Close Up (6 page)

“Don’t be so quick to throw in the towel,” he said, turning them both sideways so she could access the ledge without him in the way.

Something about his tone made her realize he was not just talking about the window. It made her determined to show Sean she wasn’t a quitter, that for once she could follow up and do something right, that she wasn’t like her mother, with a new project to back and then abandon every other week.

So she got a better grip and hauled herself the rest of the way up onto the ledge, the window frame cutting into her gut. When her head was completely out of the window and she was staring down at concrete, she let out a squawk. “I’m going to fall!”

Sean’s hands firmly gripped her thighs. “Pull your head back! You have to get your leg over the ledge. You can’t go headfirst.”

Good point. She pulled herself back and tried to sit up. This was a lot of work and she didn’t have the core strength to do it. Maybe she should start Pilates. Then again, why would she ever need to climb through a window again? She had a record of not setting foot in a gym in five years; it would be a shame to break that impressive streak.

But with Sean shoving and her hauling, she managed to get her leg up and over the frame so she was straddling the ledge, one leg inside, one outside. Good thing the window was full sized or this would have never worked. Even so, she was hunched over, and her perch wasn’t exactly comfortable. She rocked back and forth. “I think I’m breaking vital parts.”

“Well, we definitely don’t want that.” Without warning, Sean’s hand slid between her legs and under her booty, while his thumb rested quite comfortably on her clitoris.

Kristine screamed and almost fell out the window.

4

S
EAN WASN’T ABOUT
to let Kristine get hurt trying to crawl out of the window. Or injure any particularly soft spots on her body. So while maybe he didn’t need to grip her precisely where he was, he had her best interests in mind.

And he was nothing if not an opportunist.

“Whoa,” he told her, moving right up against the wall so he could ensure that, if necessary, he could yank her back toward him. He didn’t want her spilling out the window.

“I think I’m okay,” she said, but her voice was shaky. She glanced down at him with limpid eyes. “Though I’m afraid if I shift I might have an orgasm. Could you move your thumb, please?”

Sean laughed. Leave it to Kristine to tell it like it was. “I don’t want you to fall.”

“Your thumb isn’t holding me up. And you’re not playing fair.”

That gave him immense satisfaction. “I wasn’t aware we were playing. I thought we were trying to get out of this room so this photography event can happen and we can get divorced.”

Her eyes narrowed. “You’re definitely playing a game. Only I don’t know what it is. You know I suck at strategizing. I would be the first person off
Survivor
because I don’t understand scheming.”

“I’m not scheming.” Not much, anyway. “I am legitimately trying to keep you from falling. And I am legitimately using it as a reason to touch your body.” He stroked his thumb up and down, slowly. “It doesn’t seem like you mind.”

“Just because my body responds to you in some sort of sexual recognition doesn’t mean it makes sense for us to do this. We should talk.”

They could talk. And then he could make love to her. Worked for him. “Right now? My hand is going numb and I imagine your ass is doing the same.”

Kristine frowned, but she shook her head. “This isn’t over.”

He’d never thought it was. What should have been a fight and reconciliation had just ended with the fight, and he’d spent years wondering why. Did she even realize how loaded that sounded? “Agreed.” Slowly, he withdrew his hand. “Now just swing your other leg over and ease down. Don’t let go of the window until you’ve slid as far down the wall as you can, okay?”

“Got it, coach.” She drew up her other leg. “I would say this is inspiration for me starting an exercise regime, but that would be a total lie. I hate working out and that is never going to change.”

Frankly, Sean couldn’t imagine what hard-core athletic ventures would do to Kristine’s body. It would take away all those curves he loved so much, tone away the soft angles and make it not nearly as much fun to touch her. “You certainly get a workout talking,” he teased her. “You could have jumped out this window three times by now.”

She made a face at him. Then she slid down the wall, making tiny little exclamations of distress the whole time. Sean jumped up to grab the ledge so he could watch her and make sure she was okay. She landed on her feet and turned around and gave him a thumbs-up.

“Awesome job,” he told her sincerely. “I knew you could do it.”

She adjusted his pants on her hips and grinned up at him. “You know, it occurs to me that I am in a power position here. I’m free, but you’re still locked up. What if I just walk away?”

He snorted. He didn’t believe for one minute she would leave him there. “Bullshit, Kristy. You wouldn’t do that and you know it.”

But then he realized she had actually done that very thing. She had left town and changed her number. For the first year, he’d had no idea where she was or what she’d been doing until he had hounded her mother to tell him. But he hadn’t done anything with that information because, at that point, what was there to say? His frustration resurfaced and without another word, he dropped back down onto the floor.

What the hell had he been expecting? That he would show up at the gallery and somehow the past would all make sense?

Sean paced around and around the storeroom, checking his phone. No word from Michigan. He suddenly felt trapped. Which was stupid, given that Kristine was already out of the storeroom and he had gone to the gallery on his own initiative. He was simply on edge. The day’s events had been out of his control and he was never comfortable with that. He’d built a life around being in charge and he did not like how off-kilter he felt.

It didn’t help when the door was suddenly thrown open and Kristine appeared looking absolutely frantic. “Sean, oh, my God, someone vandalized the exhibit!”

She unzipped his pants and shoved them down with no concern for modesty whatsoever. “This is awful,” she moaned, bouncing around in her underwear trying to remove his pants from her ankles.

What was awful? Oh, right, vandals. Because from where he was standing, nothing looked awful at all. In fact, the view was downright mouthwatering. He was unable to think or take action.

Sean couldn’t even speak until his own pants hit him in the face. Then he forced himself to focus. “What do you mean, vandalized?” he asked as he dragged his pants down off his face into a ball.

“Get dressed.” She rushed to grab her skirt from the floor. “This is a nightmare. I’m going to be fired!”

The situation sounded like something requiring urgent attention, and the businessman in his brain rang alarm bells indicating he needed to take action. But Sean the man, the husband, was unable to really focus on anything other than Kristine in her underwear, bending over. Her panties had ridden up on her cheeks, exposing the curve of her bottom on both sides, along with her little cupcake tattoo. Many a night he had taken a bite of that sweet treat, sometimes in playful pretend, sometimes as a heady erotic nip.

But then she wiggled into her skirt and Sean forced his thoughts off sex with Kristine and onto what she had said. “Why would you be fired?”

She hopped up and down as she pulled her heels back on. “They defaced the photographs! Who could have done that? And do you think they actually locked us in on purpose so they could do this?”

His brain returned to its normal state of reason as he realized that either the caterer was actually a protestor or that someone had been watching the gallery waiting for an opportune moment to cause trouble. “I think that is absolutely what happened. It would be the mother of all coincidences if they didn’t.” Sean shook out his pants to pull them back on. “Did they leave political messages? What do you mean by defacing?”

Kristine bit her lip, and for a second he could have sworn she knew more than she was saying. “It looks juvenile, actually—”

But then she stopped talking as she caught sight of the huge erection he sported. “Sean! Put your pants on. Geez...”

“What? I can’t help it. You bent over. I’m a simple man, babe.”

But Kristine just rolled her eyes. “I will never understand how men can think about sex in times of crisis.”

Overdramatic much? Sean pulled his pants on. “This isn’t a tsunami. We are not being hunted by a crazed killer. Someone threw chairs around and stole the champagne glasses. It’s not a crisis—it’s an irritation.”

“They didn’t steal the glasses. They spray painted underwear on some of the models in the photos.”

Sean blinked. Then he started laughing. He couldn’t help it. “That’s just dumb.”

“It’s not funny!”

“It kind of is, you have to admit. They put underwear on the models?” He shook his head. “Some people have too much damn time on their hands.”

“It might be funny if it wasn’t happening to me.” She strode past him. “What am I going to do? The exhibit is supposed to open in two days! Friday is a charity fund-raiser for breast cancer research. This is just so bad. I’m going to lose my job and I’m going to starve.”

He was tempted to offer for her to eat him, not in sarcasm, but as an innuendo, but one thing he knew was that Kristine couldn’t be teased out of hysteria. She needed a solution to the problem, however large or small, and she needed one offered quickly before her panic escalated. “Let’s take a look at the damage before you file for unemployment.”

“I can’t imagine this will look good for your security firm, either,” she said, rushing anxiously across the backroom.

Oh, hell, no, he wasn’t going to let this fall on Maddock Security. “Our contract states we start at 7:00 p.m. on Friday, an hour before the guests arrive. This is not my fault. I was here because of the divorce papers, not because of work.”

She glanced at him over her shoulder. “Really? You came here just because of me?”

“Of course. It was totally out of the blue, Kristine. I wanted to talk to you. I was curious why the sudden action. But never mind. Let’s see what happened here and figure out how to solve it. No one is getting fired, I promise.”

* * *

K
RISTINE STOPPED WALKING
and turned back to Sean, her panic over the exhibit overshadowed by the tone of his voice. He sounded...hurt. This day was a disaster, plain and simple. “I thought you said you didn’t want to talk.” He had cut her off twice. But then, he had also asked her why she was filing papers now.

His eyes smoldered with emotion. “We do need to talk, among other things.”

They had so much unfinished business a cup of coffee wasn’t going to cut it. The tension—sexual and emotional—was a thick haze in the air, and it had felt way too natural for him to put his hands on her, for them to joke and tease.

But she could not deal with Sean on top of the reality of the exhibit being destroyed, and the sneaking suspicion that somehow her mother might be involved. That was more drama than one woman could be expected to handle in the same hour. “But please, let me figure out how to save my ass. Then you can chew it out thoroughly, okay?”

The corner of his mouth turned up slightly. “I can think of better things to do with your ass than either of those.”

And just like that, he could make her forget her entire life was imploding. A shiver ran up her spine. But she rolled her eyes at him, determined to be mature. Okay, maybe
mature
was stretching it, but determined to deal with the matter at hand.

Ignoring him, she continued into the gallery and was confronted again by the reality of pending unemployment. Oh, God, it really was bad.

Twenty mass nude photos hung along three walls of the gallery, each photo larger than a typical poster. Because they were so big, it allowed the viewer to see more detail in the photos, the expressions of the volunteer models, the various backdrops, and in some cases, the split and crack of the dried body paint that had been used to cover exposed flesh. It was an expressive exhibit, with the artist, Ian Bainbridge, making a statement about the powerlessness of the individual in the moneymaking machine of the health-care industry. He had always done work focusing on corporate greed, but the gallery owner, June, had told Kristine that Ian’s mother had been diagnosed with breast cancer a few months earlier, and as a result, his focus had shifted to health care. What was supposed to be a sophisticated opening-night fund-raiser was now going to be a debacle because some idiot had taken black spray paint to art.

She prayed that idiot wasn’t her mother. Ebbe wouldn’t. She couldn’t.

Or would she?

She would. No doubt about it. Spray paint was Ebbe’s medium for protest, and whereas before there had been breasts and bare bottoms, now there were crudely painted jockey shorts on everyone in the forefront of five prints, sprayed right onto the glass frame. Hadn’t her mother suggested boy shorts for the models? She had also known that Kristine was in the gallery mostly by herself.

Kristine narrowed her eyes and wondered if she should text her mother and ask her point-blank. Not that it would matter. The problem was what did she do to fix it?

“Yep, that is truly the dumbest vandalism I’ve ever seen,” Sean said, coming up behind her.

“What am I going to do?” Regardless of who had done it, it still needed to be fixed before June and Ian showed up at seven. “My boss and the artist have a meeting tonight to go over last-minute details. They’re going to see this.”

“Call the cops. File a report. Take down the photos that have been vandalized.” He turned in an arch to view the room. “Only five of them have been sprayed. That still leaves you the bulk of the exhibit.”

“No, absolutely not. I can’t tell my boss what happened. I’ll get fired!” The panic crawled up her throat again. Sean didn’t know that she had literally twelve dollars and seventeen cents to her name and a ton of student loan debt. That she desperately needed a steady paycheck since she had spent the last of her money on the plane ticket back from Vegas. The past decade had been spent bouncing from one low-paying job to another—her most recent had been working in the events department of a casino.