Between Me & You: An Enemies to Lovers Workplace Romance (Remington Medical Book 3)

by Kimberly Kincaid

  “We won’t fail,” he promised, his pulse thrumming faster in his veins. “Caring for people, the way we did for Evie tonight? That’s what we’re here for, Harlow. We’ll find a way to right the budget at the clinic. We just have to keep working and have a little faith. Me and you.”

  “I don’t know if I can hope like that again,” she whispered, and even though he knew the emotion taking shape in his chest should terrify him, he felt too good, too right with Harlow in his arms, to care.

  So he replied with the truth.

  “I’m here to lighten that load, remember?” He slid her back to the spot beside him, pressing his palm over her sternum and willing her not just to hear his words, but to feel the pure, uncut emotion in them. “If you get scared, that’s okay. I’ve got your back. All you have to do is let me.”

  And as Harlow gave up a tiny nod, then let him hold her as she drifted off to sleep, Connor realized he was falling for the brash, beautiful woman he’d once thought was his enemy.

  25

  Connor watched his coffeepot work its magic and considered the fact that he just might be the luckiest bastard alive. Yeah, yesterday had been as tough as it had been long, and—more yep—he had a mountain of a problem in front of him at work, with the clinic’s budget on life support and no cure in sight. But he’d woken with Harlow snuggled in at his side, her shoulders lacking the tension that had knotted them so thoroughly the night before. Her body had been warm and lax against his, her breathing easy and sweet, and when she’d stirred, then pressed against him in invitation, Connor hadn’t thought twice. The sex had been unhurried, yet just as intense as always, and yeah. Yeah.

  He was going to need a stronger word than lucky.

  Pouring two cups of coffee and palming both, he made the short trip from his kitchen to the open area of his living space. There wasn’t much of the stuff—nurses got by, but he was by no means loaded. Still, the room was a hell of a lot prettier with Harlow in it, her hair in a loose twist at her nape and her face bearing the remnants of the great-sex flush he’d put there twenty minutes ago.

  “Hey. Here you go,” he said, passing over one of the cups of liquid good morning.

  “Mmmm, thank you.” She took a sip, but her attention didn’t sway from the bookshelf she was standing in front of. “You’ve got a lot of friends.”

  Okay, so the bookshelves did span the entire wall in his apartment, and he supposed they were lined with as many photographs as books. “Yeah. Some of these are classics. This was when we beat Saint Catherine’s in the softball tournament two years ago—very competitive, by the way, and they are sore-ass losers.”

  Connor pointed to the photo of him, Natalie, Jonah, and Mallory, all decked out in softball jerseys and gigantic grins.

  “I don’t suppose it helped that Mallory looks like he’s doing some sort of elaborate victory dance?” Harlow asked, and okay, Connor had to give her that one.

  “Fair enough.” He laughed. “And here’s last Halloween. Charlie and Parker dressed up as a bride and groom. Naturally.”

  Harlow’s mouth formed a perfect O before parting in a laugh that Connor felt every-fucking-where. “I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that you’re in full pirate regalia.”

  “Halloween isn’t a spectator sport, sweetheart. I take that shit seriously.”

  He tried to get his expression to match up, but he felt too good to make it fly. Fortunately, Harlow’s attention was still on the photos.

  “Oh, my God,” she breathed a second later, leaning in to peer more closely at a five-by-seven that was a little older than most of the others. “Is that…?”

  “The guy from the cover of the book you swiped off my desk?” Connor supplied. Damn, it suddenly felt like ages ago since he and Declan and the rest of their unit had grinned and said “cheese” for that picture. “Yeah. That’s my buddy, Declan. We were in the Air Force together.”

  “He looks so different here,” she said. Connor glanced at the photo more closely in assessment, and huh.

  “He’s got more ink now, I guess.”

  But Harlow shook her head. “Yeah, but so do you.” She sent a—hello—appreciative gaze over his arms before continuing. “And you look nearly the same here. Declan looks…I don’t know. Happier in this photograph than he does now.”

  Connor considered it. “Actually, that smile is kind of rare for him. He’s always been sort of reserved.” What was the word their unit-mate, Mikey’s, wife had always used to describe him? Ah, right. Broody. “The book covers aren’t the best barometer, though. The photos are all posed to fit the story. Not the guy himself.”

  “True,” Harlow said, giving the pictures one last look before turning toward him. “Anyway, these are nice. I don’t have any at my place.”

  He thought about all the real estate in her condo, so big it could easily swallow his apartment as an hors d’oeuvre. “How come?”

  “Well, for starters, I don’t have a group of friends like you do.”

  “Of course you do,” he argued. He’d seen her talking and laughing with Tess and Charlie just a few days ago, for Pete’s sake.

  She laughed, not unkindly. “Okay, well, I didn’t until very recently. And putting up photos of my family felt sad, I guess.”

  “Felt?”

  Harlow bit her lip, but didn’t try to dodge the topic. “I’ve missed my mom for a long time. But I don’t know.” She looked at the photos on his bookshelf again, her eyes lighting just slightly.

  Yet it was enough. “Maybe it’s time for me to try remembering the good, rather than blocking out everything in order to avoid the pain.”

  “That’s a really good place to start,” he said, brushing a kiss over her temple.

  Harlow leaned into the contact, which only made Connor want it that much more. “How come you don’t have any photos of your mother here?”

  Annnnd buzz kill. Not that he’d hide the truth from her just because it wasn’t pretty. He was far past going all cloak and dagger about his personal life, and he trusted Harlow.

  “My mom and I aren’t close. In, fact, we don’t really talk.”

  “Not at all?” she asked.

  Connor hated the way her brows had flown upward in shock, but not enough to keep him from saying, “No. When she and Duke got divorced, I chose to live with him.”

  “How old were you?” Harlow moved to the couch, lowering her coffee cup to a coaster on the table in front of it, and Connor sat down beside her.

  “Twelve.”

  Emotion flickered over her face. “That must have been a difficult decision.”

  Connor took his turn with those emotions. Namely, regret. “Sadly, it wasn’t. Duke is ruthless about everything. He didn’t have any qualms about manipulating me into thinking he was the better parent. The one who really got me, and loved me more.” What a fucking joke the whole thing had been. After all, in order to love, you needed to actually possess a heart. “But Duke wanted a protégé, and I was an easy mark. I was right there for the taking.”

  “Wait.” Harlow’s shoulder shushed against the couch as she pulled back to stare at him. “Your father played you against your own mother so you’d alienate her?”

  It was just one of the many things to hate the son of a bitch for, although, yeah, it was pretty close to the top of the list.

  Connor nodded. “I didn’t realize it until after he was indicted, but by then, they’d been divorced for seven years and she and I hadn’t spoken for six of them. My mom was remarried. Is, I guess,” he corrected. She and Stan had been together for, shit, fifteen years now? His gut panged at the thought, and all the lost time that accompanied it. “I get a card every Christmas.”

  “That’s it? You hear from her once a year in a card?” Harlow asked, a streak of...God, he didn’t even know what moving through her ice-blue stare. “You’re her son.”

  The fact that he’d come to terms with the truth ages ago didn’t make it sting any less now. Still… “The damage is done, thou
gh. Decades of it. She’s got a different life now, one that’s free of Duke and any reminder of the mistakes she made with him.” Connor missed her, true, but—“I don’t want to put her through any more pain.”

  “Have you considered that maybe it hurts her not to know you?”

  The question came softly, yet managed to knock Connor square on his ass anyway. “I…what?”

  Harlow said, “Look, there’s no question that Duke is a consummate ass. But he hurt both of you. The memory of that will probably always sting, but it doesn’t mean you two can’t find something good again.”

  “It doesn’t mean we can,” Connor countered once he’d found his voice again. “She was devastated when I chose Duke. I was”—his throat tightened—“pretty adamant on the stand.”

  Of course he had been. What Duke wanted, Duke got. He’d probably engineered the whole thing for maximum impact. He got his protégé, and he got to hurt his ex-wife in the cruelest way possible. She’d barely asked for anything else in the divorce, for Chrissake.

  “Wasn’t it you who just told me to have hope?” Harlow asked, setting him on his ass for the second time in as many minutes. “It’s a gamble, right? A scary one. But run a risk analysis assessment for a second.”

  A laugh slipped out of Connor, unbidden, but damn, it loosened his sudden unease. “Are you seriously treating this like a business move?”

  “Only because it’ll work.” She smiled, a brief, brilliant gesture that did things to him he couldn’t explain, yet fucking loved. “Go on. Weigh the risks with the potential consequences.”

  He did, because Lord knew she wasn’t letting go of the idea. “I guess there’s really only one risk. I could reach out, and she could want nothing to do with me.”

  “Or,” Harlow led gently, her hand finding his in the tiny sliver of space between them on the couch.

  “Or she could.”

  In the eighteen years that had passed, Connor had never considered the possibility. Sure, he’d felt regret—Jesus, he’d been crushed by the stuff after he’d realized how thoroughly Duke had manipulated him at that custody hearing. But he’d burned that bridge to the ground, nonetheless.

  Hadn’t he?

  “Look,” Harlow said. “Of all people, I know how risky hope is. I’m still getting my head around the thought of it, myself, and I’m sure it will take time for me to take leaps of faith. But here’s something else I know. I would give anything to have just one day with my mother. You have the chance for lots of days with yours. Don’t waste that, Connor. Believe that she’ll want you back in her life. At least, believe it enough to try.”

  But part of risk analysis was predicting the potential damages, and here, they weren’t small. “I could hurt her just by reaching out.”

  Rejection would smart, but he could handle that with time. Hurting his mother even more than he already had? Connor couldn’t do that to her.

  Ever the good businesswoman, Harlow replied, “Or you could both finally start to heal a wound that’s needed it for years.”

  “Maybe,” Connor had to admit. But it was too big a decision to make impulsively, with too much on the line, so he added, “I’ll think about it.”

  Harlow squeezed his hand, her quiet support making him fall for her just a little bit harder. “I hope you do.”

  Harlow knew that the feeling in her chest was crazy. It was illogical and wild and totally unzipped. But it was also bright and sweet and ohhhhh-so-good, and Connor had one hundred percent put it there. He didn’t just make her laugh and turn her on. He listened to her and had her back. He made her feel. And even though the analytical part of her knew the intensity of those feelings should scare her, when she was with Connor, she was far from scared.

  Instead, she was in serious danger of falling in love with him. Yet somehow, it didn’t feel dangerous at all. It felt right.

  Welcome back, crazy.

  Pressing her (huge) smile between her lips, Harlow brought herself back to the here-and-now of the office in the clinic. True, she and Connor had tackled a lot of tasks over the past four days, and true again, she felt less stress over righting the clinic than she had last week. Not that the budgets had magically balanced—God, that still seemed about as attainable as moving Mount Everest with a shoulder shove. But ever since she’d unloaded her feelings to Connor in the safety of his shadowy bedroom, the weight of the job had begun to ease from her shoulders, paving the way for her mind to clear and her resolve to re-root itself in firmer ground.

  They’d work hard and fix the clinic. There was a solution out there to repair the damage to the budgets so they could care for people like Evie. People who needed them.

  Harlow just had to uncover it.

  She would uncover it.

  Pushing up the sleeves of her white button-down blouse, she turned back to her laptop, but the move was interrupted by an electronic ringtone, followed by a smiling icon of Macie’s face in the bottom corner. A little weird, since Connor was on the clinic floor, presumably working with the staff, but then again, mid-morning was one of their busiest times. He was probably in an exam room.

  Harlow clicked the button to accept the voice-only call. “Hey, Macie. Everything okay up there at the desk?”

  “Yep! I’ve got someone here to see you. An Evie Connoly? She says she doesn’t have an appointment, but…”

  Harlow’s heart careened into her breastbone. Although she’d spoken to the director of the shelter, Lara, twice about Evie’s transition and well-being, she’d refrained from reaching out to Evie herself. Lara had assured Harlow that Evie had her contact information (“Yes,” she’d said with a smile in her voice. “Even your cell phone number.”), but Harlow had wanted to give the girl space to let her get settled. But if her boyfriend was bothering her, or, oh God, worse yet, if she was hurt—

  “No, no. I don’t care that she doesn’t have an appointment. I’ll be right there.”

  Jamming her feet into the heels she’d—damn it, damn it, damn it!—slipped out of as she’d spent her morning parked at her desk, Harlow chucked decorum and sprinted down the hall, headed toward the clinic floor. She slowed to a fast-walk when she got to the open curtain areas so as not to alarm or crash into anyone, finishing the hustle to the front desk in what felt like a fucking eternity.

  “Evie?” she asked, the death-grip her concern had on her chest easing only slightly at the sight of the young woman, seemingly unscathed and standing safely at the front desk. “Is everything okay?” She scanned her carefully, just to be sure she hadn’t missed something. “You’re not hurt, are you?”

  Evie blinked. “What? Oh, no, I’m…” Her blink became an eye-roll. “Ugh, I’m so stupid. I knew I should have called. I’m fine. That’s what I came to tell you.”

  And that was when Harlow registered Evie’s simple, dark green dress and the tights and boots she’d paired it with, her neatly combed hair, and—best of all—her smile.

  “Oh.” Harlow’s breath whooshed out, pure relief. “You had me worried for a second, there,” she admitted, finally able to smile, herself. Wow, the difference in Evie’s appearance was huge, even though the cast that Sofia and Tess had put in place was still peeking out from the sleeve of her dress. “Why don’t you come back to the office? Do you want a cup of coffee?”

  Evie nodded shyly. “I’d really like that, yes.”

  Harlow used her badge to get them past the front desk, then the triage area. They were halfway across the main floor when Connor came out of a curtain area, pushing a wheelchair bearing a young, tear-stained boy in an air cast.

  “I know your ankle hurts, and it’s a bummer not to be able to run around and play kickball for a whole month, but…Evie!”

  His compassion turned to concern in an instant, and he turned toward the boy’s mom. “I’m sorry. Could you give me just one second?”

  “It’s okay,” Evie said, and Harlow made sure to catch his eye and nod in confirmation. We have her, remember? Harlow said with her stare. Sh
e’s safe. “I know you’re busy, and I don’t want to mess that up,” Evie continued. “I just wanted to come back to let you know I’m, um. Healing and everything.”

  “Oh.” Connor’s green-gray stare moved from Evie’s to Harlow’s one more time before completing the trip back to its starting point, full of relief. “I’m really glad to hear that. You look great.”

  “Thanks.” Evie turned to the little boy and held up her cast. “I know it hurts now, but I bet you’ll feel better really soon. See?” She turned her arm around with ease, even wiggling her fingers a little for show. “It’s not so bad.”

  “Really?” The little boy looked skeptical, but Evie nodded.

  “Promise. And they really know how to take care of people here.” Her lips pressed together as Harlow’s heart twisted. “Connor and Harlow are the best.”

  Connor smiled and gave Evie a warm goodbye, then gave Harlow a brief, private smile that she felt all the way to her stilettos before leading the little boy and his mother to the front desk. Harlow paused at the small staff room that doubled as a kitchen, grabbing two cardboard cups of coffee and handing one over before leading the way to the office, sitting down in one of the guest chairs while ushering Evie into the other, right beside her.

  “I’m sorry for barging in on you,” Evie said, glancing at the hurricane on Harlow’s desk in front of them. “I know you and Connor have a lot of other people to take care of.”

  Harlow shook her head. “Don’t be silly. I’m happy to see you. Connor’s right, you look great.”

  “I don’t know about great, but I do feel much better,” Evie said. “Lara got me set up in a new apartment as a fresh start, and I had a job interview this morning. My ex is still in jail because he couldn’t make bail. The judge set it pretty high. That lawyer lady, Ms. Kingston? She’s no joke.”

  Judging by what Addison and Isabella had said, Harlow had already guessed not. “Good. I’m sure that eases your mind.”

  “She said we can offer a deal. Then I wouldn’t have to wait for a trial or take the stand. He’d do less time, though.” Evie picked at a thread on her dress. “With the statements all of you made, the case is really solid, and I think she wants to prosecute, but…I don’t know. I just want to start putting all of it behind me.”