Richard Castle's home in the Hamptons was breathtaking. Of course, she had known what it looked like from research done before she had met him, but pictures of the mansion from the outside, photos of the property and the pristine shots of each room taken for selling purposes did no justice to the place. He had made it his own, made it feel more like a cozy beach cottage despite its size, and already had her falling in love with it.

He had walked her through the house, shown her each room, allowed her an intimate look into the master bedroom, one she hoped to share with him tonight, and even gave her a tour of the pool, the tennis court, showing her every available luxury that he emphasized she was welcome to use any time she pleased. It scared her, to feel so comfortable here so soon, to picture herself existing in his home, his life, so easily. She knew what she wanted, yes, but that didn't stop her insecurities from coming alive, crushing the excited little butterflies in her stomach with an iron fist.

"Kate," he called, reaching across the patio table to dust his fingers at her wrist. "You okay? You keep zoning out."

"Sorry," she murmured, returning to the burger he had grilled for her and taking a satisfying bite of the well-cooked meat, the fresh vegetables, and the toasted bun. She had had no knowledge of his culinary skills, but he had definitely surpassed any potential expectations. "It's just really beautiful here," she explained after a sip of water, allowing herself another glimpse of the ocean, another breath of the salt in the air.

"Told you you'd love it," he winked, waggling his eyebrows at her even as she returned the gesture with an eye roll.

She had missed him.

Fiercely.

She wouldn't admit it to him, not yet, but the thought of seeing him again had been the only thing to soften the agony of her recovery at the farm for those three unending months. Healing, physical therapy, actual therapy – they had all worn her down, left her crawling into bed at night with her muscles weary and her eyes wet, but then his number would appear on her burner cell and she would be allowed a few minutes of his voice in her ear, and even the darkest days would end with a flicker of brightness.

The worry that maybe their whirlwind of a romance would be nothing more than just that had become a present knot in her stomach within those first few days away from him, but those nightly phone conversations had eradicated her doubts with rapid intensity. The verbal communication had strengthened her belief in who they were, in what they could be, and it had caused her yearning to be able to put this theory to the test to grow more powerful with each passing day.

"Have you talked to Montgomery?"

Kate blinked, found him watching her, head tilted in curiosity, probably trying to figure out where exactly she kept disappearing to. She tightened the fingers around her food, determined to finish the massive sized burger and to stop losing herself to her thoughts when she was finally where she wanted to be.

"Yeah, I have a string of evaluations in a month that will determine whether or not I'm qualified to come back."

"You know you'll pass," Castle assured her while she took another small bite. "Rachel told me you were the best the NYPD had ever seen."

"What're you doing talking to Rachel?" she huffed, but there was amusement dancing in the sunlit pools of his eyes and he grinned in response.

"Don't be jealous, sweetheart," he teased, catching her ankle, circling his thumb over the delicate bone protruding when she delivered a playful kick to his shin beneath the table. "Sometimes she would screen my daily phone calls with you, tease me about our undying love-"

Kate laughed, loud and uninhibited, unable to remember the last time she had laughed so genuinely, felt it spreading like warmth through her chest.

"She did not," Beckett muttered, popping the last of her burger into her mouth with a triumphant smirk. She knew he was trying to ply her with well-balanced meals already, caught him studying her every bite for more than the apparent interest that came with eyeing her lips.

"Anyway," Castle stretched out in the patio chair before pushing back to stand. He was dressed in cargo shorts and a white button down that fluttered in the sea breeze, the outfit one she had yet to see on him and she was almost surprised by how much she liked it, how much it made her want to curl up in the sand with him and exist in the peace the ocean atmosphere provided. "So in the fall? We'll go back to the city?"

Beckett paused in her rise from her own chair, glancing back to him in apprehension. "Castle, I don't want you to have to rearrange your life around me."

"You're a part of my life," he answered, shrugging as he tugged her up the rest of the way. "An important part. And I'd be returning to the city regardless, Kate. It's not like it's an imposition."

The sunshine highlighted his hair, turned his skin a golden brown, and had his eyes shining an even brighter shade of blue. He was beautiful, in ways she never would have imagined, and she so badly wanted to be what he deserved.

"But what happens when we get back?" she questioned, her voice tinged with something uncertain, something hesitant and… scared? Yeah, even she could hear it, she was still petrified when it came to him. "What if - what if we don't work in the real world? What if my job comes between us again or I screw it up? I don't - god, I don't want to ruin this, Castle."

Her gaze drifted towards the ocean and she tried to train her breathing to the pattern of the waves, tried not to let it hurt her when Castle released her hand.

"Kate." He relocated his palm to her jaw, forced her eyes upwards to meet him. "I can't promise that this will work," he admitted, and she felt her lips curve downwards before she could stop it, felt his thumb brush across the frown. "But just because we don't have the answers now, doesn't mean we can't find our way. After everything we've already been through, I really don't see a change in environment breaking us."

More 'what if's bubbled on her tongue, but Castle was already ahead of her, stopped her before she could even start.

"And I'm not going to give up on us either. I'll scratch and claw for every inch because I want this to work, just as much as you do." His thumb drifted away from her bottom lip, traveling up the sharp bone of her cheek to caress the delicate skin beneath her eye. "I love you, Kate. That's more apparent now than it's ever been. So spend the summer with me and my daughter, enjoy your last month of vacation, and we'll go from there."

She knew better than to trust in words, in reassurances, but she resisted the born instinct to doubt him, to expect the worst, and decided to believe him, to trust wholeheartedly just before rising on her bare toes to kiss him.

Castle met her mouth with that foreign reverence she had so dearly missed, attending to the surface of her lips with the bold sweeps of his tongue while his hands feathered at her cheeks, soft and tentative until she arched for more. Her fingers fisted in the front of his shirt, trying to draw him closer, yearning for the heated press of his body against hers, the physical connection that their relationship was once built upon, for proof that he still wanted her.

A low groan rose in his throat when she eased a knee between his thighs, rocked her hips forward to greet his and hummed when he sucked her bottom lip between his teeth. His fingers glided into her hair, cupping the back of her skull and angling her mouth, allowing him an easy opportunity to deepen the kiss, to remind her just how quickly he could have her blood going hot and her veins turning to live wires already sparking with electricity.

Kate released his shirt to wrap her arms around him, splaying her hands wide over the hard muscles and rigid bones of his back, melding him against her and releasing a moan at the stroke of his tongue, the trail of his mouth from her lips to her jaw, down to her neck, sucking hard at her strident pulse until she couldn't handle anything less.

"Castle," she gasped, clawing at his shoulders, trying not to rip his shirt, but needing it gone. "Rick, please, please-"

Rick slid his hands past her hips, down to the firm muscles of her thighs, and hoisted her up, waiting until her legs were twined securely around his waist to turn towards the open French doors. He stumbled up the stairs with her, growling every time she rolled her hips or nipped at his jaw, and found their way back into his bedroom.

God, she'd missed him.

A mess of moans and laughter spilled from her mouth as they toppled to the bed together, his body a warm and welcome weight atop hers. His hand lifted to brush the curtain of her hair back from her face, smoothing it away with a gentle palm, watching it fan out across the ivory fabric of his pillows. The lust burning in his irises, surrounding the dilated coals of his pupils, had her blood sizzling, her body eager and squirming as he unbuttoned the shorts that ended just above her knee, but the tenderness in his touch, the caress of his fingers along her cheek, her ear, her neck, while he undressed her had her heart ripe, swollen with love for him.

"Kate?" he panted, splaying his hand beneath the sheer, flowing fabric of her shirt, circling her scar, grazing the expanding branches of her ribs, stroking the underside of a breast, but staring, studying and searching her face.

Her heart was pounding with anticipation, loud and thrumming in her ears, but she raised a hand to his jaw, skimmed her fingertips along the corner of his kiss swollen lips, and drew him down, whispered love into his mouth and gave him everything he'd sought from her in the beginning, gave him her heart.

He woke the next morning to an empty bed, panic instantly swarming the pit of his stomach, and sat up with a sinking heart. They had spent the entire day in his home, on the beach, sharing smiles and laughter and conversations that were once had only through the speaker of a cellphone. He had expected to wake with her beside him again for the first time in months, to open his eyes to the spill of her hair over his pillows and the heat of her naked skin against his.

He couldn't understand how she could leave after everything he said, after everything-

"I'm out here, Castle."

Rick jerked at the muffled call of her voice and pushed the sheets from his waist, grabbed his boxers and followed the sound of her voice to the balcony. And there she was, curled up in nothing but his shirt from the day before with no intention of leaving to be found.

"Morning," Kate greeted from one of armchairs adorning the balcony, a cup of steaming coffee cradled in her palms and an extra mug sitting on the bistro table placed between the two matching chairs. She shifted her eyes from the sunrise to him, read it all in his face before he could even try to hide it, but her gaze held no hurt, no admonishment or vexation, only understanding and a hint of apology before diverting her eyes to the untouched cup on the table. "Made you coffee."

"I - how did you even know-"

"When we were together, you woke every morning at six, no matter where we were," she murmured, training her eyes back on the streaks of light painting the sky straight ahead. "Usually you would just look around, take in your surroundings, and go back to sleep."

"You actually realized the moment I woke up?" he asked, wonderstruck as he sank down to the arm of her chair, accepting the mug of coffee she nodded towards and taking a quick sip. The hot caffeine seared his tongue, but he didn't notice, his attention on her, always riveted to her. "And you remembered?"

Kate's lips quirked around the ceramic rim of her cup. "It was only a few days, a week and a half if you count the hospital, but I remember all of it."

Castle nudged at her side, secret delight blooming in his chest as she wordlessly shifted in her seat to allow him to slide beneath her and pull her into his lap in the one person chair.

"Kind of impossible to forget," he mused, setting his coffee down in favor of the uncovered skin of her outer thigh and the tangled mane of her hair. "And it felt way longer than a near two weeks."

Kate hummed her assent, angling her back to fit more comfortably against his chest. "I don't know if I'm good for more than a few days, if I can be what you want."

Rick trailed his hand down her thigh, curled his fingers beneath her knee and squeezed. "You're already what I want. And technically, Beckett, we've known each other way longer. I met you over seven years ago."

Her shoulder pressed to his clavicle as she craned her neck back to see him, her cheeks full with the smile spreading over her lips. They had happened quickly, everything about their relationship fast-paced and chaotic, but three times the odds had kept him apart from this woman, and each time, they found their way back to each other. Like hell was he letting her go now, not when he already knew how extraordinary they were together, how they someday could be even better.

"So I'm not worried," he continued, propping his chin on her shoulder, inhaling the scent of coffee and salt and sleep embedded into her skin. "In fact, I'm pretty confident I'll marry you one day, Kate Beckett. Right here on this beach."

The moment he said it, he expected panic, expected her pliant body to go stiff in his arms, for her to finally make her escape, but she surpassed his assumptions, just like always, and relaxed further into his embrace instead.

"Oh yeah?" she hummed, trailing her fingers over the arm draped at her stomach, combing her short nails through the golden fields of hair on his forearm, and no, she didn't sound the least bit panicked. She sounded content, curious, and even a little excited to hear him elaborate.

She was in this. Really in this.

"Y-yeah," he got out, clearing his throat, scrabbling to regain the confidence he had owned mere seconds ago while she smiled up at him, so open and adoring, so different from the cracked quality all of her smiles once held. "We'll have the ceremony in the backyard, while the sun is setting, just like it is now. Alexis will be there, along with my mother, and your friends from the precinct you told me about, the two boys-"

"Ryan and Esposito," she supplied, quietly, as if not to upset the telling of his vision for their future, one he could see far too clearly when it came to her.

"But just the immediate family, because you never wanted an extravagant, overdone wedding and I've already had too many. We'll have something intimate but beautiful, something perfect for just the two of us, and after that, we'll go on our honeymoon. Wherever you want. And it'll just be the beginning, Kate. The beginning of a long life together."

Kate readjusted in his lap, turning so that she could face him, offering him an unhidden look into the raw hope shimmering in her eyes, illuminating her entire being like the sun in the sky. She laced an arm at his neck, curled the other between their chests to unfurl her fingers atop the bones of his sternum, over his beating heart.

"And I vow not to take out a hit on your life at any point in time during this long life together."

He gasped, relishing in the burst of her laughter that she buried in his throat, a little surprised they could joke about that now, but also relieved. He never thought there would be a silver lining to his ex-wife hiring a contract killer to assassinate him, yet here he was, the woman ordered to end his life curled in his lap, teasing him about it.

He loved her.

Kate kissed the column of his throat, nuzzled the taut skin beneath his jaw.

"I want it," she whispered, like it was a secret she could no longer keep bottled up inside. "Everything you said, Castle. And more."

A/N: This final author's note feels especially bittersweet. Writing this story was a wonderful experience and I extend all of my thanks to the ever so talented Kris for allowing me to draw inspiration from her incredible gif set which this fic is based upon - thank you so much for the continued support and enthusiasm. I truly hope this story lived up to even a fraction of your expectations. And to Emily, who was such a wonderful cheerleader, and Nadia, who created the brilliant cover art to accompany this story - I'd be lost without you two, thank you for all the help and general loveliness.

And I'd like to offer the greatest of thank yous to everyone who took the time to read, favorite, follow, and review this story. Your support, kindness, and feedback made this adventure all the more rewarding.