A/N: Ok, this chapter is unabashed Bruce/OC fluff—don't worry, more action to come, Jack won't let anyone off that easily. Thanks so much all of you for reading and for your awesome reviews 3 Sorry I'm a totally unreliable updater, will try to do better…

In the elevator, I began having second thoughts. What was I doing? I still didn't know what I wanted from Bruce Wayne. His attention was flattering, but after several interactions I still had no idea who the man really was. If there even was a real self under all of the various layers of his public persona, which I had begun to have serious doubts about. His passion for Rachel Dawes seemed like the most constant thing about him, but I didn't understand why he wanted to share it with me, a veritable stranger. What does he want from me? I wondered.

This was the question in my mind when the long elevator ride to the top floor of the Gotham Grand came to an end. The door opened, and I found myself standing in a small receiving hallway. A dignified older man in an elegant but understated jacket was there to greet me.

"Miss Crandall, I presume?" He gave me a very subtle onceover and then, with seeming approval, a warm smile.

"Cecilia," I said, extending my hand, "And you're…"

"Alfred Pennyworth, Miss Cecilia," he said, in what I would come to learn was his customary formality. "May I take your coat?"

After hanging my things in the coat closet, he gestured for me to accompany him. "Master Wayne is in the kitchen, finishing up the pasta if I'm not mistaken."

"Finishing up the pasta?" I asked, unable to keep the incredulity out of my voice.

"Indeed, Miss," Alfred said. He turned to me and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial tone, "To be perfectly honest, I wasn't certain it was a good idea either, but once he makes up his mind there's not much to be done."

We walked down a long hallway into a spacious living room decorated with elegant minimalist furniture and floor-to-ceiling windows that offered a breathtaking view of Gotham's skyline. Around another corner and down a short flight of stairs, I found myself in a well-appointed kitchen that opened onto a dining room. This room boasted the same panoramic view, as well as a fireplace with a small wood fire.

"Miss Cecilia is here, sir," Alfred announced.

Bruce turned around. He was wearing an apron over a light gray crewneck sweater, and his hands were covered in flour. A piece of hair had gotten loose from his normally immaculate coif and was hanging rakishly over his forehead. He looked, if it was possible, even better than usual.

"Cecilia!" He said, greeting me with a genuine, full-faced smile and leaned forward to kiss my cheek while holding up his hands. "Careful, I don't want to ruin your dress."

He turned to Alfred and they exchanged a rapid set of glances, the meaning of which I could only guess at. I was struck by the rapport between the two men; they seemed more like father and son than master and servant.

"Thank you, Alfred. Um…would you mind getting Miss Crandall a glass of wine…would you like white or red?" Bruce asked, turning back to me.

"White, please," I said, still trying to fully digest the domestic scene that I had walked into.

"That's what I thought. A glass of the Greco di Tufo that I've stuck in the fridge, then." He angled his head towards the stools at the counter bar that separated the kitchen and the dining room, "Make yourself comfortable and keep me company, I just have a couple of things left to do."

As I sat down, Alfred placed a glass of wine in front of me. "Anything else, sir?"

"No, that'll be all, thank you. I've got it from here."

Alfred's eyebrow flickering up, but he nodded. "As you wish, Master Wayne. Goodnight then."

He turned to me, "And goodnight Miss Cecilia, it's a pleasure to meet you."

"Goodnight, Alfred, so lovely to meet you!"

And with that, Bruce and I were alone.

As I watched him, I took a sip of wine, which was of unsurprisingly impressive quality. I gathered from the pasta and the vintage that we were doing Italian.

"So, you cook?" I asked, stating the obvious.

Bruce laughed without looking up from what he was doing, "I learned while I was traveling. Are you shocked?"

"To be perfectly honest, yes," I replied.

"Well that's good, because I'm doing it almost entirely to impress you," he said, angling a grin in my direction. "Plus, you know, I thought it would be nice to be out of the public eye for once. No photographers, no exes, no old family friends."

Bruce Wayne wanted to be out of the public eye? A few weeks ago, I wouldn't have believed that the thought had ever even occurred to him. This was a man who lived for front page headlines, the more scandalous the better. And he certainly hadn't seemed to mind the rumors that had surrounded our acquaintance so far.

So, whatever we were up to here was something else. The thought sent a thrill up my spine and made me shiver a little. Exactly what else was very much unclear. This was uncharted territory—I had been invited into Wayne's inner sanctum, behind the illusion.

Or at least behind one level of illusion, I corrected myself as Bruce held up a perfectly formed piece of pasta for me to inspect. "Ravioli and I'm doing them with burro e salvia, butter and sage. Ok?"

Incredulous, I did the only thing I could: I surrendered myself to the fantasy. "Ok."

A short while later, we were sitting down to a delicious homemade dinner. I was still trying to get a read on exactly who the man across the table from me was. He wasn't the playboy or the businessman or even Rachel Dawes' grieving and embittered ex. For once, he seemed at ease. For my part, I felt that I was playing an entirely new role. Instead of Jackson's mom or Phil's sister, suddenly I was just Cecilia.

Bruce was the first one to broach the topic of our past run ins. "So, that guy the other night…"

"He's a relative of Jackson's. On his father's side. He came over to celebrate Halloween," I said. Not a complete lie.

"I see. Jack did you say his name was?"

Shit. If Bruce did any digging, he was certain to wonder why everyone in Jackson's father's family was named "Jack." But, I reassured myself, he also had no reason to do any digging. "Yeah, it's a…family name."

"Hm. He seemed like a nice guy," Bruce said absently, his attention wrapped up in buttering a piece of bread.

I took a sip of water instead of replying to that comment.

"More wine?" Bruce asked, noticing my glass was empty.

As I extended my glass, my sleeve slid up and the bruise on my arm came into view. I had managed to cover the worst of it with concealer, but it still looked a bit gruesome.

Bruce reached across the table and grazed my elbow with a featherlight touch. "Ouch, that looks painful."

I started back a little too quickly. His fingertips slid down my arm and came to a rest on my wrist. "It looks worse than it is," I said, smiling to make up for my overreaction.

He ran his thumb over my wrist and met my eyes. All of a sudden, I was very aware of the warmth of his skin. "What happened?"

"Oh, I tripped in some heels. It was really clumsy of me," I said, repeating the cover story yet again with a self-deprecating laugh.

"I find that hard to believe," he said without breaking eye contact. His gaze seemed to intensify and, for a moment, I couldn't tell if he was trying to seduce me or to see into my soul.

"Why's that?" I asked absently. His fingers had made their way to the inside of my wrist and were tracing delicate circles over my pulse point. I wondered if he could feel how hard my heart was beating and the thought made me blush.

Instead of answering my question, he laced his fingers through mine and tilted his head his head. An expression I couldn't read flickered across his face. Then it was gone, leaving only a bland, amiable smile. He let go of my hand and turned back to his food.

"You're usually very graceful," he said as he pulled back. "It's one of the first things I noticed about you."

"Give me a break," I said, laughing.

"I'm serious. Back in school you were in that group of girls who used to jump rope all the time. You were so good at it. When I was nine, I thought it was the most amazing thing I'd ever seen. I had a huge crush on all of you."

I blushed a little, flattered in spite of knowing that Bruce Wayne was a champion flirt. "I can't believe you remember that."

"I do! Gotham is such a small town, it was all the same people as now. Tori Harford, Lydia…"

"Tiffany Fox, Lucius's daughter would've been there…And my sister. She was the best, honestly."

Bruce shot me a quick look, trying to figure out if he'd crossed a line. But I didn't mind remembering Ellie like this. Maybe that's what he likes about me, I mused to myself, the fact that I know loss.

"We've known each other for most of our lives, but honestly you're a total stranger," I said, "I don't know anything about you."

Bruce didn't quite meet my eyes as he answered me with a blatant lie. "Ask away. I'm an open book."

I decided to press my advantage even if the invitation wasn't genuine. "So, you were at Princeton. And then you dropped out. And then…what were you doing all those years, before you came back to Gotham?"

It was Bruce's turn to take a sip of wine instead of answering. When he did open his mouth to speak, it was with a sardonic smile. "It sounds stupid now, but, at the time, I was trying to find myself. I know that's such a naïve rich kid line, but that's what I thought I was doing."

"Did you?" I asked.

"I…thought I did," he paused seeming to consider how much he was going to tell me. Then he went on more openly, "But I think really I was running way. I was traveling constantly, starting over every few weeks. I'd be in classes at the Sorbonne one day and in rural Vietnam the next, never stopping long enough to really put down any roots."

He gave me a devilish smile before continuing, "I even went to prison once, in Bhutan. Please don't tell Alfred that."

I raised my eyebrows in disbelief. I didn't believe for five seconds that a man as spoiled as Bruce Wayne had made it through a stint in a foreign prison.

"So, what made you come back?"

He sighed. "I…met someone who made me realize that the thing I was looking for was the thing I'd been running away from all along. And that was Gotham."

"A girl?"

He threw back his head and laughed. "Definitely not a girl."

As his features settled into an amused smile and he went on with his tale, I found myself fully at ease with him for the first time. I might be meeting the man across from me for the first time, but I was enjoying myself.

A couple of hours later, we were chatting on his couch in front of the fire. I had taken off my shoes and tucked my toes underneath the very edge of his leg—intimate but noncommittal. He had responded by taking my hand again, lacing and relacing his fingers through mine as we talked.

Is this really happening? I wondered. And what even is "this"? I ran my eyes over Bruce's face, slightly in awe of how good his features, just the right mix of chiseled and delicate, looked in the firelight. He was more relaxed than I had ever seen him, and he wore it well. I bit my lip involuntarily.

"Celia?" Bruce prompted, sounding as if he had asked me a question.

"Oh, sorry, I um…" A small smile played at the corners of his mouth as I blushed a bit and trailed off.

"Tired?" He asked, leaning forward and resting his chin on my knees.

I laughed. "No."

The smile widened into a grin, the sight of which made my heart speed up. His hand slid up my arm, his fingertips very lightly tracing an invisible pattern over the sensitive skin. I shivered involuntarily.

"Cold?"

I shook my head, not fully trusting myself to speak.

His fingers reached the bruise on my arm again, and his touch grew even lighter.

"So, why did you lie earlier when I asked you about what happened to your arm?" He said. His tone was so casual it took me a moment to register what he'd said. When I did, though, I snapped abruptly out of my reverie.

"I didn't lie. Why would I?" I said weakly. I looked off toward the fire, not wanting to meet his gaze as I frantically tried to think of what to say.

When he spoke again, his tone was noticeably colder. "Why don't you tell me?"

Confused and caught off-guard, I panicked. What did he want to know? What did he already know? I couldn't wait around to find out.

"I think it's time for me to go," I said, slipping off the couch and practically running to the coat closet. My head spinning from the combination of three glasses of wine and the bolt of sudden anxiety, I grabbed my things and hit the elevator button.

Bruce was right behind me. "Wait, Celia, I'm sorry, I can explain—well, I mean, I just thought…"

I wanted to yell at him, but instead I arranged my face into my most impassively mannered society girl expression. "Thanks very much for dinner, Bruce, it was lovely," I said as the elevator door opened. "Take care."

As the door closed, Wayne was left standing in the dark hall.

As I walked past the deserted reception desk, I felt tears of anger pressing at the corners of my eyes and threatening to run down my cheeks. What had just happened? Before I could start to either cry or to analyze, I heard a voice behind me.

"Cecilia!"

It was Bruce, out of breath as if he had run down thirty-nine flights of stairs as fast as humanly possible. Which I guess must have been what he had done.

I turned around. He was holding my scarf. "You forgot this," he said

"Thanks," I said flatly, reaching my hand out to take it. Instead of giving it to me, he slipped it around my neck, letting his hands come to rest on my shoulders.

"I'm sorry. I was out of line. I-" He broke off, seemed about to say something more, then repeated, "I'm sorry."

I didn't say anything, but I didn't pull away. Cupping my face in his hand, he bent his neck and lightly brushed his lips against mine. The kiss was surprisingly gentle and chaste at first, then, when I still didn't pull away, firmer and more intense. A tingle of desire ran down my spine as my lips parted and his tongue slipped into my mouth. I put my arms around his neck, felt the warm cashmere of his sweater and the surprisingly silky texture of his hair.

After a moment we both pulled back. He rested his forehead against mine and wrapped his arms around me. I breathed in deeply and inhaled—he smelled incredibly good, clean laundry with a very faint hint of sandalwood.

I wanted to kiss him again, but instead I heard myself saying, "My car's here."

He nodded, letting me go. "Goodnight Cecilia."

"Goodnight Bruce."

I stepped outside and the icy air touched my flushed face. As I got into my car, the only coherent thought I could form was: What the hell just happened?