This was an adopted challenge from CCOAC for February. The prompts were Deana Carter's song, "Strawberry Wine," a card, heart candies, and roses. The pairing was Hotch/Prentiss.

Confession: Romance and subtlety do not come naturally to me. There is a good reason you don't find much in the way of love and sex scenes in my writing.

So, apologies all around.

Meanwhile, as always, I own nothing except my own words.

The Language of the Hearts

When she woke up, she reflexively looked at her left wrist, where she had scrawled in blue ballpoint "Babylon NY!" although the hotel was located in Freeport. Babylon was where the first two victims had come from, and therefore technically the epicenter of the BAU's current consultation.

When you were on the road a lot, little notes like that could ground you, help stave off that dizzying where-the-hell-am-I? sensation that life in a series of interchangeable hotel rooms could induce.

The three exclamation points were because the previous night – OK, technically much earlier this morning – Aaron Hotchner had kissed her on her temple.

Almost unconsciously, she touched her right upper arm, where his right hand had rested, and her left temple, in the exact spot where he had brushed his lips in a dry, surely-that-didn't-mean-anything kiss.

And it didn't mean anything. It couldn't mean anything.

But she had not washed her face before she went to bed.

And she didn't really want to wash her face this morning.

~ o ~

When he woke up, the lights were still on and case files still littered his bed. It wasn't the first time he had awakened in such a state. He blinked at his watch to determine whether it was too early to call Jack – it was – and focused on one of the file covers.

Babylon. Right. That jerk.

The futile stakeout in heavy, blowing snow, wouldn't you know the sonofabitch would change his pattern, even though the mammoth blizzard the month before hadn't cramped his style at all?

Late dinner at a Denny's or a Frisch's or something, hard to keep them all straight, too much coffee and too many carbs, Rossi and Seaver's SUV sliding into that snowbank in the parking lot, and it took Morgan and him ten minutes to push him out because the damn fool was too proud to call for roadside assistance, but at least he was doing something, damn it, not just standing there with his ears and toes freezing, waiting for the lousy UNSUB to cruise past his dump site.

Then trudging down the hall at a little past one in the morning, the smell of honeysuckle and wet wool and, oh, Christ, he'd gone and put his arm around Prentiss, and she smelled so good and felt so good and he had kissed her. And Lord only knew what she thought of him now, after that little excursion into unprofessional conduct.

And he could still smell her hair.

~ o ~

She ate breakfast – an elaborate fruit salad - with one of the agents from the local field office, a woman she had known for almost fifteen years, since even before her Interpol days. They talked about people they knew and places they had been, and Emily surreptitiously watched Aaron Hotchner, three tables over, engaged in intense conversation with another local, a guy from his days with the DoJ.

She had never found him unattractive – quite the contrary – but until now she had never realized that he was … enchanting. The way he cocked his head when he listened, the way his whole face lit up when he smiled. The way he obsessively stirred his coffee although he drank it black, no sugar. The way his hands moved, so delicate, so precise.

And the kiss meant nothing, she reminded herself. They had both been exhausted and discouraged. It was an automatic thing, an artifact from his marriage to Haley. But he had smelled so good, had felt so solid!

~ o ~

She was looking at him. He could feel her eyes on him as he picked at his veggie omelet.

He didn't think she would really make an issue out of it. They had both been exhausted and frustrated. If he was lucky, she would decide that it had been automatic, meaningless, just an artifact of his marriage to Haley.

He watched her surreptitiously. He had always been partial to blondes, but Emily's dark beauty unstrung him. The way she lowered her head when she smiled, the way she splayed her fingers on the edge of the table to keep herself from picking at her cuticles. The way her hands moved, so quick and graceful.

~ o ~

When the server brought her her check, she also brought her a complementary plastic bag of inscribed heart candies. She looked at her breakfast companion. "Is today Valentine's Day?" she stage whispered.

Her companion frowned. "Duh? It's the fourteenth."

The sound system in the restaurant was playing "Strawberry Wine," by Deana Carter.

Well, shit.

"Alone Again, Naturally" would be more appropriate.

~ o ~

When the server brought him his check, she also brought him a complementary plastic bag of inscribed heart candies. He looked at his watch. Yup, February fourteenth. Boy, that one sure sneaked up on him.

The sound system in the restaurant was playing "Strawberry Wine."

Crap.

Should have been "But Not For Me."

~ o ~

She added the tip and signed her check, still chatting with her old friend, who was gathering her things to leave.

"How about a heart?" she said.

Prentiss selected one – it said JUST FRIENDS – and handed it to her.

After her friend left, she reached back into the bag for another heart for herself.

Oooh.

That was an interesting choice.

Did she dare?

Did she not dare?

She gathered her own things, holding the little yellow heart in her fingers.

As she left, she paused for an instant at Hotch's table and set the little candy down beside his coffee. Then, without a word or a glance, she swept out of the restaurant.

~ o ~

Aaron Hotchner sat there for a few seconds, contemplating the object that Prentiss had just deposited in front of him.

THAT KISS, it said.

Well, that was interesting. Not likely to be the action of someone who was planning to hit him with a sexual harassment suit.

After his companion left, he took a few minutes to survey the contents of the candy bag and to consider potential responses. He was by nature a thoughtful and deliberate man, not given to wild impulses.

Well, except for the kiss.

He poked gently with his thumbnail at a lavender heart.

Yes. That was his best shot.

~ o ~

Five more inches of snow overnight, and somewhere out there, a killer prowled. The BAU's war room on Long Island was mercifully free of Valentine's Day detritus.

Emily gratefully put her love life – or lack thereof – out of her mind and concentrated on the reports of interviews that Morgan and Rossi had carried out the day before. Morgan and Rossi, in turn, were reviewing the conversations she and Reid had had the previous day. It was all part of being on the same page.

"Meeting with the media in forty-five minutes," Hotch announced as he entered the war room flanked by a flotilla of local law enforcement. "Rossi, can you present for us?"

As he passed the table where Prentiss sat, he deposited a small, pale purple candy beside her foam coffee cup.

She ignored it for several minutes, as an exercise in self control. She could not afford to get her hopes up.

Holding her breath, she tipped it so she could read its surface: NO REGRETS.

She repressed a grin.

Shameless bastard.

So … maybe not entirely automatic?

~ o ~

He was the only member of the BAU team who always wore a suit and tie. The reason for that formality was not his leadership. Back in the days when Rossi, when Gideon, were in charge – hell, even when Morgan had led the team – he had still worn a suit, because he was the go-to guy for legal issues. At any moment he might find himself at least before a judge, if not actually in a courtroom.

Now, he double-checked his lists – running lists of objects that law enforcement would want to find, hope to find, in the possession of their UNSUB. No matter what hour of the day or night the BAU came up with a likely suspect, Aaron Hotchner could have a detailed search warrant in a judge's hands within minutes.

And he watched Emily Prentiss tip the candy heart and read it.

And smile – yes, she almost smiled. Her cheek had definitely twitched.

That was definitely interesting.

He returned unwillingly to the legal issues that confronted the team in their search for this Babylon jerk.

He suddenly caught a hint of wild honeysuckle in the air. A hand appeared beside him and deposited a small white candy heart, face down, right in the middle of his probable cause notes.

He sat very still, hoping she would stick around, but she didn't. He heard her exchange information with Rossi, heard her ask Reid if he was ready to go and speak to a particular early victim's family.

When she was gone, he flipped the heart over.

HOT LIPS.

Oh, holy crap ...

~ o ~

One teensy-weensy little bit of progress in the Babylon case: The victim's mother recalled that her daughter had complained that some guy was looking at her oddly a day or so before she was snatched. No, the mom didn't know where, but the guy had been locking his bike into the bike rack – and there weren't that many bike racks within the vic's usual walking radius.

It sounded small, but cases had been broken with less. She and Reid cruised the girl's known haunts in search of bike racks and located five. Five was a nice, manageable number.

They had discussed stopping for a quick bite of lunch while they were out, but their potential progress had them too pumped to have any appetite.

There was a quick team conference, and Emily returned to her desk.

A pink candy heart sat face down beside a stack of file folders.

In the excitement of the hunt she had managed to put the whole Hotch-and-kiss thing out of her mind. She glanced quickly his way – he was lost in some conference with a pair of local LEOs – then held her breath and turned the little heart face up.

WANT MORE

Hmm. No question mark.

Does that mean he wants more, or is he asking whether I want more?

Or is this all just a goofy game?

When she could shake loose of Spencer Reid, she pawed through her heart candy options.

Yes. Perfect.

~ o ~

Prentiss was back. He had watched out of the corner of his eye as she shook the snow from her long hair, as she stomped the last of the snow from her boots. The chilly wind had left her cheeks bright pink, and the heightened color looked good on her.

He allowed himself one guilty instant of fantasizing whether he could bring on that flush with his own attentions.

She sat down at her place, picked up the candy heart that he had left there – and was that a shadow that passed over her features?

Damn. Too fast, too confident … he'd never been much of a flirt. He just didn't have the skills, the timing. Interrogations, negotiations, he ruled in those arenas. He represented something else, the cause of justice, in those arenas. But romance? Where the result of failure was a very personal kind of humiliation?

Nope. He was fifteen kinds of a coward in that style of combat.

Twenty long minutes passed, during which he managed to accomplish embarrassingly little toward justifying their expenses on the road.

Wild honeysuckle filled his nostrils.

Another candy heart – another yellow one – appeared at his elbow.

This time, he deliberately waited, not wanting her to stick around. He didn't handle rejection, particularly public rejection, very well.

When he was sure he was completely unobserved, he turned the confection face-up.

R U SERIOUS

He swallowed hard and opened the candy bag. Two early possibilities – FEELING LUCKY and YOU WISH – he rejected as too, too – well, too Derek Morgan. And PLEASE BABY was just too needy.

He came across another, a little green heart. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than the alternatives.

The next time he had a genuine reason to pass behind where Prentiss sat, he deposited it right in front of her.

~ o ~

God, he was right there, right behind her, and she had to tuck what she was working on under the sleeve of her sweater so he wouldn't see it. She felt like such a hopeless loser – she'd never had much success at the whole courting business. In the field or undercover, she shone. When it came to actual, genuine personal relationships, she hated the whole nuance thing.

Romance movies and novels generally reduced her to screams of exasperation, especially when weeks, months, years of misery arose from a situation that should not even have come up n the first place.

I can't tell him/her; he/she might misunderstand was a freaking guarantee that he/she was about to misunderstand, big time.

Say what you mean, mean what you say. It wasn't freaking rocket science, after all.

And here I am, exchanging candy hearts with my boss and seeing some weird kind of truth in them …

The heart was green this time, and face-down. The whole face-down thing hadn't started until they arrived at work. She wondered what the meaning was of that little detail.

She waited until he was safely out of the room before she exposed the heart's message.

U R AWESOME

Holy crap, holy crap, holy crap …

And she was blushing like a little girl.

~ o ~

Shortly after he finished his lunch, he discovered a folded three-by-five index card sticking out of his day planner. He extracted it with two fingers.

On the front, if you could call it a front, was scrawled, A Generic™ Valentine Card for You and featured a large heart clumsily outlined in red Magic Marker.

He opened it to discover a white candy heart Scotch-taped to the inside.

WANT YOU

The "card" was signed X

Maybe there's something to this after all, he thought, and he was startled by the rush of hope that surged through him.

Stupid.

Hope is stupid, Slick. You're old and used and damaged and a notorious workaholic. You've cared about two women and both of them have died on your watch.

Some track record. A sensible woman would flee.

Concentrate on the warrants.

After a few minutes, though, he got up and drifted over to the desk of the unit secretary in the offices where their war room was located.

"What do you have in the way of Hi-Liters?" he said.

~ o ~

The snow had started again.

At three-thirty it was already rush hour on Long Island as millions of commuters tried to beat the blizzard home.

The entrance to the park that the UNSUB habitually used as his dump site was chained shut. No matter how they argued and pleaded, the Parks Service was not about to allow anyone to drive those roads and hold the Service responsible.

So – if the jerk did snatch someone, he wouldn't be discarding her body here.

Rossi sighed as they drove away. "Let's hope he decides to stay in and stay warm tonight. We don't need him developing a new dump site, a new comfort zone."

"Yeah," she agreed.

She wondered what Hotchner had thought of her little gift. She hoped that it was silly and amateurish enough that he wouldn't see the hope – OK, the desperation – behind it.

Because the more she thought about him, the more she really, really wanted to know him better. Much better.

Although it was unlikely. The guy had access to her personnel file, after all. He and Garcia both knew that she habitually shaved five years off her age. She had the complexion that allowed her pretty much to get away with it. Others might suspect, but nobody else knew for sure, to the best of her knowledge.

Why am I getting my hopes up?

I'm getting to an age where men just don't want to get seriously involved.

By the time she got back to the BAU war room, she had managed to talk herself into a case of self pity. She hung her down coat on the rack by the door and cased the room.

No Hotch.

Feeling more relieved than disappointed, she walked over to her desk.

A folded three-by-five card protruded ever so slightly from one of her file folders.

Oh, my God, she thought in despair. He returned my Valentine.

But, no.

The front, if you could call it a front, featured twelve clumsily drawn squiggles outlined in red Magic Marker and colored in with pink Hi-Liter. A Dozen Generic™ Roses, someone had block printed in a precise hand. It was a good thing that he had identified them, because they had little resemblance to anything rosy – anything even remotely floral – to Prentiss's practiced eye.

Inside, good God, Scotch-taped to the inside was a pink candy heart.

TONIGHT, BABY

It was signed "X too"

~ o ~

When she woke up, she tried reflexively to look at her wrist, but her whole left arm was lodged between a pillow and … Aaron Hotchner's head.

As she shifted, his eyes opened. He blinked at his own wrist.

"Babylon," she said.

"Freeport," he mumbled back. "Technically Freeport. Too early to call Jack."

I still can't believe that this is happening. That it was that good. That he's still here.

"Are we going too fast?" she asked him.

He blinked again. "Probably," he croaked. "But do you want to slow down?"

She thought about that. "Not really."

He smiled sleepily. "Me neither."