Thank god he was standing behind that podium. Truth be told, if there was any part of his physical appearance he needed to hide at that moment, it wasn't tears.

He was frozen, his voice lost somewhere at the back of his throat. For weeks, all he'd seen of Detective Kate Beckett's body was cleverly veiled by classy suits -- suits intended to emasculate the beauties of the female body and present a crisp, professional disposition. Who knew what she was hiding underneath those designer business outfits?

She has arms, he thought. And legs. My god, she has legs.

He gripped the edges of his final Derek Storm novel, feeling the corners of the stiff, freshly cut pages dig underneath his fingernails. He stood before his family, an audience of thoroughly rapt teary-eyed middle-aged women, and representatives from six different upper-echelon literary review corporations who were all pouring over clipboards and had been scribbling furiously until that moment, when everything seemed to suddenly stand still at Castle's pause. This was not the time to choke. Not only had he stopped reading altogether, but now he was sweating because all he could think about was a pair of handcuffs, the cold but exhilarating wood veneer of an NYPD desk, and the woman in the back with the short pink dress.

He tried to pass off his strained silence as a dramatic pause as he finished reading the line. His eyes were unintentionally affixed to her as though she were the only one in the audience. Indeed, for a moment, he thought she was. The roaring applause rushed to his focus, shattering his reverie. "Uh – thank you – uh," he stammered as a sea of fans and enthralled listeners rose from their seats, nearly obstructing his view of her. He was relieved to see that his brief deviation went successfully unnoticed by the crowd.

But Det. Beckett wouldn't be so effective at her job if she couldn't recognize the minor nuances of human behavior and their implications. There he was: the guilty suspect in the interrogation room, secretly trembling behind his seemingly-composed demeanor, who would fool anyone with his story but her. No matter how masterfully he wrote it, she expertly read the subtext beneath the façade of his carefully-selected words. For all his skilled prose, his moment of hesitation proved beyond doubt exactly what she'd come here in her short pink dress to prove – Rick Castle didn't always have the upper hand.