Close Up

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.”