For a long moment Grissom felt absurd in the staring stand-off with the person standing in front of the table. He hesitated, his gaze moving from the man to his mother and back again, trying desperately to understand this unexpected connection.

The other man swayed a little, pressing a hand to his stomach. "May I sit down, please?" he murmured. Grissom nodded, and Alex took the chair closest to Olivia, moving slowly. She reached out to touch his brown, her expression concerned.

Grissom felt an odd pang of jealousy. He signed, /Mom? Tell me what the hell is going on./

"It's a long story." Alex murmured, and startled, Grissom realized the man had understood his question. Olivia was holding out a glass of ice water; Grissom watched him drink thirstily.

"I've got time," came the hard, quiet reply. "And I think I can fill in a few blanks, but I'd like the whole saga."

"Where's Sara?" Alex asked absently, smiling at Olivia, who patted his hand.

"Coming," came the short response. Alex looked over at Grissom fully for the first time, and each man keenly assessed the other over the table.

"You look bad. You're hurt," Grissom pointed out. Alex shot him a warning glance, then looked to Olivia, who was signing frantically now.

/Alex! What's wrong?/

"I'm fine," the older man repeated testily. "Just a flesh wound. Have you all ordered yet? Because I could definitely use a good glass of port at the moment."

Grissom hesitated, then looked around for the waiter. Olivia's fingers flashed quickly. /Alex, you're hurt, and from the look of you, you're not going to make it through dinner./

/I . . . I may have to cut the evening short, / came the slower signs back. /But I promised I'd be here, darling./

Grissom had flagged a waiter and tersely ordered drinks, now he turned back to Alex. "Done. So let me get this straight—your niece is my fiancée?"

/Your Sara is Alex's Sara?/ Olivia signed, her bright eyes narrowing as she tried to put this new information together.

Alex gave a sigh and caught Olivia's fluttering hands with his own, larger ones as he faced her. "Dear heart, apparently yes. My niece seems to be your son's beloved. Not something I'd thought probable, but apparently the long shot odds of Vegas apply to situations like this."

Grissom blinked, realizing the implications in a rush of surprise. If he married Sara, then he'd be related to Alex. Not necessarily a bad thing there, since he respected the man. On the other hand, given the way his mother was gripping Alex's hands—

"And how long have YOU two been cozy?"

Before anyone could begin to reply, a soft voice broke into silence. "Sorry I'm late--"

Tall, slightly flushed, bright-eyed, Sara stood there in a neat Chanel suit of nubbly cream linen. She looked from face to face, and when she reached her uncle, her eyes narrowed; moving quickly she reached out for him. "You're hurt. Damn it! Alex, you said it would be a piece of cake!"

"And it was," Alex grumbled, gripping her hand. "I'm going to be fine, Sara. So let's see this impressive bit of stone your fine young gentleman has graced you with . . . . oh very nice!"

"Alex—" Sara grumbled, but shot patient looks at Grissom and his mother. Olivia looked back at Sara with undisguised delight, eyes bright. Sara pulled her fingers away from her uncle and slowly, clumsily signed.

/I am pleased to meet you/ came the hesitant gestures.

Olivia's smile grew, and she spoke softly, but clearly. "An I am peased to mee' you too, Tair-a."

Grissom looked at Sara, his eyes wide and soft for a moment; she blushed under his stare and moved to sit next to him at the table.

For a moment the four of them said nothing, and then Alex winced.

Grissom leaned over the table. "Spill it, Hank, Alex, whatever you true name is."

Alex looked back, managing a wry grin as he nodded. "Oh very well. I may have to make this a bit short, but you'll get the gist of it soon enough. The story begins roughly forty two years ago, when you were ten years old, Mr. Grissom. We first met back then, although I'm fairly sure you don't remember me at all."

Grissom shot a surprised look at his mother, who nodded. /True, Gil./

"Your mother was having a difficult time in the mid-Sixties. Art was still very much an Old Boy network especially in Chicago, and your father hadn't left you two very much when he died. Your mother had been forced to do some unsavory things—" Alex sighed. "And one of them was . . . forgery."

Grissom went pale. "Mom?"

Olivia Grissom bit her lips, eyes bright for a moment, then she slowly nodded, her fingers moving in quick, almost desperate signs. /I'm sorry honey but it's true. I was doing fake Mondrians—his later period stuff. They went for four or five hundred a pop./

"What? What did she say?" Sara asked, watching Olivia's hands.

Grissom sighed. "My mother is confessing to being a crook."

"No!" Sara replied, stunned. Olivia's fingers moved again as she lifted her chin and looked slightly defiant.

/It's true. In nineteen sixty-six I had a ten-year old child to clothe and feed. I had a damned Art degree, and nobody in all of Chicago would hire me, a deaf woman, at a wage good enough to keep us both in food and clothing, so I agreed to do some less-than-honest reproductions for the money. I was good, too—a few of them are still out there./

"Indeed," Alex agreed fondly. "You were amazingly good with cubist and modern styles, my love. Most of my colleagues still can't tell one of your Jackson Pollocks from the real thing. I digress, however—the point is that your beautiful mother was working with a group of unscrupulous dealers who were exploiting her talent and underpaying her for it as well. When one of the faux Mondrians showed up in Britain, I was dispatched to investigate."

"You're a policeman?" Grissom demanded, his eyebrows going up.

Alex shook his head. "No, at the time, I was a patron of and docent for the National Gallery, specializing in Renaissance Art. The Moderns weren't my specialty, but I volunteered to investigate and made the trip to Chicago for just that purpose. I met your mother, fell rather seriously in love with her, and--"

"--Pound out I wat a porger," Olivia confessed sadly. Alex turned to smile at her; a look of such intimate good humor that both Grissom and Sara blinked.

"Now, now my love—what's a relationship without a few rocky bits, eh? Your situation was borne of necessity, not greed, unlike your colleagues."

Grissom blinked. "My mother. My good, sweet, virtuous mother. An art forger."

"I topped!" Olivia protested indignantly. "I o-nee did it fo two yea, Giw!"

"Two years!"

"Gil—" Sara put a hand on his arm in an effort to calm him.

"She quit of her own volition, and I made sure that she was never implicated at all in the case," Alex replied quietly. "And as far as I can tell, your mother has never again practiced artistic deception."

"Thank God for small favors," Grissom murmured, but his mouth curved into a reluctant smile as he studied his mother once more. "Boy, you think you know a parent—"

Olivia tried to smile back, but it was a tremulous affair, and she reached for Alex's hand. He took hers again and stroked it tenderly.

"My God," Sara spoke up suddenly, her intense gaze on her uncle. "You took the rap for her."

No one spoke for a long moment. Alex's gaze was sharp and uncompromising. "Sara—" he warned.

But Olivia was staring now, her blue eyes big and startled; she pulled her fingers from his and rapidly signed. /Is this true?/

Alex took a breath; it was a mistake, and he leaned forward, pressing a hand to his stomach. Instantly both Olivia and Sara moved to him, gripping his shoulders. Grissom rose up, dropping his napkin on the table. "We're taking him to the hospital. Now."

00oo00oo00

Catherine looked across the kitchen table at Mike TeeVee and felt a tremble along her spine. He was eating an In and Out burger in methodical bites, his shirtsleeves rolled up, his big frame settled into the chair opposite her.

They'd had dinner twice now at his hotel kitchenette; he was leaving tomorrow for Washington DC, and Catherine found herself unhappy with that thought.

Sure, part of it was animal attraction, she knew. Mike was just the sort she'd always had a weakness for—big and lanky. But another part of it was the anticipated loss of . . . his company. His wit, his patience, his simple presence. In the time they'd spent together working through her addiction, Catherine had come to realize what sort of a quirky, lonely soul Mike was, and further, that she liked it.

Liked him.

A lot.

He'd seen her through the worse of her drugged state, had vouched for her as a potential agent, and once upon a time he'd kissed her. She hadn't forgotten any of that, and the awareness that his plane was due to leave in sixteen hours left her melancholy already.

"S'matter? Your food okay?" he interrupted her thoughts in a low rumble. Catherine looked down at her fries for a moment.

"It's fine. I'm just not as hungry as I thought."

"Oh."

She cocked her head, looking at him intently. Feeling slightly self-conscious about her scrutiny, Mike arched an eyebrow. "What? Have I got catsup on my chin?"

"Nope. Just wondering."

He swallowed another bite and spoke again. "About what?"

"About what to make us for breakfast," she replied softly.

It was worth it to see him tense and go wide-eyed, his expression caught between surprise and delight. Coughing, he reached for a napkin to buy time, and Catherine slipped out of her chair, moving towards him. Mike looked up at her. "Catherine--" he mumbled, wiping his mouth. "I—"

"Look, I don't know when I'm going to see you again, and I'm not asking for anything more than tonight right now," she told him gently, trying not to let her voice shake. "But damn it, Mike, you mean a hell of a lot to me, and one way or another, I intend to make sure you know it."

He rose up from his chair, stretching up, tall; towering over her. Catherine tipped her head back to meet his eyes, and he slid his arms around her, pulling her to him. She held her breath as he lowered his face to hers. "I know it now," Mike whispered, and kissed her.

It started soft, a little mutual slide of lips to lips in a sweet touch of mouths, but in a spark of simultaneous heat, both Mike and Catherine shifted it into something deeper. A quick sigh passed from her to him, and suddenly their tongues were flicking against each other, sensuously, slowly.

Catherine gurgled, a rush of delighted lust flooding her senses. She broke away from the kiss, her voice husky. "You taste like In and Out—"

The look Mike gave her was priceless; a slow smoldering grin that had her blushing. He sighed, his grin crooked. "That was a pretty smutty for an innocuous comment."

"Maybe I wasn't talking about the burger," Catherine replied, and pulled him into another deep, wet kiss.

00oo00oo00

Doctor Graff was on call; he looked up from the paperback thriller he'd been reading and came over to the four people in the clinic doorway, speaking quietly to the receptionist who was hovering behind her counter. "It's all right, Marie; I'll do the intake on this one."

For a moment the receptionist hesitated, but Graff nodded to Grissom and motioned to the second exam room, moving to the other side of the pale elderly gentleman in the process. They all went into the room, and shrugging, Marie returned to her billing work.

Once inside, Doctor Graff looked at Grissom, and then the two women. Grissom hesitated, and then spoke softly. "Shop business."

"I figured as much," Graff grumbled a bit. "It's the only time I ever see you. What have we got?" He turned his attention to the elderly man, motioning for him to sit on the exam table.

The man shook his head. "Sorry, but I don't think I can . . . it's too painful--"

"Abdomen," Grissom commented. "He wouldn't tell us—"

"—off with the shirt, sir—" Graff ordered in a gentle voice. "I can't treat what I can't see."

Sara stood with Olivia in one corner, near the cabinets. Both women were quiet and watchful. Grissom helped undo Alex's shirt buttons even as the man protested slightly. The tie and shirt came off, revealing a bulky undershirt; one too bulky for Alex's slight frame. Graff lifted the undershirt to find thick gauze padding taped down, and blood leaking through it.

"This is going to have to come off too—what happened?" came his question. Alex winced as Grissom and Graff tugged on the tape holding the dressing in place.

"I was . . . stabbed, a little bit."

"Wha? Wha?" Olivia demanded, fretting at not being able to see Alex's lips.

He turned to her and made a few hand signs. /I'm going to be FINE, my love./

Alex's white-furred, rangy chest was pale, but remarkably fit for a man his age. There were two bruised and leaking gashes just above his navel, each about an inch long. Grissom winced, and Sara found herself trying to hold back Olivia, who twisted free.

"Alec!" she blurted, eyes wide. Doctor Graff frowned a little, and the look he turned to Olivia hushed her. He used the edge of the pad to wipe some of the leaking blood.

"You need stitches to close these up; every step or turn of your upper body is opening the wounds and that's why they haven't stopped flowing. We can do this right here, if certain folks will back up a bit and give me some room."

Grissom signed the information to his mother; she helped to shift Alex until he was lying on the exam table, and held his hand. Sara moved over to Grissom, sliding an arm around him, but her eyes were on the man on the table even as she spoke. "This wasn't supposed to happen."

He gave her a sidelong glance. "Mind filling me in?" Grissom's words were soft but his expression was slightly flinty, and Sara scowled in return. Before she spoke, Alex did, from the table.

"Tush, Eugene—the girl merely followed MY suggestion on this . . . venture and I absolve her of any culpability for this unfortunate result. Ow." This last was to Doctor Graff, who was swabbing down the wounds with betadine.

"Are you allergic to any medications? Any pre-existing conditions I need to know about," Doctor Graff rattled off quietly as he pulled out a sterile suture kit from one of the drawers in the exam room.

"No, and no," came the calm reply.

Sara half-turned to Grissom, her voice a sotto whisper. "Alex was supposed to make the trade of payment for paintings in a public place just so he wouldn't get hurt! The point was to have . . ." she shot a cautious glance a Doctor Graff, "--our client take the merchandise home."

"Did he?"

"He did," Sara replied. "But I had no idea about this!"

"Public venue," came Alex's voice. Doctor Graff was numbing the gashes now, and Olivia had a tight grip on one of the patient's hands. "I knew our target wouldn't risk gunfire, so it was going to be a knife. I padded myself, but not quite enough, clearly."

"Clearly," Grissom echoed dryly. "You took a hell of a risk."

"Comes with the job," Alex pointed out with quiet stubbornness. "You can't honestly believe that the person in question was going to let me live."

"Sometimes," Sara broke in sternly, "I don't know what to believe."

"I am so with you there, lady," Doctor Graff muttered, working on the stitches adding, "Damned Candy Shop."

00oo00oo00

Grissom poured more wine. Sara picked up her glass and stared into the depths of the chardonnay, sighing deeply as she spoke.

"So. Your mother and my uncle meet nearly forty years ago and fall in madly in love. In a gallant gesture, my uncle confesses—falsely—to forging the art that she was responsible for, and is given a seven-year prison sentence for it in England. He's released early for good behavior and has his passport restricted then ends up working for the National Trust as an in-house expert, and gradually ends up forging for them on a hush-hush secret basis."

"Meanwhile, half a world away, my mother tries to find Alex for . . . years," Grissom murmured thoughtfully, "And eventually gives up. She leaves Chicago for California, pulls together enough capital to start an art gallery and keeps her broken heart to herself."

"Until—" Sara prompted, smiling a little for the first time.

"—Until you call your uncle and discreetly mention a scam to him. He agrees to help, and in one trick of Fate runs into my mother at the Manly Hammers garden center."

"Wet. Both of them," Sara sighed, remembering. "They must have been sneaking out on us after that, meeting up and making their own plans. You just can't trust anyone over seventy, I swear."

Grissom smiled. They were on the Bohemian, cuddled together on the bow, their backs against the railing. In front of them sat the bottle of wine. The night was cool, but the sky clear and the brilliance of the starlight shone on the rippling water of Lake Mead.

"So all that talk about New Zealand was a ruse? No sheep station down under?" Grissom asked.

Sara nodded. "Completely, Mr. Peppermint. My devious uncle was going to take Olivia with him to Portugal using some of the insurance money from the Trebor-Bassett case."

"That's rather romantic in a cunning, wily, underhanded way, actually," Grissom admitted. "I'd approve, if it didn't involve my mother."

"What? My uncle's not good enough for your mom? He did time for her you know—" Sara bristled gently. Grissom tightened his arm around her and kissed her nose.

"Alex may be TOO good for a manipulative, bossy control-freak like my mom."

"Yeah, well like mother like son—" Sara murmured under her breath. Grissom shot her a dry look, but he couldn't keep it up, and a soft smile crossed his features.

"You love me anyway, Frango, so suck it up. If our relatives beat us to the punch altar-wise, we'll be related in some odd way, won't we?"

"Yes, we'll be the terminally embarrassed younger generation of a pair of horny seniors. I saw the way your mom was making goo-goo eyes at Uncle Alex."

Grissom gave a shrug. "And he grabbed her ass—they're both guilty."

They were both silent for a long moment, savoring the starlight and the peace. Sara finally let her head rest on his shoulder. "Do you think--" she began softly.

"Yes. Yes, we are going to be just like them when we reach that age," he told her in complete confidence.

Sara laughed, and lifted her mouth for a kiss.

(Thanks so much for reading! Candy Shop is going on a month-long hiatus and will return in June with Candy Shop:Moonglow. I hope you'll be back for that!)