She never had a guilty pleasure quite as bad as Richard Castle.

As a child it was always something simple: like the smell of burning rubber tires when Mommy came home from work, or the feel of sand pooling in her palm as she poured a fistful from one hand to the other. When her mother died, that list grew one item longer with a series of murder mysteries where the detective, savvy as Beckett herself ever wanted to be, always solved the cases in the penultimate chapter, and there was always a sense of peace for the victims' families. The books should have made her angry, should have pushed her to tears at the injustice she herself had suffered at the hands of inept officers like Detective Raglan. But Castle's prose was so immaculate that a small part of her – the same part that had her checking rabbit holes at age five for dimensional rifts even though Daddy always told her Alice was fiction – couldn't help but believe that any day now, Derrick Storm would breeze through New York, stumble upon her mother's case, and solve it in 250 pages.

Now her guilty pleasures included Texas Hold 'Em, shots of espresso when no one else was in any position to catch her in the act, and stolen glances at the manuscript of Heat Wave, which Castle had surreptitiously slipped her one night she was last to leave the poker table. She kept it hidden in a chestnut box, much like the one that held her mother's wedding ring, at the back of her work desk's bottom drawer. But none of these things made her blush quite as deeply as when Ryan found that inscription in the front cover of At Dusk We Die, or when Esposito caught her, despite her quick fingers changing tabs, flipping through the forums at CASTLEHAREM.

There was no getting around it. Richard Castle made her more jumpy than anything else on that list. And these days, what with his growing presence around the station and crime scenes and his new series of books written specifically around her character coming close as ever to publication, Kate Beckett was feeling more on edge than ever.

"Cock."

She tightened her grip on the pen in her hand and paused, a bright blue ink splotch bleeding into her newspaper. "Excuse me?"

Castle was at her ear, the vague amalgamated scent of espresso and aftershave creeping upon her from what seemed like all angles. "Breed of fowl with no lateral footedness" he read, pointing over her shoulder at number 24-down. "A cock."

Beckett's cheeks flushed a shade of red that put her hair to shame. Painstakingly unblinking, she counted the boxes down from number twenty-four. One, two, three, four... five, six, seven. "No," she said, her voice a bit dusty at first. "It won't fit."

"That's what they all tell me, but it always does," he murmured. And just like that, Beckett was four-hundred degrees Fahrenheit of mortified.

He was her guiltiest pleasure, and she hated him for it.