catching the retaliatory swipe of her fingers for the effort.

"I'm not a puppy, Gibbs. Don't thwap my nose."

That perturbed little pouting is the exact reason he's never slapped her upside the head.

That and he can't bring himself to do so, regardless of what she's said or done.

That, and… she's his untouchable. Used to be?

Technically, this is a whole lotta touching.

"I won't." he grins past how grumpily she tucks tighter into his chest, stretching farther into the way he's leaned up beside her, still in his jeans and t-shirt. "It makes you blush right down your throat."

She rolls her eyes up at him but she's smiling, her lips beautifully curved. "You're a tease."

"I like watching you blush." Mischief is the only thing that lives in his smile as he tugs down on the center of her shirt, fingers prying on the top hemline so that he can slope a glance against the edging of her creamy colored bra. "How far down does it go, Todd?"

Her uninhibited laughter ringing out from the center of his bed does something to his gut that is completely unprecedented, more than unexpected. The half erection, that's expected, accepted, unintentional but natural. It's the crackling hot drop of his stomach as he watches bemusement take over her lips that has him letting the shirt hem slide back into place as he possessively strokes his palm full against one of her breasts. He can't help watching the swaying back of her head as she exhales a sound of pleased relief, an appreciation for his slow fingers as her eyes slide closed. And he can't help smiling wider into the way her knee lifts into the shifting of her hips, bringing them closer to his as her hand rakes nails against his forearm. He keeps his movements slow, forcing himself to keep the touching light but persistent as he groans his nose down into the crook of her neck. She even smells warm and welcoming to him. How long has she smelled like a homecoming?

"That what you wanted? Huh?" She groans into how easily his voice turns from erotic to terrifying with just a breath and the ringing of his cell, the twist of it ranging lower into a threat. "I'm gonna kill him."

Very slowly. With pleasure.

She laughs again, the sound of it trouncing out a tease as the palm of her opposite hand skiffs up the short cropped hair at the back of his head, "You can't know it's - "

Kate quiets into the silent warning he gleans her way before lifting his cell from the table, his body a solid weight against the way he's still keeping her curled to the middle of the mattress.

"I'm gonna smack the hell out of you." She's angling her knee between his in an intentional tease and he lets a little growl into the words that's meant for her and she owns it with a silent laugh. "I told you to go home, DiNozzo."

He can feel the watching, avoids turning his head into the way she's closely studying him as he listens to DiNozzo. She lifts her hand to the side of his face and he instantly knows that this conversation needs to be short – because he'd much rather enjoy the fact that she's wiping her fingertips along the edge of his hairline than have a three am chat with a giddily weary Tony. He leans into the twist of her fingers tweaking along the curve of his ear, shying into the teasing touch as he forces air into his lungs.

"All right. Go home." He's not even all that sure where the other man was in the conversation, but he knows he's already got all the information he needs. "Late morning tomorrow, all right? Get some sleep."

"Petty Officer Leighton is in custody?" Kate's murmur is an ending of some sort, a resolution and relief as he exhales the breath he's been holding onto.

He tosses the phone noisily back to the table and drops his mouth onto her collarbone in the same shift of movement, lets his tongue ride the line of her clavicle as he digs down into her, "He is."

"Where are they - "

"Kate," the fabric of her shirt, pliant but tight, is bunched into his hand as he lets the growl off into the side of her throat, "close your eyes. Go to sleep."

"I don't want to sleep, Gibbs." She's proving it with the way she's managed to tug into the hair at the crown of his skull.

Yes, ma'am. Copy that. Me either.

Still… "You need to."

"You're not my boss." she tweaks against his ear before he lifts a bemused smile over her, head angling into the way he studies her tired eyes.

"On the contrary, Agent Todd - "

"I mean in this." Her interruption is soft but leading in its sudden swaying affection.

Gibbs blinks a searching glance over her features, "In what?"

"I'm not completely sure." There's no real concern in her tone, though. It's not that she's nervous. It's that she hasn't seemed to completely figure it out yet. Judgment reserved upon accruing more information. That's his smart girl.

"Exactly." he nods his lips back down along her throat, kissing the words to the skin he's already decided he'll soon mark a claiming on. "Sleep on it."

He watches her descend the stairs with a still dipped jaw and hooded eyes, intentionally slowing his hands and arms in the midst of the distraction. Her shoulders are lifted, the muscles of her arms bunched up close to her ribs. The very way she's carrying herself makes it seem as though she's cold. He realizes then that he's drawn a chilled sweat up on his skin and through his shirt, roughed his own muscles past the scream of exhaustion by forcing them to keep moving.

"I win." Her voice is just as soft as the sound of her feet against the stairs and he aches into slowing his movements, letting the sander go still but keeping his arms up to punish himself into pain for no real reason at all.

He cocks his head into watching her step full into the basement, not at all ashamed that he's enjoying the first sight of her in a place he hadn't necessarily ever expected to find her in, "You very often do."

"Made a bet with myself." Kate's arms curl under her breasts, tightening to lace her own ribs as she steps toward his work space, her head tipped in studying it instead of looking toward him. "Boat and bourbon over a woman in your bed. You're predictable, Gibbs."

"You seem to think."

She smirks into his response even as she still ignores the pinning of his glance, "She'll be beautiful."

He just shrugs his forearms into the wood as he stretches his back, letting his glance slope down and back up the front of her, "She already is."

She cocks him a slimmed glance that says even she can't believe he's dropped a DiNozzo worthy line on her but it still makes her smile wide enough that she embarrassedly shakes her glance away from his smile. He revels in that turn of her head, the one that still makes her seem innocent and young and flushes her a charmed pink.

There are plenty of things she just can't quite manage to hide from him.

Liking that he thinks she's pretty is just the next thing down on the list he keeps tallied in his head.

"Why'd you come down here?" She's got her palms up flat to braced boat ribs across from him, pressing between the wood to lean into his shifting attention. "You needed the habitual? Something ritualistic?"

He just shrugs, bites into his cheek, refuses to admit he'd had to stop watching her sleep.

"You changed your mind."

Gibbs shakes his head tightly at the dry and bankrupt tone of her voice, "That's not necessarily true."

He'd been trying to, though. Trying to talk himself out of it. Sorta.

Unfortunately, she had an arsenal of pros that usurped his three primary cons:

1. I'm an asshole.

2. I'm your boss.

3. I'm your asshole boss.

"You chose a half made boat and bourbon over a woman in your bed."

"I have self control, Kate. I don't need to ravish you first thing." His entire body leans into the middle of the frame, unconscious of shifting the smattering of tools she's got her hand pressed down beside.

"You don't?" she bites out on a smile and he swallows down the realization that he's shying the tools away from her, angling edges and points toward himself rather than in her direction. "That's disappointing."

His palm presses flat between them as he angles his jaw back and forth, "Kate."

"Are you sure? That you don't need to?" She's squinting the accusation like a near threat but he can still see the haunted taunt of a smile trying to curve on her lips.

"I shouldn't have let you sleep. Now you're rested." Gibbs points at her quickly, his shoulders swelling an ache that's starting to wrap itself down his spine, "And you're not gonna shut up."

"You knew I'd follow you down here." she surmises easily, blinking the sleepiness out of her eyes as she shrugs.

"So?"

"You needed the proverbial high ground." The short height of her seems suddenly taller as she presses off the frame and swings her steps in the opposite direction, giving him a wonderful view of her ass as she moves toward the tool bench. "Shoring yourself up?"

"You're never gonna let up, are you?" His movement off the frame is slower, more calculated in its shifting.

The laughter that comes off her is comfortable and breathy as she tosses back a quick smile before continuing to step away, "You knew that from the start. I don't feel sorry for you."

"I stopped seeing you as an available woman when I handed you the badge."

Well… that's some prime bullshit, Jethro. But good effort.

"That's bullshit, Gibbs." She snaps it over her shoulder as she fingers one of the chisels and nimbly lifts it for closer inspection.

He snorts through his nose as he shakes his head, stepping closer with a lowered tone, "Watch yourself, Agent Todd."

"Grow a pair, Gunny." She's maybe the first woman to wield a mortise chisel at his chest and flippantly wave it closer while mouthing off at him.

Now, hell, that's sexy. And… slightly terrifying.

Gibbs leans against her and curls his palm against the way she's holding the handle looser than she should be, weighing down against her hold as his other hand finds and tugs the knotted up tie of his own pajama pants. "You wearin' that infamous jock strap under these?"

"I'm not wearing anything under these." Her tone is so sweetly conversational, so supposedly innocent but nowhere damn near.

The sound he makes in his throat in response is somewhere between first strike and ending surrender, eyes thinning into the way he lays a look down the front of her as he lets the confiscated chisel clatter to the table.

"Why would I?" As though he's completely remiss in thinking otherwise, as though it's a foregone conclusion that she wouldn't dare put anything between her skin and (something of) him. "They're yours."

Her hand rises into his silence, tugs him leaning closer with a pull against his shirt that is so sure he can feel the decision making in the flex of her wrist, "Can I keep them?"

"Hell no." He grins his eyes up to her hushing smile.

"Please?"

"I said 'no'." He finally laughs into her playful chippiness, shaking his head into a full blown smile that makes her eyes flare wider in pride. "Are you gonna shut the hell up?"

"I keep hoping that if I distract you that - "

"You can't distract my focus, Kate. Not in this." What she doesn't realize is that he's two steps ahead and his fingers are carefully stretched into shifting tools back on the bench, edging them away from her with a cautiously flat slide of his palm.

She doesn't notice his advance because she's too busy studying his face as her head shakes back and forth. "What is this, Gibbs?"

"A long time coming." His hands flex tightly into her ribs, prying up against her weight in a way that draws her palms along his forearms in surprise as he jacks her hard up onto the work bench. "You're not my equal, Kate."

She looks down on him, an embittered smile pursing her lips, "As you often remind me."

"You have the potential to be better than."

She almost looks sad, as though he's completely shifted the foundation of her reasoning.

He knows he's not the sort of man to fling compliments around but, hell, she doesn't need to seem so completely shocked silent when he manages to give her a good one.

"You'd say the same thing about Tony." she shakes it off embarrassedly as she fingers the fabric of his shirt in a fidgeting that he can't stand, catching her fingers still to draw her attention back.

"Yeah, I would." He nods tightly, once, just once. "Tony's different."

"How so?"

"Tony doesn't want it like you do. Doesn't need to prove it. He likes what he does and he's damn good at it." He smirks into the surprised look she gives him at the unmitigated compliment. "How many female Secret Service agents have made the Presidential detail before age thirty five? C'mon, I know you know."

"Five." Her admission is soft and shy and he knows it's true just by the rise of blushed pride in her cheeks.

"Including you?"

Kate nods slowly into his watching, biting along her lip to make him swallow down hard because, generally, it always does - and she likes watching it happen. "Yes."

"In the history of the Secret Service?"

Her smile breaks down over him, "Yes."

He nods slowly into the arching of his brow, "How many agents have bypassed my probationary period in six weeks?"

"I have absolutely no idea, Gibbs." she's exhaling the words into the way he kisses her once, and then again, and keeps doing it to draw her leaning lower.

"Very few." It's pressed against her lips.

Kate draws her head back a fraction, letting her jaw tip as she scrutinizes him, "Including me?"

"Including you."

"In the history of Special Agent Jethro Gibbs?" She's so damn proud of herself that she can't help the grin that takes over her lips and he just exhales a half smirk in response as he shakes his head closer to hers. "So this is just… more training?"

"No." he laughs against her mouth and he can't figure out exactly why except that it makes her lips curve on yet another smile. "This is just a very bad idea."

Her argument is just her tongue catching his as she shifts her head into kissing him, stroking the taste of long ago bourbon off him and sighing into it, "Are you talking me out of this?

"Just reminding you of the facts."

He shrugs away from her and the way her mouth has his tired eyes burning as he blinks low. His back turns between her legs as a sort of unplanned test of defenses and he's simultaneously pleased and annoyed at the realization she really has none against him at the moment. Because she draws her knees tight against his hips and her hands are slow but comfortable as they wipe against his shoulder blades.

But then… she doesn't need to be defensive.

He should have gauged her position.

Because he's damn sure given her the high ground.

"All it tells me is that you're more stringent than the United States Secret Service, Gibbs. I already knew that." The heat of her mouth leans along the back of his ear and he can't seem to stop her right arm from caging up under his own so that she can spread a palm to the flat of his chest.

Her familiar hand spanning the center of his chest seems, at once, foreign and deliciously domestic. "You don't know what you're doing."

She's becoming the safety on the gun he's made of himself and he knows he should stop it from happening but it's been a long time since he's been at a rest. And he can't help but realize that, regardless of who they are, she's choosing to be the pause button. Pushing to be that safety switch. Trying to guard him, maybe.

That's a thankless and impossible job, sweetheart. Quit while you're ahead.

"I know exactly what I'm doing." she answers his silent revelry with a rub of her fingers against the jut of his skull directly behind his left ear. "Why'd you offer me the job?"

"I didn't want you to go anywhere else."

He very nearly wholly trusts her to be his safety – and not the way he'd trust DiNozzo or Mike or any of his brothers (except that, really, he can't, with any of them). This is on a whole other level, in any case. He'd never admit to needing that guarding hand. The grace of her being her is that she doesn't even try to make him admit it. She inexplicably balances being the gun hand, the safety, trigger pull and the fucking bullet. And he doesn't quite completely understand how she manages it.

Her fingers are rubbing his sternum as her mouth wipes the side of his neck, teeth and tongue grazing skin, "Because of my potential?"

Because you're the first shot, first kill, Katie. Bolt-action-beautiful.

"Naw." She's gotta stop doing that, because it's entrenching him into tipping his head closer to her mouth. "Because of your sass."

"You liked me then."

Her tongue curves the shell of his ear and he can feel the pinioned snap of tension in his wrist as he lifts his hand and digs into the dry darkness of her hair, stilling her tightly. She's gotta stop. She has to just stop it or he's going to hurt her in more ways than one. Starting with fucking her fast and hard against the table and ending with a kill shot to their relationship, in whatever incarnation.

Gibbs lets his head angle into hers slowly, "I like you now."

"Then why not just give me your number instead of a job?" her whisper is quietly curious, no other edge or accusation. "You're not a shy man."

"And what if I had? Would you have called?" he asks as he fingers the darkness of her hair before loosening his grip on it, half turning to glance back into her watching.

Oh, yeah. That look. She would have.

"Probably."

And he would have enjoyed her for as long as humanly possible. In as many ways as he could have managed before she whacked him in the head with something hard and stalked away on high style heels. He's gotta stop putting himself between the legs of beautifully dressed but attractively volatile women.

Sure, when there's an avalanche in Hell.

"And then what?"

She thins him a scrutinizing glance, avoiding stepping into what she can already see is his point-making-trap, "You tell me."

"Dinner and a drink after, maybe? Bring you down here? Some woodworking?" He's learning what the color of lust looks in Kate Todd's eyes and he's ready to admit that in this particular lighting (or lack thereof), it's fucking phenomenally coppered. "I'm extraordinarily good at making a woman feel appreciated, Kate. Because I appreciate women. I'm old fashioned. Doesn't make me a chauvinist."

"You are, a little." she counters quickly but shrugs it away. "What else?"

"A lot of really good sex." He smirks unabashedly into the disbelieving tease of a noise she lays over him before tugging against the pants she's wearing. "And you would have ended up with these probably."

"I'm still not seeing why this was the better option."

"Six months later and you woulda been gone. Maybe longer. You're strong. You'd tough it out long as you could." He navigates the turn back to face her slowly, keeping her legs hooked close by the skimming of his palms before he lets his hands rise and find their way under her shirt. "You'd hate me at the end."

"You're not as impossible as you think you are." Her head shakes minutely, as though she's just verbally slapping Tony around in the middle of the bullpen while his hands curve on her rib cage.

"This way you're still here." He ignores her strident accusation, fingers ribbing against the lower line of her bra, "And you don't hate me."

"I can't hate you, Gibbs." she tells him quietly, honestly, her breathing softening out. "I've tried."

A derisive snort breaks off him quickly as one palm flattens out against her stomach and presses still, "Have you really tried, Caitlin? Because it's not that hard. You don't know what you're doing."

"But I do." Her voice is forceful but her eyes are so very bright under the sickly yellow of the light that's clipped to the shelf behind her head. "Stop training me, Gunny. I'm not your soldier."

"No, you're not. Are you?" He's watching her still features, assuring himself of what he already knows as she studies his eyes.

"No."

He digs her hips forward with pressing palms and then a pull against one leg that has her knee riding back up against him same as earlier, his mouth nipping at hers briefly, "This is your very last chance, Kate."

"I realize that." The slowly cradling smile she gives him is guileless and all undeniable pleasure, her heel digging into the back of his leg in a rake of impatience. "Carry on, Marine."