Close Up (4 page)

No one needed to know that, least of all her ex.

Kristine opened the door to the closet, which was a walk-in and served as a secondary storage area for things like mops and paper towels. Stepping in, she turned. “It’s—

Sean was literally inches away from her and she forgot what she was going to say, sucking her breath sharply. “Oh, hello!”

He was moving forward still, forcing her to back up until she was against the far wall under an exterior window, trying to keep a few feet of space between them. She laughed, meaning to sound cavalier, but it came out as nervous as she felt. She was far too aware of Sean and how close his mouth was to hers. He gave a sly smile, as if her nervousness amused him. With one hand, he reached behind him and closed the closet door.

Not good. A closed space, an old lover... She couldn’t remain professional under those circumstances. Unless it was a professional whimperer. “Sean. We should talk, but I don’t think this is the time or the place. Let’s finish up here and go for coffee.” In a public place. With a table between them.

“I don’t want to talk.” His voice was slow and sensual, and she saw the burn of desire in his eyes as he ate up the space between them.

“No?” Damn it. She knew that look. He was going to kiss her.

Sean touched a stray strand of her hair trailing down her neck, and she shivered, the urge to close her eyes and sink into his embrace overwhelming. He smelled different than she remembered, but the sensation of being close to him was familiar, tantalizing.

Then he tugged her hair, playful, yet bordering on harder than necessary. “You darkened your hair color.”

“I was having a dark moment,” she whispered.

“I like it. Much more than those divorce papers you sent me.” He turned back to the doorknob, twisted it and pushed the door. “Did you hear that? It sounded like the door was just locked.”

Nothing happened. To the door, that is.

But Kristine saw spots in front of her eyes. “What divorce papers?”

“What the hell?” He shoved the door harder, ramming his shoulder against it in irritation. “Does this door stick?”

“No. Not that I’m aware of.” And she hadn’t heard anything over the sound of her own mortification. But if she was locked in this room with Sean it was going to be the definition of awkward, because she was pretty sure he was saying he had received divorce papers from her, which was not supposed to happen. Not until she’d had a chance to talk to him first. “What divorce papers?”

“The ones that dropped on my desk this morning.”

Oops. Why did that not surprise her? Nothing ever went the way she intended.

Sean rattled the door again. He shoved. He kicked. Turning, he gave her a seductive and somewhat angry smile. “We’re locked in.”

Locked in? Alone with Sean?

Kristine could have sworn she felt an egg drop down her fallopian tube in excited feminine anticipation.

It occurred to her that perhaps she wasn’t as over Sean as she had thought.

3

“
H
OW CAN IT BE LOCKED?
” Kristine brushed him aside to check the knob herself.

Sean shrugged, wondering why he wasn’t more concerned. He had a meeting in an hour, a million emails to answer, and yet he wasn’t panicking. In fact, he was rather enjoying the thought of spending time with Kristine. A few moments to study the woman she had become before they both went on with the rest of their lives. “It’s locked. The dead bolt has been thrown on the other side. I can see it.”

“What? How could that happen?” She turned and looked at him, licking her lips and shifting to the left.

“My assumption would be that unless the building has a precocious ghost, someone shot the door bolt closed.”

“But why?” Kristine stuck her face to the door, trying to peer through the sliver between the frame and the door.

Her actions caused her backside to rise enticingly toward him, black fabric stretched tight over her perky ass. He tried not to get distracted, and failed. The chemistry between them had been off the charts when they’d been married, with many a weekend lost to satisfying sex. So it didn’t surprise him that he immediately had a hard-on. But he managed to focus on the problem at hand. They were trapped. Right. “I’m assuming that’s a rhetorical question. So, what is the caterer’s name again?”

“Allison.”

“Why don’t you call for her? Maybe she’s still here. She said she was going to be around for another ten minutes.” Sean stuck his hands in his pockets to prevent himself from reaching out and sliding them across her ass. It was strange to be this close to her for the first time since their split. His body, his head, all wanted to pick up where they had left off, yet nothing was the same after so much life had happened to both of them. He had no right to touch her.

He was angry. Frustrated with himself. Why was he immediately having this reaction to Kristine, when for years, he had found himself merely going through the motions with women he dated?

It was completely illogical, and he had a hard time accepting it. He wanted answers, and ironically, this might be the perfect way to get them. What was it about Kristine that drew him on such a cellular level? Why had he never been able to forget her?

Maybe because their ending had been so abrupt, so seemingly unnecessary. Marriage interruptus.

“Allison! Allison, are you still out there?”

Kristine yelled for the caterer in a voice so booming, it made Sean grin. He hadn’t ever heard her use that particular tone. She was clearly desperate.

Kristine put her hands on her hips in distress. “I don’t even have my phone with me.”

“The gallery sounds quiet. They obviously all left.”

“Do you have your phone?”

He reached into his jacket pocket. “Yes.”

“What am I saying? Of course you do,” she said. “You did everything but shower with your phone when we were together, and that was even before internet access on cell phones.”

What was that supposed to mean? Sean frowned at her. “I don’t know if my phone will work,” he said, just because her sweeping assessment irritated him. “These concrete buildings are hell on reception.”

“This is a nightmare,” she declared. Then she glanced at his phone in his hand. “Do you remember when I bedazzled your phone as a surprise? God, you were so pissed off at me.”

Oh, he remembered. He remembered not having time to pick the jewels off it before he went to his business internship, and his boss had seen it. “I seem to remember little jeweled skull stickers, yes. I also remember you going through my phone.” That had been the cause of their last monumental fight. Her unwarranted suspicions that he had been cheating on her. The hurt he had felt had been overwhelming, the anger loud and immediate.

Kristine leaned against the door, blowing out a huff of breath so that her bangs rose slightly. “Well, yeah, there was that. But you were so territorial about your phone, and you started working out five days a week. It was a logical conclusion for a nineteen-year-old.”

“I hid my phone because I didn’t want you bedazzling it again,” he said drily. “But I don’t imagine you want to dredge up all that ancient history. It’s time to move on, right?”

Contrition crossed her face. “Look, Sean, you weren’t supposed to get those papers until tomorrow. I was planning to call you today and ask you to meet me for coffee so I could tell you myself. There is no way I wanted you to be served impersonal papers like that.”

Sean studied her face. He believed her. She looked sincere. Kristine was a lot of things—impulsive, silly, generous, sweet, afraid of commitment. But she was not a liar. He firmly believed that. “You don’t owe me anything at this point, Kristine. But I admit, it caught me off guard.”

“I’m sorry,” she said simply. “For a lot of things.”

He had thought he wanted her to apologize, but for some reason, hearing the words annoyed him. Their breakup had been ridiculous, the result of their immaturity, and he ached for what could have been. He didn’t want to go there. Couldn’t go there. So he gave her a sardonic smile. “You can make it up to me, you know. We might as well do something while we’re stuck in here.”

“I don’t have a deck of cards with me,” she said, even though she clearly knew what he was suggesting. Her eyebrows rose and she gave him a smile.

“I was thinking of something a little more hands-on. For old times’ sake?”

But Kristine just laughed. “Seriously? Here I just thought we could chat over coffee. Nothing about your suggestion is a good idea, if you weren’t joking, which I’m pretty sure you were.”

Actually, he wasn’t. But she was right. It would be a terrible idea to go there again. It might be amazing, and then he would be further ruined for other women; or it might be awkward, and then they really wouldn’t be able to look each other in the eye. Because the truth was, he would enjoy establishing some sort of adult friendship with Kristine.

“Well, you do know me. Full of jokes 24/7.” They both knew that was the furthest thing from the truth. Lots of adjectives could be used to describe him, but
funny
was not one of them. “I’m sure I could find better uses for my tongue than cracking jokes, though.” It wasn’t appropriate, but hell. There were no guidelines for proper behavior when locked in a storeroom with your ex.

Her eyes widened. “As much as I appreciate your wit, we’re trapped in here, and I’m starting to freak out because I don’t think the air quality is great.”

The air quality? He was picturing his mouth on her breast and she was preoccupied with stale air? Okay, so fooling around wasn’t going to happen. It had been a long shot. He shouldn’t even want to have sex with her, but there was no denying he did. He wanted to take her against that door hard and fast, then do it all over again, nice and slow the second time, driving her to the brink over and over until she whimpered with need and pleasure.

But she was wrong if she thought he was using sex as a distraction from discussing their impending divorce. The two had nothing to do with each other. He could still crave her physically even though their relationship was long over. The truth was, he was starting to think he wouldn’t be able to move on with his life until he purged the sexual memory of her from his head and from his cock.

If he ever wanted to move on and have a quality relationship with another woman, he needed to relegate Kristine and her body firmly to the past.

And he could think of only one way to do that.

But he needed to figure out how to convince her of that fact without sending her running for the hills again. Even trapped in this room, if he spooked her, she’d likely crawl up the metal shelving to escape him. No, it wasn’t going to happen here, in this room. But he had every intention of taking her up on that cup of coffee to discuss their divorce, and he had every intention of that meeting ending up with them in bed.

Unless she was dating someone, which was why she suddenly wanted the divorce. There was an unpleasant thought.

“No panicking. You’re not going to suffocate. There’s a decent-size window. This is no big deal. I’ll call my assistant and we can wait for him to get here. Or I’ll just lift you up and you can crawl through the window if you’re feeling impatient.”

“What? Are you insane?” Kristine eyed the window and snorted. “As you are well aware, I am not a tiny woman. My hips will never fit through that opening.”

He was definitely acquainted with all of her delicious curves, and he was positive her hips would fit. “Of course they will. Come on, you got this, no problem.”

“Call your assistant.”

He was already hitting Michigan’s name on his phone. “Hey, yes, can you return to Collective? The event coordinator and I somehow got locked in the storage room. I’m assuming the door can be opened from the other side, but just in case, maybe you should call a locksmith on your way over because I’m not even sure how the door got locked in the first place.”

“You’re locked in a storage room? With your wife?” Michigan sounded very nervous.

Kristine was eyeing the window suspiciously.

“Yes. Where are you? How soon do you think you can get here?”

“It’s rush hour. I’m in some heavy traffic. I have to get off the highway and turn around...probably twenty minutes. Minimum.”

“No problem, thanks. Call me when you’re here.”

He hung up the phone. “Twenty minutes at least. He has to turn around and traffic is heavy this time of day.”

“I guess that’s the simplest thing to do. Calling the police would probably be a waste of law enforcement resources, wouldn’t it?” she asked.

“Definitely. This is a nonemergency.”

Kristine had perched her bum on the very edge of the metal shelf. She looked uncomfortable and unbelievably sexy, her tenuous position causing her breasts to spill forward out of her sweater. “So why now?” he asked her.

“Why now, what?” She looked at him blankly.

“Why a divorce now? Are you engaged to be married to someone else?”

She wobbled on the shelf and grabbed it for better balance. “No. Not at all.”

“Then why?” There had to be a catalyst. She didn’t just wake up one day and think she needed a divorce. He certainly never had. Initially, he had been too raw to even consider it, then he had felt stubbornly that it was her responsibility since she was the one who had technically walked out. Eventually, it had just seemed unnecessary, and a task that fell by the wayside when he had seven thousand other things to do on a weekly basis.

If he were brutally honest with himself, he had assumed Kristine would seek him out when she got into a scrape. She had always needed him to bail her out of one disaster after another, and he had thought it was his ace in the hole. She would need him.

But she hadn’t.

Kristine pursed her lips. “It was pointed out to me that not everyone is okay with dating a woman who is technically married.”

Ah, so that was it. “A stickler, huh?” Sean didn’t blame the guy. It was a little weird, but damn, it had been ten years. It was a marriage in the courthouse records only. “We haven’t even seen each other in a decade.”

“I know. I explained that, but he thought it was too revealing that we haven’t divorced.”