Part Nineteen: She Just Needs

He was pressed to her back, flesh against flesh. His fingers trailed lazily along her curves, tending to her as he would tend to fading embers.

Having finally closed the case and finished her paperwork on the victimized dominatrix, Kate was enjoying a quiet day off, resting in a red armchair at the café as rain doused the street outside. But the sound of the rain and the murmur of the patrons only lulled her into her imagination, and as she filled her notebook, some part of her slipped away to the wintry cabin where Nikki and Rook were snowed in and too wrapped up in one another to care. Kate could see them so vividly; she could hear them, too.

"I'm not big on spooning."

She expected him to call her out on the lie; remind her of their first morning-after, how she'd nestled into him without complaint. But he didn't.

He simply tucked one leg between hers and used it for leverage, pulling her weight with him and propping them both up until she was resting between his thighs. "We're not spooning. We're sitting."

Wiseass.

It still looked suspiciously close to spooning to Nikki, but at least sitting upright wasn't exactly snuggling for pillow talk. And leaning back into Rook was kind of like leaning into a warm chaise lounge. Even now, she liked the fit.

He wrapped his hands around her waist, and she traced her fingertips over the broad leather cuffs on his wrists, still a little surprised that he was so willing to play her game by her rules.

But her fingers were not the only ones to wander. Rook started to tease her until she wriggled from his touches, sighing hopelessly.

From his place behind her, around her, he parted her legs with his own and held them there as his fingertips continued their exploration.

She was flooded with the warmth of arousal, just barely managed to speak as her hands flew to his. "Is this your idea of topping from the bottom?"

"I don't know what you mean," he said, obviously playing dumb, because in that moment, he folded her hands to her chest and wrapped one strong arm across the front of her body, securing her in place with nothing but strength and creativity.

Richard Castle studied the raindrops on the windowpane, each slipping into another before descending as one.

There was just nothing else to it. Either Kate Beckett needed to take the lead or she needed to follow his, or else they would never get anywhere.

Not that where they were already was not someplace he was enjoying, but now that they had made some strides toward a new kind of camaraderie, a new kind of closeness, it was difficult not to imagine a time when he could hold her flush against him and learn to interpret her shivers from the mere feel of them.

Of course, just because he could identify what they needed, that didn't mean he was any more ready to broach the subject than the protectively layered detective-muse. Beckett made it abundantly clear that this research arrangement made her feel exposed, but he had found it easy to hide behind his persistence to know even more of her than she knew of him.

He remembered finding out that she subscribed to his website and smiled at the thought; remembered her reaction to the cover art of Heat Wave and almost chuckled to himself, catching it just in time as he came back to the place where he was.

He realized that he had zoned out, thinking about Kate, and what else was new? He drifted back to the sound of a woman's voice, incessantly demanding and just a little bit belittling. Oh, right. Gina.

He tried to conjure up his poker face so Gina couldn't tell that he was mixing business and pleasure without her.

As hard as this was to do, it was infinitely easier to pretend that he wasn't thinking about Kate than it was to stop thinking about her.

He let his free hand meander along her skin, moving from efforts of teasing her to pleasuring her and alternating between them—whether more for his own enjoyment or more for hers, she couldn't be sure. His legs remained curled around hers, holding them down no matter how she writhed and wrestled with him.

"You're not fighting this as much as I'd expect you to if you wanted to escape," he said, his breath hot at her ear. "I'm strong, but I don't know that I'm this strong. Are you just exhausted or are you enjoying this as much as I think you are?"

"It doesn't suck."

"Hmm," he hummed into her. "If I still had them, I'd put on the leather gloves. I know how much you liked those." He paused, as if considering something.

She could practically hear the wheels turning in his head, even though she couldn't gauge exactly what he was thinking. "What?"

But he only teased, "What, what?" as he climbed out from behind her and leaned her back against the bed.

She propped herself up on her elbows and watched as he removed the leather wrist-cuffs.

He took one of her hands in his and secured a cuff to her wrist, a strangely serious look in his eye; a look she didn't well recognize. She decided it suited him, somehow.

She laughed, but she let him fit her with the second leather band. "What, you going to cuff me to the headboard now?"

"No." He reached past her head for something, but she couldn't quite tell what.

"Why don't I believe you?"

"I don't know," he said. "You should. You have my word." And with that, he easily folded her legs to her chest and wrapped her arms beneath her knees. Then he secured the cuffs together with a snap hook, rendering her limbs essentially useless to her and all of her most sensitive parts exposed to his sight and touch.

Just how easily Rook restrained her was, admittedly, a surprise. "What the hell?"

"You're just jealous that I did you one better," he said with a grin. "I only needed one snap hook."

"I need a title, Richard. And all you've given me is a gossip girl and ballplayers and politicians and mobsters."

He tried. Really, he did. But business and pleasure were still swirling together in his head, impossible to compartmentalize when Kate Beckett was already so much a part of both. "Gossip . . . Heat." Off Gina's look, he said, "Right. Yeah. What was I thinking?"

Gina massaged her forehead. "She gets tied to a chair. What about Bound Heat?"

Rick cringed. No way was that going to fly with Beckett.

Not that he needed her permission on this or anything—she was only his disapproving work-wife in investigation. But still. If Gina didn't castrate him now, he'd like to know that Beckett wouldn't later.

He tossed out an idea that he didn't really like but which seemed like a compromise: "Scandalous Heat."

But she dismissed it: "Too long."

"Hey, I apologized—"

"The title," she hissed, clearly making no time for his innuendoes. "Now walk me through it again. The basics."

Rick sighed and worked his way through the book's premise as though retracing his steps: "Well, a gossip columnist turns up dead, and she's a contact of Rook's so he manages to get involved in the case. And it turns out that his article brought Nikki some unwanted attention, even though he thought she'd be flattered. But since she's not really the type to draw attention to herself, she just feels vulnerable and naked. Oh!" He snapped his fingers at an epiphany: "Furious Heat."

"Oh, I like that," Gina said, looking away in thought, but what she liked was not his suggestion at all. "Naked Heat. God, it practically sells itself."

"Whoa, wow, now wait."

She didn't. "Eye-catching, ear-catching, good rhythm, short and sweet and sexy—and you even get your little layer of emotional subtext you like so much. What's not to like?"

"False advertising," he argued feebly. "I mean, doesn't it sound like . . . porn?" This, of course, from the man who once brushed off Beckett's ire over what sounded to her like a stripper name.

Back then, he'd invoked artistic integrityto counter her commands to rename the character. ("If I cave now, what next? What next? What more demands would you demand of me?")

His objection today was less fierce than Beckett's had been, but that didn't mean he felt any less personally violated.

Besides, it wasn't just possessiveness about his character (surpassed by little else but his possessiveness for his own daughter and a certain muse). He'd invested a lot of time and energy into the book already and it wasn't even finished yet.

All that work he put in, he thought, getting Nikki and Rook to keep talking to each other instead of falling back on their default setting to fuck it out, only for it to be bound and sold as Naked Heat.

She leveled him with a stare, like she couldn't believe he was serious. "There's a sex scene again, right?"

"Well, sure . . ." Two, at present. More until he'd scrapped the rest.

"Then it isn't false advertising. And since when are you squeamish about pornography, Richard?"

He thought: Since the woman you want me to sell flicked a paper star at me and laughed. But he said, "I'm not squeamish. I—was just hoping that this one would have some class. You know, sequel to a bestselling success, strong plot, a decent case, stands on its own merit without over-sexing the characters like fanfiction."

"Oh, that reminds me. I hope none of your fans have used the title already. We'll still get the copyright, but I really don't need the accusatory letters," she said, and continued to rattle off the details of going forward.

It was then that he suspected that Gina had won.

He sighed and nodded along like a long-forgotten bobble-head. He never even bothered to keep tally with her. Considering the distribution of power in their relationship, an imaginary scoreboard wasn't really worth the effort.

But he prepared himself to up the tally in Beckett's favor. He'd let her win as many times as she needed in order to forgive him.

The story formerly not known as Naked Heat was supposed to serve as an apology. Now he had the uneasy feeling that there would come a time that he would need to apologize for the apology.

Ah, a whole new abuse of irony.