AN: For the few that so sweetly approached and requested a bit more of these two, thank you for sharing your enjoyment of them with me. It thrills me that you've come to care for them as much as I do.

Chapter 1

A bead of sweat zigzagged down the back of Kate's neck as she stood there in the doorway of Rick's early-morning bedroom, her heart thumping not from the miles on the treadmill she'd just bitterly fed it, but from the sight of his form stretched out beneath the sheets where she'd left him, after too many days and nights without.

It'd been five months of it-five months of a lot of it-yet her body still craved his with the force of an ignited rocket at the moment of launch. Sometimes, when he'd call her in the middle of a day, she'd unconsciously cross her legs at the sound of his voice, like there was some secret to be kept hidden between them where he so often lived, like he was some famed artist and she was safeguarding his treasured canvas.

Never before or with such intensity had she wanted a man; never before had a man taken such smug delight in knowing it.

"I can hear you panting from all the way over here, Counselor," he croaked without shifting a hair. "You'd make a terrible stalker."

Kate braced a shoulder against the doorjamb, banished the beginnings of a grin with a nip of her lip. "It wouldn't hurt you to get your ass down there into the gym every once in a while, you know. I'm sure you're paying a fortune for it."

He was put together deliciously. She chose to set aside that fact for her own selfish purposes.

That had him swiftly rolled and perched on his elbow. "If the lady is displeased with the gentleman's physique and his regimen for its upkeep, perhaps she should slide her gripes on over here and climb on. He'll be happy to remind her how skilled he is at burning calories in other creative ways."

Given the hour, it was undoubtedly more physiology than arousal, she knew. Nonetheless, that Kate could make out the outline of his length, hard beneath the sheets, from where she stood had her sparked, and though time wasn't her friend that morning, she was well acquainted with the charity of his… skill and the benefit its demonstration could have on her endurance in facing the craze of her day ahead.

She took a step toward the bed, lifted her running tank over her head and let it fall to the floor. "He and his ways are going to have to be quick about it." Her eyes carved a deliberate path from his all the way down to the prize she was about to collect. "It doesn't look like that'll be a problem. The gentlemen seem to have gotten a head start."

Rick tossed off the covers and gave the unoccupied spot on the mattress an energetic swat. "Ain't science grand? Get over here with those ab muscles of yours. I want to trace them with my tongue for breakfast." There was no need for him to ask twice. She jumped in beside him in a blink. "Happy five-monthiversary," he said following a kiss that testified to just how happy he was. "Are you ready for your present?"

Kate reached for his hand, slid it beneath the waistband of her shorts because she wanted to show more than tell, and when he hummed against her neck his pleasure in the slick finding, the grin she'd earlier done away with broke out wide across her face.

xxxx

"You were pretty dirty this morning," Rick called to her through the shower's fogged wall of glass as he stood at the sink and dragged a razor across his jaw. "When I'm finished shaving, you want me to climb in there and show you how to maximize lather effectiveness?"

"I got up at 5:30 a.m. and sprinted three miles, Billboard Boy. What'd you do?"

He set his Schick on the marble vanity, took three steps backward until he was able to tug open the door that had Kate boxed in. "That's not what I meant," he said with an overdone wink, and before he knew it found himself beneath the spray with her, having been yanked inside by the towel he had draped around his neck.

"Dammit, I can't be late today. You know that." In a breath, the towel was gone, chucked over the glass to the tile below. "Why do you have to be so-"

"Ah-ah, I'd think carefully about how that sentence ends, Counselor." He took her by the waist and rotated their positions so the water would roll down over her skin in lazy ropes, instead. He found that arrangement far more pleasing. "I know I've already given you the gift of ecstasy for our anniversary, but there's still a little something more, so you really should be nice to me."

He'd been the one to bring it to her attention the night before that their shared days had amounted to a collection worthy of note, but mingled with her surprise in and appreciation of his recognition of it had been a swirl of guilt she hadn't voiced.

Their time of late had largely been spent apart, not by choice, but by a bombardment of professional obligation-hers mainly.

Not to say Kate wasn't grateful for the work or up to the task. Worn thin as she often was, hers was the only name engraved on the gold shingle that hung at her office's front door. Keeping the practice alive was her responsibility alone, and it was the successful realization of that dream that her passion employed as fuel to press her onward, despite the odds against its survival in a field with competition popping up like a game of Whac-A-Mole.

But now another passion had hold of her, one she was into too deep to even contemplate giving it up to appease the other. There was commitment, and with it love, and she didn't want to give Rick any reason to feel doubt about that.

It wasn't the time to share it, though.

Kate dipped back and came up again, pushed her fingers through her wet hair. "For your information, what I was going to say was incredibly nice." Those same fingers walked the curves of his waist and settled beneath the cheeks of his ass. "Since you interrupted me, I guess you won't be hearing it. What a shame for you."

She gave him a simultaneous pinch on each side and slid by him, his drenched boxers flying through the open door and hitting her in the head as she toweled off.

xxxx

It was bad enough that it was Monday, even worse that it was a Monday crammed with back-to-back-to-back appointments. She was already working on a way to make her trusted aid, Morgan, pay dearly for that.

Already on her second fix of caffeine of the morning, Kate's bleary eyes broke from the printout of her schedule when Morgan wandered in and plopped down in the chair in front of her.

"So, you and Rick did it this morning, huh?" she said with unsettling confidence. "I can't do sex in the morning. Or with the lights on." She sipped casually from the mug she carried in with her. "We're going to be busy today. You look thrilled about it."

Christ. Kate didn't even know where to start.

"I should fire you for saddling me with all of this on a Monday. I could fire you for the other thing. Since when is my sex life any of your business? And how did you even…?"

"Um, since you actually decided to get one?" Morgan snickered around another sip. "Do you honestly think I can't tell when you two have gotten your thing on-or off, more importantly? I've seen you almost every morning for three years. Trust me. It's super obvious. Jeez, if it bothers you to hear that, I won't even bring up what I can hear coming from this office when the he visits and you close the door."

Okay, yes, she and Rick, on a few occasions, had indulged in some less than professional office activity, and though her cheeks now flashed pink with its verbal acknowledgement, she regretted none of it. In fact, she actually thought they were due another round. Perhaps when the office was otherwise vacant.

"Why don't you keep the noticing to yourself, from now on. I know we're friends, but that doesn't mean we have to talk about everything, and, you're sort of creeping me out."

Morgan flipped her mouth into a frown. "Fine, but let me just say it's kind of mean of you to withhold the sexy goods from those of us forced to live vicariously, especially when the sexy goods involve a man as beautiful as yours."

God, he was beautiful, Kate thought. But that wasn't the point.

"Mean of me? Does this mean you won't play with me in the sandbox at recess?" Kate plucked her coffee cup from the desk and leaned back in her chair. "You're even more dramatic than he is, and that's not easily accomplished. How about you go out to your desk and make sure we have everything lined up for these client meetings. Clearly you could use the distraction, and I could really do without yours right now."

Morgan got up without a fight, set off in retreat. "You know," she turned back to say, "for someone who got laid this morning, it sure hasn't relaxed you any."

"Just get outta here. Buzz me when Rebecca shows up."

Yeah, Kate really hated Mondays.

xxxx

"It's been a zoo around here, too," Rick commiserated when they spoke by phone that afternoon. It had become a thing they always did-a sweet routine. No matter how busy they were, no matter how many directions they were being pulled, they always made time to find one another, if only for a minute or two. "Hearing your voice is just what I needed."

"Were you guys able to make any headway? How's he been today?"

Rick had taken on a high-profile client as a favor to a friend with a scheduling conflict, and acrimonious didn't even begin to scratch the surface of that nightmare of a divorce battle.

It was rather like The War of the Roses, it turned out-quite a surprise for Rick, that not unimportant tidbit having been left out ahead of his agreed involvement-where neither husband nor wife had any interest in or intention of relinquishing their respective stakes in the palatial Greenwich home they'd built together in happier times. Through it all, they still continued to live under the same luxury-shingle roof.

Given the number of hours Rick had already logged with the husband of the pair, how little he imagined there could ever have existed happier times. A bigger prick he wasn't sure he'd ever met, and though he was fighting tooth and nail for him, as he did for all his clients-prick or otherwise-part of him was secretly pulling for the wife.

"I wish someone had been keeping track of the number of times I've used the word douche over the past month. I swear I could secure a page in Guinness. He actually told my assistant today that the coffee she brought him was too beige and, therefore, too boring to drink. I caught Nora's face afterward. She was about two seconds away from hurling it at him, cup included."

"As I recall, you hurled a pair of your wet underwear at me this morning. The two of you make a nice team."

"You know I would've just given them to you if you'd asked," he quipped to a puff of a giggle. "Since you brought them up, will there be more flying underwear-preferably yours-in the cards tonight after we have dinner?"

In that moment, there was nothing Kate wanted more than to spend their anniversary night with him, however silly and simple the recognition of five months together might seem to some. But…

"Rick, I can't tonight, not since I managed to sign both of those new clients today. I have to get some work done on their stuff."

His disappointment screamed into the silence he briefly let hang between them. "I guess that'll teach me to send customers to opponents." He'd quietly recommended her, and suddenly remembered he wasn't going to let her in on that for fear she might look upon the gesture the wrong way. "Shit. You didn't know that part. I gave your name to Rebecca through Nora. They're friends, and I didn't want to handle her myself, in case, I don't know, something went sideways. Nora works miracles around here. I can't risk losing her."

"You thought I'd be upset about it, that I'd think you were throwing small-time Kate Beckett your scraps."

"Honestly, that possibility did cross my mind. I promise you it wasn't that, at all. I learned how capable and how hungry you were the first time I met you, and you haven't let me forget it since. I know you don't need me for that. I will admit I do hope you need me for other things, though. I do hope."

There were times when he did things, when he said things that Kate felt grateful to be sitting down for.

It dizzied her to think about how none of it might've ever been. Had he not shown up at that legal conference, had she walked out of the convention center and gotten into her car instead of reluctantly going with him to the bar, had James Sullivan known another kid from school who turned out to be some hotshot lawyer, Richard Castle would still just be a face on a billboard that drove her mad.

"I do," she confessed with softness. "And I'm not upset. I am sorry, though. I know there hasn't been a lot of time lately. Maybe we can try to do a weekend away when things quiet down-if things quiet down."

"We'll find a way to do a weekend. Hey, I actually have to run. I'm doing a staff meeting here in a few with all the troops. Are we still good for dinner at 7 p.m.?" Kate confirmed with but a sound. "You're always just what I need," he told her again. "I'll see you tonight."

"See you tonight," she echoed.

It dizzied her to think about it.