Disclosure 3

A/N: So much fluff I think I might even be making myself a little ill. But they have a real conversation at the end.

She was floating somewhere warm and happy between sleep and wakefulness. Something wasn't right; she hadn't felt floaty-warm and snuggly in her bed since before the nightmares. A long time before the nightmares, actually, since the last source of snuggling she might have had was decidedly not a snuggler and tended to get paged away if she ever fell asleep before he left. Hold on, since when was she a snuggler, anyway?

She felt the warm chest rising and falling regularly under her cheek. With her nose buried against him, she couldn't help but inhale the scent of his fading cologne, mixed with her fabric softener and a dash of male. Yup, this was definitely Rick in her bed. Whoa, hold on there. She did not remember falling asleep with any body parts buried against Rick's chest. She opened one eye to better assess and thought back to falling asleep next to Rick, not on top of Rick.

Well crap, Sleeping-Kate had apparently decided snuggling was more comfortable and acted on it without consulting her. Sleeping-Kate had also apparently flung her arm around his ribcage and securely tucked her fingers under his opposite side, which meant if she tried for a subtle extraction now, she'd probably wake him up. And then there was her thigh, which she wasn't quite sure where to place at the moment, since she couldn't see it under the comforter, but "tangled" might be the best descriptor of its association with Rick's lower limbs. Well crap.

Sleeping-Rick was no slacker in the snuggling department either, apparently, since she noticed he'd managed to wrap one arm around behind her and place his long fingers dangerously close to the underside of her breast. Around the time she started her mental countdown to just bolt quickly and run to the bathroom before he really knew what was going on, she felt him take a breath deeper than all the prior ones. He tightened his grip around her and unconsciously (she presumed, though maybe not) made partial contact with the aforementioned sensitive body part. Harsher curse words replaced the countdown in her head.

A glance at the clock showed her it was seven. On a normal Saturday, she would have been up an hour ago, back from her run, and drinking coffee. Oh, she smelled the coffee. Bless the infallible timer on her coffee maker. But since she'd had a minor, drama-filled interruption in her night's sleep, she'd apparently taken advantage of her Castle body pillow for the extra hour to catch up. So many inappropriate comments she could insert here.

"Mmm. Kate. Hey. I smell coffee."

He was nothing if not predictable.

"Good morning to you, too, Rick…" she turned her head up toward him with a slightly sarcastic smirk and took in his hazy, slowly-blinking eyes and ruffled hair. She needed to escape before he realized…

"I like this cuddly side of you. All warm and comfy." He lifted his free hand to cover his mouth as a yawn escaped. He idly stroked his other hand down her ribcage and back up again and her eyes went wide. She watched it dawn on him where his hand actually was with a wave of chagrin.

"Oh, sorry." But he didn't actually move his hand away.

"Uh, yeah." He shook his head and blinked and slid his palm to a more neutral position on her back.

New-found honesty and declarations of love and sleeping in the same bed aside, they hadn't quite covered "copping a feel in pajamas" previously. She just thought it might be smart to take things a little slower with the physical side, like for example more than four hours after admitting their feelings.

But then again, four years was a lot of foreplay. God, Awake-Kate was starting to sound like Sleeping-Kate in her head. Time to get up.

She pulled her limbs back to herself and propped up on one arm next to him.

"Want some of that coffee? I have cereal, but it doesn't contain any marshmallows, so you might not like it."

He seemed to be taking this waking up in her bed wrapped in her arms thing remarkably well. Actually, if she thought about it, so did she. Huh. Weird.

"I will have you know that I eat non-marshmallow cereal, too. Cocoa Puffs, for example. I even tried Alexis' Honey Bunches of Something-Good-For-You once, and it wasn't terrible."

"That's some range, Rick." She couldn't stop the "Ricks" from coming out of her mouth! Where the hell was her filter? Oh, wait, she didn't usually have to apply the Castle filter with him next to her in her bed, prior to a run and a shower and caffeine. That might be it.

Then again, maybe it was the lingering rush of hormones from their early morning declarations of love. She'd actually said it out loud. That had just popped out, too. The filter caught it every other time she had been thinking it so loudly at him that she figured he must have heard it directly from her brain, but not last night. This morning. Whatever. Times, they are a-changing.

She must have drifted off into her thoughts, because he was waving at her with a goofy grin on his face.

"Penny for your thoughts?"

"Just trying to figure out what the hell to do with…" she pointed back and forth between them, "…this, us, together in my bed."

"Wow. I knew that's what you were thinking, but I'd never have guessed you'd actually admit it." He had a funny, bemused little grin on his face, cuing her in to the fact that he wasn't making fun of her honesty.

"But we need nourishment before we can have this discussion. And caffeine. And maybe a shower. Separately is fine, but I'd be open to having the discussion face-to-face in the shower if you prefer."

That garnered a full eye roll.

As they finished their respective bowls of Cheerios with skim milk and bananas (hey, at least she'd had bananas), he took a long swig of his coffee and shifted his focus to look her square in the eye.

"Listen, Kate. I just want you to know one thing from my perspective. I needed to tell you what I'd been keeping from you. I needed to tell you that I had your secret figured out. And I needed to hear how you felt about me. All three of those things were accomplished by 3:30AM. I've said my peace, and you didn't throw me out. I assume if you were so angry that you couldn't forgive my intrusion into your mother's case, I wouldn't have spent the morning in your bed. If not a single intimate, happy, together thing happens between us other than what happened last night, I can live with that, at least until you're ready for more."

He just looked sincere. There was no other word for it. He had no media face on. He had no publicity tone to his voice. He didn't sound imminently like he was attempting to convince her of something. He just sounded like Rick Castle being honest. The same person she saw when he was with his daughter. The same one she saw in a freezer, in front of a bomb (or two), in a cemetery. This was the real Rick. She couldn't blame any of it on an image or a publicity hound. So she had to take him at his word.

"I can't tell you that I'm pleased about being manipulated. If there is one thing I can't tolerate in my life both as a professional police officer and as a human being, it's being led somewhere without full knowledge about why," she paused, took a breath, and told him the truth.

"But I can understand why you did it. Roy did the same thing to me, and I forgave him. And I wasn't in love with Roy."

A/N: Sooo… I keep writing on this one and ignoring the sketching out of my dark and brooding multi-chapter fic with angst (and of course Caskett goodness at some point). I feel the post-ep story has to end before the next ep airs. Ergo, this may be done now. We have dogs to deal with come Monday.