Close Up. Erin McCarthy

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СКАЧАТЬ did not have time for this. “I need this job or I will be forced to move in with you, and God knows, neither of us wants that. So save the protests for social media, okay? Because if you show up here Friday and destroy this opening night, I will lose my job and I will never speak to you ever again, even while I’m sharing your apartment.”

      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.

      * * *

      SEAN MADDOCK 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 СКАЧАТЬ