Notes: This chapter picks up soon after the last one left off, after 2x14 "The Third Man."

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Part Fifteen: Official Offer

Remy's was neutral territory, where neither Beckett nor Castle had the home-field advantage, but that didn't stop them from battling. It also didn't stop them from acting as though they were in the privacy of their own homes.

That secret, unprintable side of Kate Beckett suddenly made a public appearance, and Castle couldn't have been any more delighted. He couldn't have been any more delighted because, all the while, Beckett was enjoying herself.

She didn't need to say so. He could just tell.

That delighted him, too.

"Castle! Cut it out."

"See," he said, reaching across the table to retrieve the tiny misshapen star they'd made from his straw wrapper and flicking it at her again, "it's just that it's so hard to take you seriously when you're still laughing. Maybe if you had a safe word . . ."

Beckett cut him off: "Shoot one more star at me and I'll shoot you." For once, the fire in her eyes looked more like thrill than threat.

He only grinned and sipped at his shake. "Won't give up the power, huh?"

By the time their food came, Beckett wondered if Castle had forgotten their bet or if he just knew that he'd lost and hoped that she forgot it. Either way, he left the piece of paper in his pocket, and she couldn't really read his body language to determine anything about what he'd written. It sort of looked as though he knew that he had won, but then again, she'd played poker with the man, and this was more or less the way he looked right before she made off with most of his Gummy bears.

At least the food was delicious, she decided, and so welcome after the disappointment of Drago. And the conversation wasn't lacking, either.

Castle had plenty to say, yet he wasn't terribly self-absorbed or even unbearably nosy. As far as company went, he wasn't half bad. Even when he teased: "So, reading anything good? Maybe taking Heat Wave for a Round Four?"

It didn't bother her like it did the last time he'd pestered her about reading his book more than once. She'd gotten used to him pulling her pigtails. "As a matter of fact," she said, "I've been reading something else."

"Oh, yeah? What's it about?"

She decided not to admit so readily that, when she wasn't with a writer, she was still reading about one. "A Russian man," she said vaguely, "living through the Revolution. Though he died, so . . ."

Castle looked offended, and not just at her poor story summary. "You're cheating on Heat Wave with Russian literature?"

"No," she said. "It's a fairly new book by an American writer: Vince Minaret." She wondered if she'd just given herself away—what the book was or the fact that she'd kissed the author.

Meanwhile, Castle only noticed that she corrected him about the book and not about the "cheating," but he wasn't exactly in a position to make something of that. Beckett could read whatever she wanted; he knew that. In fact, their taste in reading material was one of the things he most liked to discuss with her. So he swallowed down the tinge of jealousy that had bubbled up at the sound of an unfamiliar name and decided to lean back on humor. "Think you'll read it more than once?" he asked, as though asking whether or not she expected a recent date to be more than a one-night stand.

"Oh, I don't know," she said. "This one's 499 pages; it'll take me a while longer."

Castle choked on his shake, making a vanilla mess. "Four hundred and ninety-nine pages? He couldn't squeeze out a few more words to make it an even 500?"

Beckett silently handed him a napkin so he could clean himself up.

"Anyway," he murmured, drying the table, "book that long, he's probably compensating for something."

In light of their conversation by the elevator, he had started authoring a dating guide in his head, and under First Date Etiquette he added the rule: Do not, under any circumstances, talk about the length of another man's book.

Heat Wave had been just shy of 200. He vowed to himself that its sequels would be a bit more substantial—longer, but by no means fluffed up with BS. Just as long as they'd need to be to do justice to the stories. But definitely longer than 200 pages.

"Don't worry about it, Castle," she said, interrupting his thoughts with a devilish smile. "Size only matters to a point."

He flicked the shooting star off the table at her, his heart soaring with her laughter.

They had finished eating long before their meal was over. Considering they'd left the precinct after 10:30, their (second) dinner out was anything but a brief stop. There were hardly any other patrons in the place by the time Castle and Beckett agreed that they didn't actually intend to camp out at Remy's just because it was open all night long.

Never mind that it was three in the morning, and staying any longer would mean an inevitable walk of shame. That part, neither of them bothered to mention.

"Moment of truth," she said, an edge of nerves to her voice. "Let's hear it, Castle."

Silently, he extracted the little slip of paper from his coat pocket and slid it across the table as though he were making her an offer she couldn't refuse.

She glanced at the paper, but he recited his thought process for her as though she didn't have his guess written in front of her.

"One strawberry shake," he said. "One medium-well burger with lettuce, tomato, mushroom, and green pepper. No ketchup, not because you never eat ketchup, but because you're wearing something you like enough that you—"

"Impressive," she interrupted him, pushing the slip of paper back across the table for him to retrieve. "And so close."

"Close?" he said, checking the paper again. "What do you mean 'close'?"

She shrugged. "It was a cheeseburger."

"But I—oh." In his haste and complacency, he must have forgotten entirely to specify that; hadn't even noticed the discrepancy as she ate, distracted as he was with her lips and her laughter and even an accidental brush of her leg against his. "Burger," he said quickly, taking off into a ramble. "Burger could mean ham or cheese. It's not like I wrote 'quiche.' Although that could also mean ham or cheese. Or both. So that actually proves my point. It is like quiche. I'm not convincing you, am I?"

She shook her head. "Surprised you got all the veg, though. And strawberry. I think we've only had burgers and shakes at the Twelfth once or twice since you've been around, and not even from Remy's." Having let him down gently with compliments and congratulations, she smiled and said, "All right, now pay up."

"Guess so," he said, taking out his wallet, his visage of reluctance looking just a little too forced.

It was then that Beckett suspected that Castle had still won.

She kept up the ruse. She acted just as he did—as though his paying for her meal tonight was no more chivalrous or romantic or indicative of any feelings on the part of either one of them than the apologetic four-course takeout they'd shared at her desk last week.

But the more she acted that way, the more convinced she was that the gesture was platonic and the harder it was not to wonder what could possibly be the harm in letting Castle take her home. Her home. The door. Just to deliver her there unscathed.

Unscathed and warm and full-bellied and satisfied.

They hit the cold midnight air outside the restaurant, her dress bag draped over his arm again, and the absence of him at her own arm made her feel nothing like she had won.

She turned to him. "You know, Castle, you were right about almost everything."

That made him grin. "Wow," he said. "What are the odds I can get that in writing?"

"I mean, what's one topping, right?" She took out a couple of bills and offered them to him. To the man who, one week ago, gave one hundred thousand dollars to the lost cause of catching her mother's killer.

She swallowed the feeling that what she offered him now was insignificant, but she also swallowed the feeling that it held any greater meaning than what it was.

Just the cost of a burger and shake and at least half an order of fries. A fair offer.

Not a pitiful sum compared to a grand gesture of generosity.

Not a silent plea to let her lose their wager, just this once.

No, neither of those. Nothing but a fair offer to make good on her word when she simply wasn't sure which of them had won.

But even though her outstretched hand undoubtedly told Castle one thing—Take the money—the barely perceptible tremor in her fingers told him another: Take me home.

Or did it?

Sometimes ideas and reality were so far from each other it was ridiculous. That could have been nothing more than his imagination. It wouldn't be the first time.

He knew how eager she'd been to offer to repay him that money he'd put up. This wasn't that.

It wasn't Coonan's interrogator who faced Castle tonight in the chilly air.

But he still could not decipher the shiver that ran down Beckett's spine. Did she long to be warm or did she long for his warmth?

He hesitated, her meaning too unclear to him. "No," he said finally, quietly. "No, we had a deal, and I'll honor that."

It was what she'd once told him when she'd made him leave the precinct. They'd made a deal: one more case before he'd be gone again. And she'd expected him to honor that. Then one extraordinary apology later, she was offering him tomorrow.

That was a lot of tomorrows ago now.

And after everything they'd been through, especially over the past couple of weeks, this "honoring a deal" thing didn't seem to cut it anymore. It was—inadequate, somehow. How could he possibly believe what she'd confided in him just last week, I want you around, if he was still operating on a level where they had temporarily stagnated months ago?

"This isn't a deal," she said suddenly, catching him off-guard. "This isn't a bet or a win."

He was officially confused. "What isn't?"

"Walk with me," she said, her clarity honest but incomplete until the last words came out on an exhale: "Just walk."

They held each other's gaze for what seemed a timeless moment, reading each other, speaking without words.

His eyes confirmed it: You mean nothing more.

But hers said: I mean nothing less.

He nodded once. "Okay," he replied, a smile playing at his lips. "I can do that."

Then they chatted and laughed and even enjoyed silent companionship all the way to her door.

Not a single comment passed between them about it being three in the morning or about practical concern for her safety—or for his, more realistically. He knew that she could take care of herself, and even as a lowly civilian, he certainly had a flair for getting himself out of trouble.

So she just wanted him around a while more?

He decided that Beckett was wrong about one thing. It was a win. Not even a tally in his mind would properly commemorate it.

This time, when they parted at her door, Beckett didn't slam it in his face. In fact, she even smiled as he gave her the dress bag and let her return to her quiet apartment, her sacred space.

If she could do all that after five unofficial hours alone with him, Castle decided, then that was a good sign.

He smiled, too.

Of course, there was yet another snarky comment from his mother about arriving home in the wee hours—not to mention her general confusion as to how an evening with Amanda Livingston turned into a late night with Detective Beckett.

"Closed the case," he said by way of explanation, sidling up to her in the kitchen. He caught the jug of orange juice in her hand before she could restore it to the fridge and poured a glass for himself.

"Mm-hmm." Martha gave one sniff to the air and a pointed look as if to let him know that his distinct Essence of Burger told a different story. But she only beamed, picked up the New York Ledger from the counter—the copy with Amanda Livingston's photo cut out but Richard Castle and his controversial blurb still very much intact—and pushed it into his chest, barely waiting for him to take hold of it before she headed to the stairs. "You know, darling," she said, "this is how rumors get started."

One of the pieces of advice that Vince Minaret had given to Kate that Sunday afternoon in the café was to know where her characters were coming from and where they were going in any given scene. He said it might help her tie up loose ends, or at least feel a better sense of the overarching story as it gradually took shape.

The next time Kate wrote about Nikki and Rook, she swept them off to celebrate a mutual friend's wedding in Las Vegas. They weren't there together, but neither of them had brought a date, and they fell into an easy banter while spending some time in the casino at the hotel where all of the wedding guests were staying.

Kate even managed to refrain from all the cliché "getting lucky" jokes—and what surprised her even more was that Rook did, too.

He was actually quite the gentleman. Nikki noticed.

He did want her to be awfully open and honest with him, though. In the midst of their playfulness—their general flirtation and a few kisses behind the Roulette table—Rook still wanted Nikki to say what she really thought, and he wouldn't settle for anything less. He wanted to know if she believed that they could ever move in the same direction again.

She thought maybe they could.

That night, they shared the elevator on their way to their respective hotel rooms. He was supposed to drop her off on the fifth floor before going on to the seventh himself, but one passionate kiss with her back pressed against the elevator wall was all it took for her to miss her stop.

Nikki and Rook got off on the same floor.

Three times.