“My advice?” Connor asked, certain he’d misheard her.
But she nodded. “That day, when Marta went into labor in the clinic, you told me that sometimes, we need to think outside the box when we treat people. The clinic is important. Yes, it’s a business, and in some ways, it needs to be treated as such. It needs money and budgets and smart, strategic plans. But it’s also more than that, and it was worth saving.” She looked at her father, smiling briefly before returning her gaze to his. “It’s my mother’s legacy, just like I am. So, I saved it.”
Connor’s breath tightened in his lungs at how strong she was, so breathtaking and beautiful and brave. “Okay, but how? I mean, the amount we needed was—”
“Insane? Yes, I’m aware,” she said, nodding at her father.
“Harlow sold all of her stock in Davenport Industries. With the help of a very shrewd financial advisor, she liquidated all of her other assets, and she received a substantial severance package from Davenport Industries that gave her just enough money to make a gift sizable enough to reopen the clinic. Immediately.”
“I still don’t think this is aboveboard,” Joanne finally put in, but Davenport shut her up with a steely stare, and Langston punctuated the set-down with one of his own.
“I can assure you that it is,” he said. “And since the gift was rather gracious, you might want to try thanking Ms. Davenport.”
Joanne mumbled a thank you as something Harlow’s father said finally made it into Connor’s brain. “Wait.” He stared at the man. “You said severance. You fired her?”
“I did,” Davenport said. “At her request, of course.”
“My position at Davenport Industries required me to be a shareholder,” Harlow explained. “I figured if I was going to liquidate everything anyway…”
She trailed off on a shrug, and the gravity of what she’d done sank all the way in. “You let go of the thing that meant the most to you in order to save the clinic?”
“I believe we’ve come to the part of the meeting that would best be held privately,” Harlow’s father said, smoothing a hand over his tie. “Harlow, we can settle up any loose ends later this afternoon.”
“Thank you,” she said, nodding equal thanks to Dr. Langston, who also got up from the table, with a still-scowling Joanne in tow. Before he got too far from the table, Harlow’s father turned back, leaning in toward Connor and dropping his voice.
“You’ve got your chance to talk to her. Do yourself a favor and make sure you get it right.”
“Yes, sir,” Connor murmured.
As soon as the door closed behind him, Harlow raised a brow. “Do I even want to know what that was about?”
“Probably not,” Connor said. “I can’t believe you did this. I mean, your job, business…it’s everything to you.”
“It was,” Harlow said, her expression growing wistful. “But the clinic is more important. On that note, I did have one more stipulation for my gift.”
“And that was?”
“You get the director’s position. You earned it, Connor. You know how to run that clinic, and you’ll offer care exactly the way my mother would’ve wanted. With compassion.” Tears filled her eyes, but rather than try to hide them the way she once might have, Harlow kept talking. “Please tell me you’ll take the job.”
“No.”
Ah, that got her. “No?”
“I have a condition,” Connor said. “I’ll only take the job if we split the director’s position permanently. I’m in charge of operations, and you’re in charge of the business side. Otherwise, my answer is no.”
Harlow blinked. “Are you negotiating with me?”
“You didn’t expect me not to, did you?” He stood, moving toward her until he’d reached her chair, but instead of pulling her up so they could go toe to toe, he knelt down, taking both of her hands. “Harlow, I said some terrible things to you, and I know I hurt you. A lot.” The reminder sent a brand-new wave of pain through him. “I was upset, and I was angry, but that’s a flimsy excuse. I was wrong, and I’m so, so sorry.”
“I got that from your messages,” she said, a smile slipping out. “And your gifts. I just didn’t return your calls because I had to be sure all of this would work out. I knew that if I talked to you, I wouldn’t be able to not say anything. I’m sorry if you thought I was still mad.”
Connor shook his head. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I know you went to the board so I wouldn’t have to.”
“Are you really going to turn this job down if I don’t co-direct with you?”
“I really am,” he told her. “We’re a team. Me and you.” He reached up to place a hand over her heart, then pressed the other one to his own, just as he had that first night they’d spent together. “I love you, Harlow. I don’t want to do this job or live this life without you. I want you with me every step of the way.”
“You do?” More tears spilled over her cheeks, and Connor lifted the hand he’d flattened over his chest to thumb them away.
“Who else is going to boss me around and make me write business plans?”
She laughed, turning her cheek into the curve of his palm. “You bring up a fair point, and it just so happens, I am currently unemployed. Also, I’m madly, deeply, wildly in love with you. So, there’s that to consider, too.”
Connor grinned, and now he did sweep her up and off her feet, wrapping his arms around her to pull her close. “I think this calls for a celebration, don’t you?”
“Absolutely.”
As it turned out, business and pleasure were the perfect mix.
Epilogue
Four months later
Tess Michaelson had been yelled at, bled all over, and thrown up on, and it wasn’t even lunchtime yet. But that little trifecta was like amateur night when it came to being an emergency attending physician, and anyway, the yeller/bleeder had been a twofer with a ten-inch piece of rebar stuck through his hand, and the captain of the vomit comet had been unblessed with a nasty strain of the stomach flu. Legit reasons if ever there were any to go all volume-up, body fluids-out.
And Tess was there to cobble them back together no matter what. She might not be able to fix her own shit, but she could Humpty-Dumpty other people like a fucking boss.
It was, as it turned out, her only superpower.
“Hey, Dr. M!” Connor sidled up to the spot where she stood at the nurse’s station, which should’ve been a physical impossibility, considering that he was basically a (really muscular) house with legs, but of course, the big oaf not only sidled, but did it well. Tess would’ve looked like a grade-A idiot moving her hips like that.
Honestly, Tess. Don’t you think you’re too…I don’t know. Old for that sort of thing now?
“You have that look on your face,” she said, chucking the memory—and the chagrin it had sent through her chest—aside. “You know, the one you give up when you want something, but you know I’m probably going to say no. Don’t try to get on my sweet side. I’m sure you’re well aware I don’t have one. So, spill, Ginormica. What is it that you’re here to wheedle me into?”
Rather than going the contrition route like most folks with a pulse would have, Connor threw back his head and laughed. “See, this is why I miss it here enough to pick up a shift on my day off. You don’t beat around the bush.”
“Good Lord, no.” Damn it, her eye-roll was so much less effective when her smile decided to hone in on the action. Happy little bastard. “I don’t see much purpose in not getting to the point.”
Well, most of the time, anyway. She had hung on to her dumpster fire of a marriage far longer than she should’ve, even though she’d known things between her and Alec couldn’t be fixed far before she’d told him she’d wanted a divorce.
Guess everyone was allowed to wear idiot pants at least once. At least now she knew better than to believe in all that happily ever after crap.
Wasn’t she too old for that, anyway?
“I’ll go ahead and rip the Ba
nd-Aid off, then.” Connor’s grin deposited Tess back to terra firma in the ED, and she vowed to stay there as he said, “Dispatch just got a call from Ambo Twenty-Two. They’re bringing in a guy who’s all hopped up on God knows what.”
“Can you give me the bullet?”
“He’s breathing and was stabilized in the field. GCS 10.”
Now her smile came out to play in full force. “That sounds like an intern’s problem.”
On a scale of one to coding, a high-in-the-sky patient with decent vitals hardly required her attention. She was already on her second pair of scrubs today. Plus, she’d be nearby if the guy started to tank. “Young is on my service today. See if she can—”
“Can’t,” Connor corrected, holding up his hands in surrender as she pinned him with her Sunday-best glare. “Dude decided to take on a window in an effort to fly. He only fell four feet,” Connor added quickly. “It was a first-floor window. But it was closed at the time, and Slater said between whatever the guy took, the possibility for a head injury, and the unbelievable amount of lacs the dude sustained…”
“Right.” This one did call for her expertise. The big man wasn’t wrong. Still… “You’re helping me out, though.” Sighing, Tess, adjusted her ponytail and turned toward the ambulance bay. “This guy gets squirrely, and I’m going to need it. Let’s grab Young, too.”
“Copy that.”
Five minutes later, Tess and Connor and Erika Young stood gloved and gowned in the ambulance bay. Sunlight streamed down, filling the space with warm, pretty light that Tess hadn’t enjoyed in far too long. But between her not nine-to-five shifts in the ED and her adorable but totally teething nine month-old, she was lucky she knew that it was June, and that she’d remembered to put on pants this morning.
She turned toward Connor, who had saved her bacon before the sun had fully risen, and she had to smile. “Hey, thanks again for filling in today.”
Last night, a group of the ED nurses had gone out for sushi. Only one of the seven hadn’t gotten violently ill, and Tess had been scrambling hard to fill today’s shifts.
“All, it’s all good. I like when you owe me favors for a change.”
Tess lifted one corner of her mouth, allowing her tart smile half of an escape. “I did help train your staff when you first took over at the clinic,” she agreed. “But you paid me back, remember?”
“Of course I remember.” Connor arched an auburn brow. “I sang that Baby Shark song until I was practically purple.”
“Hey, you offered to babysit and send me for a pedicure. No single mother in her right mind turns that shit down.”
Young tried to suppress a laugh, but failed. “I don’t have kids, but my sister does, and that sounds pretty accurate.”
“Oh, I’m not complaining,” Connor said, lifting one massive shoulder in an easy shrug that highlighted his words as the truth. “The song is kinda catchy, and Jackson’s pretty cute. For someone who wears diapers and drools.”
Warmth took a head-to-toe trip through Tess, and not just at the thought of her son. Her friends at Remington Mem were her only family, other than Jackson. Most of that was choice—her idiot ex lived across town, and her mother and sister were in Greenville, which was a two-hour hop-skip by car. But she hadn’t seen much of any of them since Jackson had been born, because that choice thing? Was real, and Tess had made it with her and her son’s best interests front and center.
Her friends and her kid were all she needed. Judgy, holier-than-thou asshats who did nothing but make her feel small need not apply.
Connor slung his tree trunk of an arm around Tess’s shoulders, his unyielding camaraderie turning her choice into a no-brainer. “Plus, taking care of people here in the ED is just like old times, and Harlow’s got things under control at the clinic. She knows where to find me if something weird goes down.”
The big, goofy grin shaping his face at the mention of his live-in girlfriend sent a pang of something unidentifiable through Tess’s belly. She liked Harlow a lot—the woman was tack-sharp and took neither prisoners nor crap from anyone, plus she made Connor happier than Tess had ever seen the guy—and with his laid-back demeanor, that was really saying something. But all of her close friends had paired off. Hell, her best friend had just (re)married the guy of her dreams. In a move that had surprised exactly no one, Jonah had proposed to Natalie last month as she’d entered the maintenance part of her chemo. Connor and Harlow were shacking up. Even the goo-goo eyes Young and her fellow intern, Boldin, had been making at each other a few months now had grown more serious than short-lived.
Tess was happy for her friends, and not in that shitty, always-a-bridesmaid sort of way. If anyone deserved love and to be loved, it was Charlie, Parker, Nat, Jonah, Connor, and Harlow. For her, love was just going to come from a different place, in a different form. Because that whole soulmate/no-you’re-the-schmoopie thing wasn’t going to happen. Ever.
That’s why God invented vibrators.
“Ah, here we go,” Tess said, gesturing to the rig trundling into the ambulance bay before any heat could reach her face over the thought. Quinn Copeland jumped out of the driver’s side (annnnd cue up another person who was getting hitched), the ambulance’s back door swinging open courtesy of Connor’s grab-and-pull, and Tess thanked her lucky fucking stars she’d elbowed her way into a trauma gown, because even from ten feet away, she could tell her new patient was a hot mess.
Luke Slater unlocked the head of the gurney as Young unlocked the foot, with Connor on the assist to guide the thing out of the ambo. “Adult male, conscious but altered, possible head and neck injuries from a four-foot fall, no obvious skull or spinal deformities. Obvious multiple lacerations—”
“Understatement of the year,” Tess muttered. None of the wounds appeared particularly deep at first glance, but damn. There were a ton. Debriding all of them was going to take a month.
“GCS 10 in the field.” Slater finished with the guy’s vitals—holy heartrate, Batman—and yeah, there was no chance this guy wasn’t somehow chemically polluted.
“Hi, Mr…” Shit. She split a glance between Slater and Copeland. “Do we have a name?”
Copeland smiled. “According to him? Captain James T. Kirk.”
“Awesome.” This from Connor. Naturally. But Tess had seen worse, so she simply shrugged and did a closer once-over of the guy.
“Hi, Mr. Kirk. My name is Dr. Michaelson, and I’m here to help you.” To her surprise, the guy tracked a glassy, wide-pupiled look in her direction. At least, with his eyes. His neck had been completely stabilized by a C-collar and the rest of him strapped to the backboard on the gurney. “Can you tell me if you feel any pain?”
“No, no, no,” Kirk said, his grin all teeth as he sent it to the sky. “No pain, sweetheart. That’s the idea! No pain! I just wanna fllllllyyyyyyyyy…”
He dissolved into a fit of giggles. Man, Tess did not want to be around when he crash-landed back to reality. “Do you know where you are?”
“Heaven,” Kirk crooned. “I’m in heavennnnn, and my hearts beats so that I can hardly speeeeeeeak…”
Right. “Okay.” Tess looked at Connor and Young. “We’re headed to Trauma Two.”
The trip was quick and thankfully uneventful. They went through the motions of transferring the Captain to the gurney in the trauma room so Quinn and Luke could reclaim their gear and hit the road, then Tess got down to the business of a rapid trauma assessment. Her patient was in bad shape, but not life-threateningly so, just as long as the head and neck films she’d just asked Connor to shoot came back clean.
“Looks like other than these lacs and some nasty contusions, there aren’t any serious injuries,” Tess said, looking at Young. “So, where do we go from here?”
“I’d order a CBC and BMP. And a tox screen, obviously,” she replied, but Tess shook her head.
“Nothing’s obvious in emergency medicine, ever. Tell Connor what you want ordered. He’s good, but he’s not clairvoyant.”
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“Right.” Young, who might’ve been intimidated by Tess’s response a few months ago, turned to look at Connor. “Let’s run a CBC and BMP, along with a full tox screen. In the meantime, start a line and run some saline, and get as many suture kits in here as possible, please.”
Tess translated her attagirl into a smile. “There you go.”
She took the films Connor handed over, popping the first one onto the backlit screen on the far wall. “Ahhhh, it seems you’re a lucky man, Mr. Kirk. You don’t have any major injuries to you head or neck.”
“I’m invincible!” he called out, turning to look at Tess as she carefully removed the C-collar from around his neck. “Are you an angel? Oh, shhhh! I am in heaven! Don’t tell the others.”
Tess slid a glance at Connor. “Can we get a rush on that tox screen?” To Kirk, she said, “I’m afraid this isn’t heaven, sir. But you’re in good hands.”
“Okay. Will you marry me?”
She barked out a laugh that matched Connor’s. “Sorry, no can do, Mr. Kirk.”
“I see,” the man said, nodding gravely. “It’s because they’re listening, right?”
For some reason Tess couldn’t quite explain, she replied with the truth. “Nope. I’m just not the marrying sort. We’ll get you fixed up in no time, though, okay? Don’t you worry.”
She went through the final steps of sending the labs upstairs and having Young start in on the poor guy’s sutures. The memory of the sunlight on her face, the fact that it had taken her this long to realize how long it had been since she’d felt it, popped back into her head. Tearing off her trauma gown and disengaging from her gloves, she washed her hands and headed out to the ambulance bay on a what-the-hell. It really was nice outside, the kind of day that wasn’t hot enough to scorch your Pop-Tart, yet was still sunny enough to warm a girl right up.
No one else was around, having probably opted for more scenic spots, like the courtyard in the middle of the hospital grounds or the outdoor eating area by the coffee cart. Tess didn’t mind, though. The solitude gave her a chance to lean back against the brick wall at the mouth of the alcove and let her eyes drift shut.
Between Me & You: An Enemies to Lovers Workplace Romance (Remington Medical Book 3) Page 30
