A/N I don't actually know what font was used in Heat Wave, so I exercised writer's prerogative and chose one.

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

What she had had before was just the galley, the advance copy of Heat Wave. She's still fuming that she hadn't gotten it ahead of everyone else, since she's the one it's based on and she's the one who has had to endure Richard Castle and all his 14-karat inappropriateness for months on end. He crowds her all the time. He breathes down her neck, reads over her shoulder, bounces around in the car seat next to her. The man is human Velcro, for God's sake. So now here she is with the real thing. It feels so different in her hand. It's not the raised lettering on the cover, although she likes that tactile change, it's the heft. In hardback, with a dust jacket, it feels so much more substantial. Real. Even though it's fiction—well, almost. That sex scene is definitely completely fictitious. Oh, the crap she's already having to put up with over that. She could kill him, except that she doesn't want to spend the rest of her life behind bars. Among other things, she'd never get to wear a dress like this one again. Oh, yeah, Castle, like she doesn't see him giving her the eye from the other side of the room. Yup, here he comes, looking cocky as ever, right on schedule, four, three, two, one.

"Hey," he says. Why does she have to be wearing that wet dream of a dress in public? He can see more than a suggestion of her perfect breasts, which means that every other man here can, too. Oh, he'd like to see more than a suggestion, but only when it's just the two of them. The two of them, him and Beckett, not the two of them, her breasts. Well, them, too. Shit, she has him flustered. He was going to say something devastatingly debonair, but when he reached her he was reduced to a pathetic, monosyllabic "hey."

That's all he says. "Hey." Why couldn't he have said something else? He's thrown her off and she needs to recover, quickly. She'll flip through the book and think what to do. Okay, got it. She stops to run her free hand over a page. "Hmmm. This is a bit of a surprise." She's not going to look directly at him, especially at that scruff that really does scream sex and is getting harder and harder not to hear, even over the din of her heartbeat. What is it with her heart, anyway? It sounds like a pneumatic drill, and it's going way too fast. Maybe she needs to see a cardiologist. Okay, flip a few more pages. "Hmmm."

"Hmmm, Beckett? That's all you have to say?"

"Oh, I have more to say."

"Are you going to enlighten me? I am the author after all. Of the book you're caressing." Good one, that'll get her.

"Caressing? Pfff. I was just examining the font."

"The font? You're interested in the font?"

"It's a Garamond, isn't it? A very old one, sixteenth-century French? This looks like one of the early adaptations. You know how I love French…things."

Beckett knows about fonts? How is this possible? He may have to take a cold shower, but unfortunately there's none available here. Maybe he could dump that bucket of ice over his head, and parts south. "Yes, yes, it is. You're right. Garamond. I do like a good serif."

"A good serif?" She gives him her best inquisitional look. "Did you choose this font? I'd have thought that was the designer's job."

"Well, yes, ordinarily, but I wanted my input for Nikki."

Input? He had to have done that deliberately, except that he seems a little off his rhythm right now. She hopes so, anyway, now that she has found hers. "Isn't Braggadocio more your style, Castle? Even though it's sans-serif. The letters are so full. Thick. Confident. And the name, braggadocio. It would have been so appropriate, you know, so… self-referential." Oh, she's plenty confident herself at the moment. She looks him unwaveringly in the eye.

"I just changed my mind, Beckett. I might love sans-serif now."

She doesn't know how it happened, but he has his hand wrapped delectably around her elbow, with just the right amount of pressure to send a little frisson through her. Huh, frisson. Yes, her brain is buzzing with all sorts of French things.

He felt that little shiver of hers, right under his hand, no denying it. He's going to press his case a little, and start steering her away from the crowd. He moves his mouth closer to her ear, that gorgeous ear with the gorgeous earring hanging so gorgeously from it. "It sounds incredibly sexy when you say it. Sans-serif: without a stroke." Time to go to his best whisper. "Although I'm really, really fond of strokes. Don't think I could give them up, could you? You can't possibly say no unless you've experienced my stroking."

Oh, God, that did it. Her knees nearly buckled. And she's very, very warm. Warm and, she blushes to admit it to herself, wet. Wait, is she actually blushing? Can Castle see her blushing? And are they out on the corridor now? Her eyes don't seem to be working properly. Focussing. "Uh, Castle, are we going somewhere? Shouldn't you stay here with your, you know, admirers?"

It's all he can do not to kiss every inch of her newly flushed skin right there in the corridor, but he sees the door just a few feet ahead. The door to the private dressing room that he has for this event. The event originally being the book launch but now, he's praying, a launch of a totally different kind—a launch of them. He manages to extract the key card from his pocket, open the door on the first try, and guide them both inside. "Well, Beckett, I'm very much hoping that you're one of my admirers. I'm hoping that we're establishing a mutual admiration society, just the two of us."

He shuts the door and they both react to the click with a start, breaths shallower, pupils dilated. A click as an aphrodisiac? Who knew? Castle turns Beckett into his arms and moves her up against the wall. Amazingly, she is still holding a copy of Heat Wave.

"Are you reading that?"

"Not really. But since the author is here, it seems rude not to." She presses her hips forward. "Shall we?"

"Read?"

"Yes."

"Any part in particular?"

"How about page 105? I remember your mentioning it last week." She raises the book slightly and turns it so that they can both see it. "Now that I look carefully, I can see that this is a very sexy font."

He leans in and begins to kiss her with unrestrained passion, his tongue running across her lips for only a moment before she parts hers. She lets the book fall to the floor. And though she's as far gone as he is, she eventually draws back and rests her forehead on his. She's speaking seductively: "'Their kisses were deep and urgent, familiar all at once, her tongue finding the depth and sweetness of his open mouth while he explored hers'."

"You recited that, Kate! You memorized page 105?" Technically he's holding her up, but he's grateful that she's strong, since he could keel over at any moment.

"I might have. Do you remember what comes next? "'One of his hands reached for her blouse but hesitated.' But I'm not wearing a blouse."

"I can see that," he says, reaching out to the front of her dress.

"'She clutched it, and placed in on her breast'." And so she did, taking his hand and placing it directly over one of her partially exposed breasts with a very taut nipple.

He isn't one for lingering, certainly not now. Lingering can come later. He plans to peel that dress off as fast as he can. "Going off script now, Kate," he says, reaching behind her and undoing the zipper, then pushing the dress off her shoulders and all the way down her body, finally helping her to step out of it. He gasps. "You have nothing on! You had nothing on underneath there! Thank God I didn't know that while we were in the other room."

"Didn't want to ruin the line, Castle. No VPL, no VBL, just me." She moves her hand from his shoulder, which she had gripped while she was getting out of the dress, to his belt, undoing it and whipping it through the loops. She quickly unzips his pants, and as she reaches in and grabs him, coos in his ear. "I'm doing just what Nikki did. Are you going to groan like Rook, Castle? Is this what you were imagining as you were writing this at your desk? Were you," she begins massaging him, "using this font?"

He moans, all right. He might be moaning even louder and more lustfully than his fictional counterpart had in the confines of his writer's brain. Even as Kate is working him up, he's toeing off his shoes and getting the rest of his clothes off.

They're virtually one slippery skin now, her back against the wall, her nails digging into his back, and they both feel as if they're about to explode. "I'm sopping," she says.

"I'm leaking," he says. "Fuck the foreplay."

"No, fuck me, Castle."

She has one leg already curled around the back of his calf, and together they move it to his waist. She gives a little hop so that her other leg joins the first, and she's wrapped tightly around him. He's trying to take it moderately slowly, but she's so ready for him, and they're both so eager, that he enters her in one quick, spectacular thrust.

"Jesus, Castle."

"Sorry, sorry, are you all right?"

"Yes, I'm perfect, you're perfect, we're perfect. I cannot believe how fantastic you feel. And you'll feel even more fantastic—" she gives him a little slap on his perfect ass—"when you start moving."

With each thrust and response, they grow impossibly more aroused. They're alternating between plundering each other's mouths and watching their bodies come together and slide apart in varying tempos: slow, a little faster, very slowly, and finally so fast that Beckett bites him on the shoulder to keep from screaming. She is contracting around him with such force that he's afraid he might drop her, but the sensation is so spectacular that he drives into her even harder until he climaxes every bit as forcefully as she had. Bending his knees, he brings them both to the floor, lying on his back and pulling her on top of him.

Beckett is the first to come to her senses, licking a trickle of sweat from his throat and then kissing the spot. "You know what?"

"What?"

"That's one hell of a font."

"Thank God." He draws her up his body and kisses her. "Because your review is the only one I care about."

A/N That's it for chapter 1. More chapters (and fonts) will follow eventually.