"Nicole," he said with some desperation in his voice. She was being unusually forceful, and in all his time with Nic he hadn't seen that part of her. "This doesn't have anythin' to do with my ex jumpin' on the bandwagon here does it?" He wondered how worried she was about that. Hell, he worried how he felt about that. He hadn't seen Kate since his deathbed. Maybe when he'd been alone and a sucker for company he would have thought about her, but this wasn't the time. She was bound to let loose like a bag of cats in the alley.