Close Up

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.”

“Or more likely lazy,” he said. Then, because he was curious, nothing more, he asked, “Did you love him?”

She shrugged. “No. There wasn’t time to love him. A month into dating, and he ditched me when he found out my legal status.”

“Why didn’t you tell him right away?” Sean asked, a little astonished. “I tell women on the first date. No one ever cares.”

Kristine snorted. “Of course they don’t. You’re wealthy and hot.”

His jaw dropped. “So you think the women I date are shallow?”

Kristine wrinkled her nose. “How should I know?”

Annoyed, he stripped off his jacket, folded it and draped it over a metal chair, then he walked to the window and turned the latch to shove it open. He was insulted and not entirely sure why.

“I’m not crawling through that window,” Kristine said, sounding mulish. “I won’t fit and there is a four-foot drop to the alley. Why don’t you crawl through it?”

“I definitely won’t fit. My shoulders are too wide.”

“Your shoulders are smaller than my hips. I have hippo hips.”

That was it. He’d been keeping the lid on his control, but his emotion boiled over without warning and he rounded on her. “Stop making it sound like you’re three thousand pounds,” he said, irritated, and suddenly understanding what she was saying about stale air. It did feel stuffy in the room, but maybe that was just tension. “I hate it when you do that. You’re a goddamn beautiful woman with a body that stops traffic, so enough already. Not every woman is built like a twelve-year-old boy, and some of us are damn grateful for that.”

Kristine blinked at him, her eyes wide. “Oh.”

Sean immediately felt guilty for raising his voice. She looked so stricken. “Kristy,” he said, falling into her familiar nickname. “If you weren’t so gorgeous I wouldn’t right now be wishing I had you naked beneath me.”

She sucked in her breath. Sean stepped toward her, blood rushing south, his cock aching painfully. He wanted to taste her, take her mouth with his and push his tongue between her soft lips.

“This is a bad idea,” she said, in an uncertain whisper.

“That never stopped us before.” He took another step, stalking her like a predator.

But she suddenly started, scooting around him.

“Okay, lift me up. I’ll try the window.”

Sean was disappointed, but he still grinned. Clearly, being alone with him even for twenty minutes was such a temptation she was willing to tackle the window. It would totally suck if she were unaffected, but she obviously was not. This he could work with. She still had some feelings for him, even if they were simply sexual. He could fan the flames of her desire, coax her into his bed, and say goodbye to their marriage and Kristine properly and on a positive note.

He had enjoyed their marriage, and frankly, he didn’t want it to end in bitterness. If she was determined to divorce him, then he wanted to go out with a bang. Literally.

So he squatted on his haunches and cupped his hands together to make a perch for her. Kristine kicked off her heels, and while she gave his hands a dubious look, she took a deep breath and put a foot into his hold. Her skin was warm, and her knee bumped his chest. She squawked as her balance failed and her foot fell onto the floor.

“You have to hold on to my shoulders.”

Kristine gave him a look, as if she was convinced this was a ploy to get into her panties. Which he supposed it was, though he’d had absolutely nothing to do with the door being locked. He wasn’t taking the blame for that.

Now that he thought about it, why was the door locked? It didn’t seem like something a caterer who didn’t normally work in the building would do. He’d been so distracted by seeing Kristine that the obvious had bypassed his attention. “So this Allison, have you worked with her before?” he asked Kristine as she stepped into his foot again, fingers lightly perched on his shoulders.

“No. I’ve had this job for only two weeks. I just got back to Minneapolis.”

Well, at least she hadn’t been fifteen minutes away from him for months without communicating. That would have been something of a kick in the nuts to hear. “Has the gallery used this caterer before?”

“I think this is the caterer they always use, yes.”

Huh. So was it really just an accident? He supposed it must be, unless the caterer was an international art thief clearing out the gallery as they spoke. For a second, he wondered if they should call the cops, but the gallery sounded dead silent and Kristine distracted him from his thought processes. She wasn’t doing anything. One foot was still on the floor, and her waist was still tantalizingly close to his face. His mouth.

“What are you doing?” he asked her.

“I don’t know. What am I supposed to do?”

He grinned. “You have to reach for the ledge. You pull and I’ll lift you up.”

“This is not going to work. Forget it.”

His phone rang. It was Michigan. “Excuse me, Kristy, this is my assistant.” He tapped at his phone to answer it. “Hello?”

“There’s been an accident and I’m sitting here completely stopped. Looks like a semi rolled and three lanes are blocked. So, um, it may be a little longer than twenty minutes. I’d guesstimate an hour.”

Sean should be more annoyed than he was. “Okay, thanks. Sorry.”

He hung up and said to Kristine, “There’s an accident on the highway and Michigan is in the thick of it. He estimates an hour before he gets back here.”

“Oh, geez.” She eyed the window. “That’s a long time without air.”

He wanted to laugh. “There is plenty of air. It’s fine.”

“I’m a little claustrophobic. I’m starting to feel uncomfortable. I’ll try the window.” She took a deep breath and went for it, reaching for the ledge and attempting to haul herself up while he gave her a boost.

Sean waited until she had a grip on the window before he let go of her foot and stood so he could grip her waist for stability and to give her an extra lift. But Kristine panicked and started slipping, her feet flailing.

“Ack!” she screamed.

“Damn it,” he muttered with a grimace as her heel connected with his groin.

“Sorry,” she said, breathless, scrambling for a purchase on the ledge. But it was a lost cause. Kristine dropped to the floor, stumbling backward into him.

“Okay, we need to rethink our strategy,” he said, readjusting his throbbing cock.

She shot him a dubious look. “Did we have one to start with?”

Sean laughed. “No. Probably not.”

She smiled at him fully and without inhibition for the first time since he had walked into the gallery, and damn, but it was a thing of beauty. Kristine possessed the kind of smile that could make even the surliest old man’s blood quicken a little bit. Kids and old people adored her, and Sean had, too. He’d fallen for that smile, and the reappearance of it made him more determined than ever to take her to bed. To get closure. He needed that.

“This would be a lot easier if I wasn’t wearing a skirt,” she added.

“So take it off,” he suggested.

Hey, if you didn’t ask...

“Yeah, great idea. Then I’ll scrape the heck out of my legs on the window. Then when I drop down to the street, I’ll be in my underwear. No, thank you.”

“You’re going to have to hike your skirt up to your waist anyway to swing your leg over, so you’ll still be flashing. I could give you my pants.”

Her eyebrows shot straight up. “What? So then you will be pants-less?”

The idea made sense to him. “Yes. You put on my pants, which will protect your skin and your modesty, then you come around to the front door, and unlock this door to let me out and I put my pants back on.”

“Won’t your pants get ruined? They look expensive.”

Sean shrugged. “Pants can be replaced.” Other things could not.

Pulling his shirt out of his pants, Sean undid his belt and smiled. “Take your skirt off, gorgeous.”

* * *

UNDER DIFFERENT CIRCUMSTANCES, Kristine would have loved that type of command. But this was just...weird. The whole situation was so not what she had expected out of this day, and she was having a hard time keeping up. Sean was daring her—it was obvious. He didn’t think she would do it. Or maybe he did think she would. After all, he knew her fairly well, or he had once upon a time, and she was nothing if not impulsive, and always up for proving she had a certain amount of nerve.

The logic was sound. Wearing his pants would keep her from getting scratched up. They were trapped in this room for at least another sixty minutes or so if she didn’t crawl out the window, and she wasn’t lying: enclosed spaces made her nervous. It wasn’t an elevator, that was true, but the idea of being trapped made her heart beat faster and her palms sweat. Not to mention the front door was unlocked, leaving a very expensive exhibit unmonitored. There was tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of photography out there, and for all she knew, it was being stolen right now while she debated whether or not she could handle taking off her skirt in front of her ex—or almost ex—husband.

If she were playing with fire by stripping to her panties in front of him, well, so be it. Her ass was on the line here, quite literally, and she couldn’t afford to lose this job.

So she reached behind to unzip her skirt. “Close your eyes.”

Sean snorted. “Are you joking?”

It was stupid, but she felt self-conscious. She hadn’t been to the gym lately. Okay, ever. Plus she was wearing granny panties. If she were ever to be in the presence of Sean again in her underwear, and she had pictured it on occasion, she had not imagined it would be in a dusty storage room while she wore cotton panties that basically came up to her armpits. She had also imagined herself younger. “No, I’m not.”

“I’m not closing my eyes, so forget it.” Sean unzipped his pants and shoved them down, before stepping out of them. “Here you go. Take ’em or leave ’em.”

Kristine cleared her throat. Maybe he wasn’t actually the one who needed to close his eyes, because she found herself staring quite steadily as Sean stripped to his boxer briefs. His thighs were rock solid, definitely more substantial than they had been at twenty-one, and while the dress socks looked just a tiny bit silly, what those black briefs contained did not make her laugh. That was an erection, and she was fighting the urge to drool. Afraid of what she would sound like if she spoke, she grabbed the pants out of his hands and stepped into them.

She hauled them over her hips, thank God. Buttoning them, she then unzipped her skirt and tried to shimmy it over the pants. It required a lot of skirt tugging and holding the pants in place with a death grip, but in the end, she managed to get the skirt off while keeping the pants on. Glancing down at herself, she had to smile. The pants were too long, tight in the hips, and saggy in the waist. Her midriff was showing between her sweater set and the pants. “Well, this is quite the look.”

“I have you beat,” Sean said. “I’m wearing a dress shirt, tie and cuff links, but no pants.” He turned sideways and took a Roman pose. “GQ will be calling, I have no doubt.”

For a second, Kristine’s heart squeezed, and she allowed herself to remember what it felt like when she and Sean were together, and the casual fun and intimacy marriage had allowed. That had been the plus side of commitment. She knew every gesture he made, every inch of his body, right down to the scar on his chin, which he’d gotten jumping off his parents’ bed as a toddler.

Yet there was still so much she didn’t know about him, not the least of which was why he had been attracted to her, of all women.

“Rawr,” she said in reaction to his pose, then immediately regretted it. That sounded too personal, too familiar.

But Sean didn’t react like he thought it was strange. He just told her, “Thanks. Now climb that wall and liberate us.”

He didn’t bother to squat this time. He just came up behind her and gripped her around the waist.

“Sean!” Good grief, that was a whole lot of Sean all up in her business. Thighs, hands, pecs and another part that started with p were getting very close and personal with her.

She jerked forward so far she almost smacked her nose on the wall when his penis snuggled up into her backside.

“What? I’m lifting you up. Stop wiggling.”

“You can’t lift me—”

He lifted her.

Okay, she stood corrected. Dangling in the air, Kristine grabbed for the ledge, and pulled herself up onto it. She got her upper half where it needed to be, but then her efforts came to a grinding halt. Uh-oh. Thanks, puberty. “Sean, my boobs are stuck.”

He gave a crack of laughter. “What? What do you mean?”

“I mean, they’re caught beneath me. I need you to lift me up so I can spring them. I can’t go forward until they’re free.” At that moment, she was actually grateful it was Sean she was trapped with, because she didn’t think she could say those words out loud to any other man. A woman? Sure. Her own gender understood the complications of cleavage, but men didn’t understand that what they considered to be their personal playground came with its own setbacks.

“I’m not exactly sure I know what that means, but wrap your legs around my head so you can get a better angle.”

Wrap her legs around his head. Now that brought a pleasant memory or two to mind. “Um...”

“Like this.”

Suddenly, Sean’s head and shoulders nudged their way between her legs. She gripped the ledge harder, palms sweaty from stress and arousal. How could he sound so normal and unaffected? She was splayed across a window ledge, breasts being squeezed against the ledge, booty back in the air, Sean between her legs. It was like performance art or yoga for perverts, and she was enjoying it far too much.

He stood up again, so that she rested on his shoulders, his head bent forward. “Okay, sit up before you snap my neck.”

Kristine sat up, freeing her chest, and clamping her thighs onto the sides of his head to give her a sense of stability. “Is this doomed to failure?” she asked, eyeing the window and doubting her ability to haul herself through it without injury or death. It was possibly the only thing that could distract her from the fact she perched on Sean’s shoulders with his hair tickling her bare midriff.

“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

SEAN 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.”