Disclaimer: The only part of Castle that I own is the TV on which I watch the show.

Castle laughs so hard that he really does almost drop her, but stays on course. "I think that may qualify as line crossing, Kate," he says, steadying them both.

"You started it," she semi-protests, very sleepily.

Her bedroom door is ajar, and he pushes it open with his foot. When he reaches her bed he sets her down exactly as he had yesterday (yesterday!), very gently. She's asleep, or at least almost there, so he takes off her shoes. Should he wake her so she can brush her teeth and wash her face, or let her be? He opts for the latter: she's worn out and needs uninterrupted rest more than clean teeth. Now he's faced with the second question: take her jeans off or leave them on? This time he chooses the former because she'll be uncomfortable if she sleeps all night in her pants. It's one thing to unzip them, but quite another to peel them off her, even if they're relatively loose because of the weight she's lost over the last few weeks.

The trouble is that every time he manages to get the jeans almost to her hips, her panties come with them. He's doing his damnedest not to look, but really: they're scarlet and have lacy edging and a tiny red satin bow. Torture, this is freaking torture. She's torturing him. Okay, not deliberately, but still. On the fourth try, he gets it right: he holds her panties up with one hand while he pushes her jeans down with the other. It's awkward—awkward in ways he can't afford to think about yet—but it works. Except that just as the waistband of her pants reaches the middle of her thighs, she wakes up.

"Castle?"

"Go back to sleep, Kate." But she grabs her jeans and starts hauling them back up, so he puts his (much larger) hand over hers to stop its progress. "I'm taking these off so that you can get a restful night. You'd hate waking up and finding that you're still in your jeans. I've been there, I know."

"Not in my jeans, you haven't."

"Regrettably no, not in your jeans. But in my own, and when I do I feel all creaky and ancient." He takes his hand away but looks right into her eyes, in case she has any doubts. "Please don't tell me that you're worried about my seeing you in your undies. You were walking around in them all day yesterday. But now that you're awake again you can get these jeans off all by yourself. See you in the morning, okay?"

"Okay."

He reaches the door in four strides and closes it quietly behind him. Unlike Kate, he's wide awake. It's still fairly early; there's enough light left in the sky, combined with the light that's coming through the kitchen window, that he can stay on the porch for a while with his book. He quickly settles into a pattern: read five or six pages of The Brothers Karamazov, stop and think, not just about the novel but about Kate. Eventually it's too dark, so he goes inside and stretches out on the sofa, where he reestablishes the read-think-read-think cycle. At some point he becomes uncomfortably aware of the crick in his neck; he should go to bed. Though he's a little reluctant to take Jim's room, he does. His back will thank him, especially now that he's not going to be leaving on Friday. Oh. Whoops, he hadn't mentioned that to Kate. He will, he will. Maybe her Dad already called to tell her. Or texted.

When he goes to the bathroom and turns on the light he finds a Post-it note in the middle of the mirror. It's Wonder Woman! Oh, my God, is it from when she was little? Does she have a cache of these? She's left him a message:

"Thanks, Castle. You were right."

Beneath it she had drawn a pair of jeans, which she had enclosed in a red circle with a red diagonal line running through it. He reads it over and over while he brushes his teeth. After he's done, he peels it off the mirror and takes it to Jim's/his room, opens his wallet and carefully attaches the little note to his New York Public Library card. When he gets in bed, he listens to the country sounds; he's not used to them, at least not ones like these. These are woodsy sounds, very different from the ones he hears in the Hamptons, which hardly qualifies as the country, certainly not in summer. He's almost asleep when he thinks of something, and sits up. A plan— a "line" plan—has surfaced and he'll need to be up before she is. Five-thirty should be early enough. He sets the alarm on his phone, rolls onto his side, and as he drifts off thinks how glad he is that a little package had caught his eye when he was in the grocery store, how glad he is that he had tossed it in the basket.

Maybe it's all the years of single parenthood, but he wakes a half an hour early. By 5:10 he's in the kitchen, assembling what he needs for his early-morning project. He tears open one of the little packages of yeast—his impulse purchase at the market—and dissolves it in a bowl of warm water. Not long after, he's kneading dough. He'd forgotten how soothing it was; he hasn't done this in years, but he remembers every step. With the dough rising in a greased bowl on the kitchen counter, he makes himself a cup of coffee and walks down to the pond. There's a wooden platform there where he can sit and dip his feet into the water. Geez! Freezing! He waits a minute or two and puts in a big toe. Ah, not so bad that way. He swishes it around, yeah, not bad. Maybe they should have breakfast down here. He could carry the chairs and—dammit. A mosquito. It must have been the size of the robin Kate was so taken with before. And here's another one, taking a hunk out of his calf. Of course there are mosquitoes here; they like water and it's dawn, just time for them to have a snack—him—before their bedtime. "I'm skedaddling!" he says, and runs back to the house, in such a hurry to escape the voracious mosquitoes that he's unaware of the remnants of his coffee sloshing onto his blue tee shirt.

The dough has risen enough; he rolls it out, brushes it with butter, and sprinkles it with cinnamon, raisins, and some pecans that he'd found in the freezer. Now he rolls it up, cuts it into slices, puts them in a pan and lets them sit to rise again. He has 45 minutes to kill before putting them in the oven; might as well shower. When he pulls his tee shirt over his head he finds the coffee stain. Nyet problema, as Dostoevsky would say. Or not. It'll come out in the wash; besides, he has two other shirts now. After he dries off and shaves, he considers the new tees: he gravitates to the red one. No other choice, really, not with the vision of Kate's little bikinis floating around in his brain.

Back in the kitchen, he takes a piece of paper from the pad next to the phone, writes a brief note on it and puts it on the floor about ten feet from the stove. The timer goes off just as he starts a full pot of coffee, so he takes his culinary masterpiece out of the oven and puts it on a rack to cool. He figures she'll be out in two minutes: no way can she sleep with this delicious smell permeating the cabin.

Less than two. Here she comes now, walking slowly through the living room, her head tilted up as she inhales deeply.

"Morning, Kate. Drawn from your bed by an olfactory magnet, I see."

"Proud of yourself for that one, are you?"

"Pretty much. Wait! Stop right where you are!"

She halts, and looks behind her. "Is there something coming after me that I don't know about? A bear, maybe?"

"No, there's something in front of you," he says, pointing to the floor. "You're about to step on it."

Lowering her eyes, she reads aloud, "Warning, you're about to cross the line," then looks the question at him. "Mmm?"

With his hand protected by a pot holder, he picks up the pan and tilts it towards her. "The breadline."

"Breadline, huh? Those look a lot like rolls to me, not bread."

"Yeah? Well, trust me. You eat one of these and you won't be having this semantical debate with me anymore. You'll be in cinnamon heaven. This is bread, Beckett, that just happens to be in the shape of rolls. So there."

She laughs. "Hard to argue with a debate ender like that one. 'So there.' I'll just go sit down at the table. You going to serve that so-called bread or what?"

"I am, as soon as I pour the coffee that will accompany it. Keep your shirt on."

"You've kept yours on, I see. Changed it, actually."

"Yup." It would not be a good idea to tell her that he selected it to match her underwear, so he doesn't. "And there's more where this came from. Prepare to be dazzled again tomorrow by another color." And with that he delivers a mug of coffee to her, along with a plate that's home to a warm, gooey, cinnamon roll. Plopping down opposite her, he waits for her to take the first bite. He's rewarded instantly.

"Oh, my God, Castle," she says. "This is unbelievable. Best thing I've ever tasted." She pulls another piece from the roll, chews, swallows, and licks the frosting from the tip of her finger. It's hypnotic; he can't take his eyes off her. She does it again. "You know what this reminds me of?"

"No." Do that again, please. Lick your finger and your lip, please, please, please.

"That hilarious scene in Victor/Victoria when Victoria is starving and can't pay the rent and her landlord is about to throw her out. She notices that he has spaghetti sauce on his tie or the napkin that's tucked into his collar, I don't remember which, and she takes her finger and wipes the sauce off and eats it? And then she says, 'I'd sleep with you for a meatball'."

The coffee that he had foolishly put in his mouth as she was halfway through this movie memory comes right out of his nose and onto his new red shirt. He doesn't care. Totally worth it. Even his almost-scorched skin is worth it. She's laughing while he regains his ability to speak, or gasp, anyway. "You saying you'd sleep with me for a meatball, Beckett?"

"Dunno, Castle," she says, eyes sparkling. "I've never had one of your meatballs."

This elicits another round of coughing. "You'll have to excuse me," he says, almost choking as he pushes his chair from the table. "I need to change my shirt. Again. And take a cold shower."

"If she keeps this up," he mutters to the bathroom mirror while he wipes the coffee from his bare chest, "I'm going to have to live in the cold shower. Maybe I could just stand in the pond for the next nineteen days." He towels off, puts on the green tee shirt, and runs his fingers through his hair. "Okay. I can take it."

"Nice shirt," she says when he reappears. "Kind of the color of money."

"It should be. Set me back nine ninety-nine plus tax."

"May I ask you something?"

Is she kidding? "Sure. Ask away."

"May I have another cinnamon roll?"

He pretends to weigh his answer. She deserves to wait. "Only if you admit that you crossed the breadline."

A smile that would melt the frosting on the tops of all the rolls, that would melt the entire polar ice cap, takes over her face. "I admit it. I crossed the breadline."

"That's all I ask," he says primly, turning to the kitchen to get her a refill. Liar, liar, pants on fire, that is so, so, so not the only thing he's asking. He brings her a second roll.

"Thank you. I can't believe you made these, Castle. When did you get up, anyway?"

"I don't know." Another lie. It was 5:01:54.

"Did you not sleep well in Dad's bed?"

"No, no it was great. I think the birds woke me. Not used to all this nature like you. I like it, though."

"Yeah?" She's suddenly a little shy. "You do?"

"Yeah."

When he smiles at her she wonders if the ice cubes in the freezer just melted. "So, you got big plans for today?"

"Believe it or not, I'm going to write. 'm a little behind. I'll leave you in peace for a little. Bet you never thought you'd hear those words pass my lips, right? Oh! I forgot! Your Dad texted me last night." After I texted him, he does not add.

"Really? How come?"

"He, uh, he said his case is really, you know, heating up and he wondered if I could stay up here so that he could work through the weekend."

"What did you say?" she asks, looking over her mug.

"I said it was fine since Alexis is away and that I could, uh, write anywhere. So I guess I'd better get writing, huh?" He stops. "Is that okay with you? If I stay since your Dad is busy?"

"Yeah. It is. Sure. Of course. And I have to step up my PT today, add some stuff. So I might be a little grouchy. Good thing if you write and ignore me."

As if. "Right." He clears his throat. "Guess we both better get cracking then."

"Guess so. Thanks again for this amazing breakfast, Rick."

"My pleasure." Amazing? This breakfast was way beyond amazing. It was inspirational. "I'm gonna do the dishes and then write out on the porch."

She goes to her room to do her morning PT, and he goes to the porch to write, just as he'd said he would. He opens his laptop and begins to type. What he produces is an extended scene that he'll never, ever send to Gina or anyone else. It makes page 105 look like a Disney cartoon for suitable for kindergarteners. It's almost enough to make him blush.

TBC

A/N Thanks again, everyone!