Close Up (2 page)

Hardball was the only way to play the game with Ebbe. Otherwise, she would do exactly what she wanted, with no thought to the consequences for those around her.

“What kind of daughter threatens her own mother?” Ebbe sniffed on the other end of the phone.

“One whose mother threatens to get her fired. Now I will talk to you later. Love you.” Despite knowing she would pay for it, Kristine ended the call without saying goodbye.

Tossing her phone onto the desk, she grabbed the sign, which was going to be placed on an easel at the front of the gallery, and pushed her way back into the main room. She was about to speak to the caterer when she realized there were people by the front door. Two men, in suits.

One looked familiar. Very familiar. Ten years hadn’t eradicated the knowledge of his muscular body, his narrow face and dark hair, despite the power suit. She knew every single inch of this man, every expression, every gesture, the touch of his hands, his lips, his tongue. Among other things.

He strode toward her and her mouth heated. Her breath caught. Her knees wobbled.

It was Sean, the only man she had ever been in love with.

Her husband.

* * *

S
EAN
M
ADDOCK HADN’T
been confronted with this many naked bodies at once since a tequila-fueled skinny-dipping party in college. Unlike then, he was stone-cold sober this time around, but fortunately, or unfortunately, however you chose to feel about it, these were not flesh and blood partygoers, but nude photographs. A lot of them. In enormous proportions. With dozens and dozens of people in each shot, so that everywhere Sean turned, he caught a breast or a backside or an eyeful of man junk.

Damn. It was a lot to take in at two in the afternoon.

His latest intern, Michigan, was an ambitious recent U of Chicago graduate, who had apparently broken his parents’ hearts by choosing not to attend their alma mater, which had been his namesake. Instead, he’d worked his ass off at Chicago, and Sean suspected he’d never seen this much skin at any point during his undergrad years.

The poor kid made a strangled sound in the back of his throat as they stood in the lobby of the art gallery, Collective. “Interesting,” Michigan managed.

“You could call it that.” Sean shook his head. Maybe he wasn’t deep enough to comprehend the bigger meaning, but having two hundred people naked together in one photograph, looking like a herd of sheared sheep, did not project any sort of message to him other than awkward. “But it’s highly commercially successful, so the artist knows what he is doing. As does the gallery.”

Under other circumstances, he might have found it amusing. There was nothing he loved more than seeing a quirky idea take off on the open market. Not to mention he had no objections to nudity, though he preferred his naked encounters to be one-on-one. But today he was distracted by the papers that had arrived unexpectedly in the morning, jarring him out of an ordinary day’s work and straight backward to the previous decade.

Back to Kristine.

“How many people are attending this event?” Michigan asked.

“Two hundred.” Sean glanced around the neat and upscale gallery, noting there were multiple exits, one presumably to a back storeroom, and two directly to the exterior. The front of the gallery was all glass, which was, of course, problematic for security, but generally speaking, he didn’t think Maddock Security would have any issues securing the opening night of the Ian Bainbridge exhibit and charity fund-raiser.

He didn’t need to be here, frankly. His team had already done their research on the event and the facility, and had put a plan in place for the party Friday evening, but Sean hadn’t been able to resist stopping in himself for a look when he saw the name of the event coordinator who had hired the firm. Kristine. His former wife, who wasn’t technically his former wife, since they had never legally filed for divorce, despite it being ten years since their impetuous and short-lived marriage had ended. They had parted ways after a rip-roaring fight, two headstrong personalities barely out of their teens, and as far as he knew, Kristine had been living in Vegas since their split, heading west on impulse. That was Kristine—action first, thought second.

It was one of the things about her that had made him fall in love with her initially—that she was so much the opposite of him. He was methodical, pragmatic, a self-made millionaire who had been accused of being coldhearted a time or two. Though, back when they had been together, he had been broke, with nothing more than a vision and a determination to work hard. He hadn’t been as cynical, as remote as he was now, and there had been nothing cold about him when it came to Kristine. She had made him hot with passion, and warm with the most intense emotion he’d ever known. He didn’t fall in love easily. In fact, it was safe to say he had not been in love since, which was why he’d never bothered to pursue tracking her down and obtaining a legal divorce. The technicality didn’t matter, because he hadn’t been serious about another woman in the following years, maybe because, at the tender age of twenty-one, he had learned there was something to the adage about fools and love. He had fallen hard and gotten his heart ripped out of his chest and stomped on.

Not to mention, somewhere in the back of his mind, Sean had always assumed Kristine would come back and they would resume their relationship because he hadn’t done anything wrong. She hadn’t done anything wrong. They’d had essentially a juvenile fight that had exploded beyond all comprehension, and surely that couldn’t be the end of their relationship.

Yet, ten years had managed to slide by, one day at a time while he had been building his business from the ground up and pretending he wasn’t lonely. He had no idea what Kristine had been doing.

Sean hadn’t known she was back in town until divorce papers had arrived at his office three hours ago, and it had given him a hell of a jolt. Most days, the past was relegated to the past, and he didn’t give much thought to Kristine, so to have her suddenly thrust into his day had been very distracting. It surprised him that she had the callousness to serve him papers without at least a phone call. So much time had passed—she couldn’t possibly think he was still angry over the way their relationship had ended. They had just been kids. Then again, maybe it was so long ago, she didn’t think it was important enough to let him know she was finally requesting a divorce, which, frankly, should have happened years ago.

Maybe it was just something on her To Do list that she’d finally gotten around to. Divorce Sean Finally. Check.

While he had been mulling over all of that, and the fact her address listed on the divorce papers was one in Minneapolis, not that far from his own condo, he had seen her name on the contract for the gallery event as he’d gone through the paperwork with Michigan.

Those three pieces of information had created more awareness of Kristine than he’d had in years, and before he’d given much thought to it, he’d decided he wanted to—no, had to—see her.

So here he was, agitated and not entirely sure why, his tie feeling too tight, hand in his pocket to hide the way his thumb drummed on his thigh. He didn’t like feeling out of control. At all. And the way he dealt with feeling out of control was to wrest it back by throwing other people off their guard. It was how he had built a successful business. It was what he was doing here now, watching catering professionals in the back of the gallery bustle about setting up tables, with crisp white linens and champagne flutes turned upside down on their rims.

But he was determined not to let Kristine see how unnerved he was. That was the rule in business. You kept your hand close to your chest and you charmed, with a casual attitude, as if the outcome of the deal didn’t matter to you one bit.

He wasn’t even sure why this outcome did matter. But before he signed those divorce papers, he wanted to look Kristine in the eye, see the woman she had become. Call him nostalgic. Call him a masochist. Call him simply curious.

Michigan was scrolling through his phone. “I’ll go ask the staff where the event coordinator is so you can speak to her. What’s her name again?”

For a second Sean didn’t answer, because the door to the back room had opened and Kristine had emerged from it, a sign in her hand almost as big as she was, shielding her beautiful and curvaceous body from his view. But he could see her face, and it punched him in the gut to see the harried smile she gave a staff member, her fiery-red hair piled on her head, tendrils falling down the back of her neck as she turned and pointed to something on the table.

She looked more mature, her style more refined, the angles of her face sharper, her narrow skirt emphasizing her hourglass figure. It was hard to believe, but she was even more beautiful now than at nineteen.

It didn’t surprise him that, in addition to the powerful wave of confusion he felt, there was an instant desire for her, making his mouth hot and his dick hard. Even from across the room, his body responded to her, and he flashed back to all those nights where she had snuggled up against him in bed in their lousy studio apartment, her bright smile taking the edge off whatever dilemmas had come his way during the day. Kristine was not pencil-thin, but sported some serious curves, which, when she turned sideways for a minute, were perfectly displayed for him. Curves that she seemed to have learned to show to advantage in the tight knee-length skirt she wore and the floral button-up sweater. There were hips and breasts and a whole lot of mouthwatering backside.

She had been a pretty and sparkling young woman when he had married her, but damn, she had grown into an absolute bombshell. Sean itched to touch her. Everywhere.

“Her name is Kristine Zimmerman Maddock,” he told Michigan. “My wife.”

“Excuse me?” Michigan asked, sounding very confused. “You’re married?”

Yes. And no.

But Sean didn’t answer him, because at that moment, Kristine glanced toward the front of the gallery and spotted him. Even from twenty feet away, he saw her start, her hands slipping on the sign and almost dropping it. A man in the black-and-white waiter uniform moved to help her, but she waved him off, her eyes still on Sean.

He smiled and raised his eyebrows and nodded to her in acknowledgment. “Michigan, you can go back to the office. I’ll be there in a bit.”

“You want me to leave?” Michigan sounded nervous.

Sean didn’t need to look at him to know he would be pushing his glasses up on his nose. It was a nervous tic he had when he wasn’t quite sure how to proceed. Normally, Sean was patient with him, and encouraging, because he thought Michigan showed a lot of potential as a businessman, but right now, he couldn’t be bothered. All he could think about was Kristine. Standing in front of him for the first time in ten years.

Without responding, Sean strode forward.

Kristine darted a glance left and right, as if she was looking for an exit route. Her cheeks were flushed pink. For a second, he was distracted by the sign, which announced the exhibit with a photograph of a group of people naked in a tree. The woman straddling that tree trunk did not look comfortable at all. But Sean shoved that thought aside as he approached the woman he had loved, and promptly invaded her personal space.

“Hello, Kristine.”

2

T
HAT VOICE.

Kristine felt a shiver rush through her, further flustering her. That voice was exactly the same as she remembered it, whiskey smooth, confident, sexy as hell. The voice she had heard in her dreams night after night for the first year after she had been stupid enough to run scared away from him during their big blowout fight. One of her trademark impulsive moves.

She couldn’t believe Sean was right in front of her. Standing, frankly, too close for any sort of appropriate public behavior.

Her heart was racing. Her palms were sweating, the Plexiglas-covered sign in her hands slipping. Her cheeks were burning. Her nipples were hard. And she was speechless, which for her was a rare event, occurring only once a decade during a full moon. Or the season finale of
The Bachelor
.

Oh, God.
Speak,
she commanded herself.
Say something, you total idiot.

“Sean,” she said. Only it wasn’t a confident and professional-sounding statement. It was a breathy, sexy, “lay me down in the tall grass and make me forget your name and mine” kind of whisper.

His nostrils flared. His eyes darkened.

Her arms wobbled and she blamed it on the weight of the sign. But the truth was it was Sean.

He was just as gorgeous as she remembered, though he looked older, obviously, and more put together. His jaw sterner, his hair, once unruly, now short and controlled. He looked as if he had filled out, his arms more muscular, shoulders broader, more commanding. When they had been together, he had favored jeans, expression T-shirts and Converse sneakers, but now he wore a designer suit in black, his dress shirt a blue pinstripe, the tie a rich dark blue. It didn’t surprise her that he hadn’t chosen a red tie—he would probably think it a cliché. He looked better in blue anyway. It made his pale blue eyes that much more arresting in contrast to his dark hair.

So much so that she glanced away, unable to hold his gaze. It made her feel way too vulnerable, way too confused in a way she wouldn’t have expected. So much time had passed, she hadn’t expected to feel much of an emotional reaction to him, despite the fact she had been madly in love with him once upon a time. Maybe it was just the sheer unexpected appearance that had her off-kilter.

What the hell was he doing here anyway? This event was small, a tiny drop in the ginormous bucket of his business ventures. When she had been hired by the gallery as their events coordinator two weeks ago, the previous employee had already set up the bulk of the Bainbridge event, including security, given the photographer’s notoriety for attracting protestors. Because of her history with Sean, she had felt a bit voyeuristic to see Maddock Security in the paperwork, but even when she had to re-sign an addendum to the original contract, she hadn’t expected that Sean would ever be made aware of her hand in the party.