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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.