by Cara McKenna
He urged her to turn over, then draped his arm around her waist and buried his face in her hair. “Stay the night,” he murmured. “Here. With me. And tomorrow. And the night after.”
“I will. I’ll stay with you.” Maybe someday, I’ll come and stay forever.
He held her tight, lips grazing the nape of her neck as he spoke. “I can’t wait to meet you all over again, Merry. And to let you meet me.”
She smiled and shut her eyes, wrapped her arm around his.
“And I’m so excited to make your acquaintance, Rob Rush.”
Keep reading for an excerpt from Cara McKenna’s “sweet, smoking hot”* erotic romance
AFTER HOURS
Available now from InterMix
*Beth Kery, New York Times bestselling author of Because You Are Mine
The second half of my shift proved quiet, borderline boring. Having Kelly as a distraction wouldn’t have gone astray.
As a psych professional you have to pay attention constantly, not just for signs of danger, but while taking a zillion sets of vitals, in making notes in the right files, doling out the right meds in the right dosages at the right times, making sure the right patient actually swallows them . . . Nothing dynamic, but I swear the sheer constancy with which you have to be alert is as tiring as any physical chore. By the time dinner hour was over and we met with the next shift for the hand-off meeting, I felt like I must be dreaming. I staggered down the stairwell on aching feet.
I wiped my name off the duties board and ran into Jenny while I was changing.
“Got plans tonight?” she asked, dialing her combination lock.
“No, none at all. Just finish unpacking and pass out.”
“You’re more than welcome to come along to a little party across the road. Retirement bash for one of the veteran RNs in our geriatric ward. Free eats. You know where the transitional residence is?”
“Yeah.” I stripped off my scrubs, not feeling compelled to tell her I was in fact living there for the time being.
“You should come. Get off campus, enjoy a drink. I’ll introduce you around to some people from the other departments.”
I wouldn’t have minded meeting the geriatric staff. I had experience with that, after all, and wouldn’t say no if a chance to transfer out of the locked ward should present itself.
“Starts at seven thirty,” Jenny said. “Bring your staff ID—they’ll be rigid, what with alcohol being served.”
“Okay. Sure.” Why the hell not? It was my birthday. There’d be drinks, maybe a cake, and even if they weren’t in my honor, it’d be nice to do something special. Restraint training had been the highlight of my day, and that wouldn’t do. Exhausted or not, I deserved a bit more. I could top getting tossed around and banged up by Kelly Robak. Then I pictured his body, and wondered if maybe I couldn’t.
With twenty minutes to kill, I strolled through campus and crossed the road, headed up to my little apartment and changed into the only dress I owned. Nothing glamorous, but it gave me a bit of a figure, and that was a luxury after two days in nothing but yellow pajamas. As I clasped a pair of earrings, I hoped there’d be wine. Against my better judgment, I hoped there’d be Kelly as well. But he didn’t seem the type to carouse while still basically on the institute’s grounds, nor one to cut loose in front of colleagues and ruin his stoical façade. Though he’d allowed me a glimpse of his after-hours self, at the bar. And surely I wasn’t so special that it’d been some one-time peek.
On the first floor, a series of construction-paper signs pointed the way to the party, in the large basement rec room—the unglamorous venue surely picked for its proximity to work, and because alcohol wasn’t allowed anywhere inside Larkhaven’s gates. I didn’t recognize anyone when I arrived, but I was pleased to spot a motley selection of beer and wine lined up on a ping-pong table; crackers, cheese, veggies and dip, and an uncut cake on the other side of the net.
What I wasn’t so pleased to see was a room full of scrubs. I wasn’t the only one who’d changed, but the majority of the partygoers seemed to have come straight from a shift. Instantly I felt dumb and overdressed, some newbie weirdo in a wrap dress and heels—no matter how short they were—surrounded by sneakers and clogs. The folks who weren’t dressed for work wore jeans.
“You came!”
I turned to find Jenny behind me, holding a gift bag bursting with pink tissue paper.
“Oh, hey.”
“You look great. Trying to put the rest of us to shame?”
I tailed her across the room to a table laden with flowers and presents. I eyed them with envy. It was my birthday, after all. Standing there with no one to realize that fact, I felt lonely, deep down to my bones.
But it wasn’t as though I were used to my birthday being special. My grandma hadn’t been in a state to remember it in recent years, and I considered it a banner year if my mom thought to call. Amber had offered to have me over for pizza and cupcakes, but since I got off work so late and my nephew would already be asleep, I’d asked for a rain check.
I followed Jenny’s lead and poured myself a cup of wine. She introduced me around, largely to staffers my own age. I smiled a lot and forgot everyone’s names, wondering if they’d remember mine or just think of me as That New Girl Who Didn’t Get the Dress Code Memo.
Shyness had me drifting out of conversational orbits twenty minutes into the party, and I was about to up my wine dosage when someone set an empty cup beside mine. I knew it was Kelly from his oversized hand and its misleading wedding band, and my heart thumped as I tilted my face toward his. In an instant, I was drunk.
“You look awful fancy.”
A blush warmed my cheeks and I tried to hide it by filling my cup. “I know.”
“Special occasion?”
I shrugged, looking around to indicate the party. It’s my birthday, I wanted to tell him. Make a big deal of me.
“You promised me a glass of wine this morning in restraints,” he said.
“True. Though I don’t see any funnels.” I filled his cup. He tapped it to mine and gave my body an open, brief up-and-down, at once businesslike and predatory. I took too big a gulp and felt my face burn brighter still.
Kelly had changed, but only into jeans. “How you feeling, after this morning’s workout?”
I flexed my left shoulder and it swore in protest. “Pretty dinged up. Can’t say I’ll be sad when your days of throwing me around are over.”
He faked a jab to his ego and gave me a wounded look, but there was mischief in his eyes. He hadn’t missed the double entendre I’d accidentally lobbed his way. “Be grateful there were gym mats.”
“And witnesses,” I cut back, and yeah, it sounded pretty bad—like we were agreeing things would’ve evolved into something scandalous, had the setting been different. Damn it.
“And Audra, barking corrections,” Kelly added.
“Yeah. That’d be a mood killer.” Oh fuck, why had I said that? His resulting smile was as dangerous as ever, a shot of pure, liquid stupid plunged straight into my bloodstream.
He answered my flirtation with another assessing look. It wasn’t terribly professional, but I was grateful for that. I’d spent my first two shifts feeling like a newbie, a jailer, a waitress, and a wuss. Felt good to feel like a plain old woman, something enticing enough to bring a little heat to Kelly’s cool gaze. The wine suddenly tasted very expensive, and I decided it was everyone else’s loss, not taking the opportunity to dress up a bit, not my folly.
A small group of people came by and we made room for them to get drinks. I wandered toward the middle of the party with Kelly, praying no one could see the comical lust lines vibrating from my body toward his.
He’d worked at Larkhaven for years so he knew everyone, and as long as I stuck by him, I was never at a loss for conversation. It see
med perhaps he did shed that cold façade alongside his gray uniform, and tonight he was as warm as I’d yet seen him. He introduced me and goaded our colleagues into recounting old war stories—funny ones, not scary ones. I was even invited to join Larkhaven’s softball team, though judging by the way my coworkers put away the boxed wine, recreational drinking was the institution’s official sport.
After an hour’s mingling I felt relaxed, even a little charming. I also felt dangerously attracted to the man on my left. But I wouldn’t ever act on it, so what was the harm? It’d been more than a year since I’d made out with a guy or had a date or even a crush, and I’d forgotten how fun infatuation was. Like being continuously buzzed on champagne. You just have to know when you’ve had enough.
By ten I was yawning uncontrollably, and as nice as it was to feel cheerful for the first time since arriving here, it couldn’t top the promise of bed. I got to sleep in a bit the next morning before restraints, and I could use all catch-up rest I had coming to me.
“You want a refill?” Kelly asked me, nodding at my empty cup.
“No, I better get to bed. It’s been a long couple days.” Walk me up, I wanted to say. Walk me to my door, and give me a look that said he wanted to kiss me, but not actually do it. Send me to bed with no thoughts of attacks or paperwork or antipsychotic dosages.
But he didn’t. He drained his own cup and took mine, tossing both in a nearby garbage can. “You’re taking all the glamour away.” He said it like I ought to feel guilty, and gave me a final assessing glance.
“You’ll cope.” I smiled wearily and offered a wave before heading for the stairs. I wanted so badly to turn, to see if he was watching me go. But if he wasn’t, I’d be disappointed. And if he was, he’d know I cared.
Upstairs, I changed into pajama pants and a tee shirt and checked a voicemail from my sister—no crisis brewing thank God, just “Happy Birthday” sung into the phone, with Jack shrieking gleefully in the background. I hung up, smiling.
A knock at my door interrupted my search for a washcloth. Nervous, I peered through the peephole.
Kelly, of all people.
Every ounce of my hard-earned self-possession vanished in a breath.
I swung the door in. “Um, hello.”
He took up the entire threshold, and he was holding a vase of white lilies.
Fucking hell, he was here to woo me. And I would go so, so easily.
I wished I hadn’t just gone from heels and a dress to bare feet and an oversized Red Wings tee shirt.
“Happy birthday.” He held out the flowers and I accepted them.
“How did you know that?”
“Saw it on the roster this morning—the participants list for the restraints course.” His chameleon eyes looked blue again, the pale robin’s egg shade of my walls.
“Oh. Well, thanks.” He was being so uncharacteristically sweet, I offered a dopey smile and admitted, “I wish you’d said something earlier. I was feeling sorry for myself all day, thinking no one knew.”
“That’s a shame. Want me to sing to you?” This was a strange hybrid version of Kelly, a mix of the cool, civil man I passed on the ward, and the more mischievous one who’d proclaimed himself a controlling hothead in the neon intimacy of the bar.
“That’s all right.” I put the flowers on my dresser, disreputable bits of me still clinging to the hope that he was here to seduce me. Getting trounced by a gigantic orderly seemed a great way to kick off my twenty-ninth year. Except for . . . well, he was my coworker, for one. And nearly a stranger, and a bit of a chauvinist. But only a bit, my pussy pointed out. And he brought me flowers. Valid points.
I cleared my throat and nodded to the vase. “They’re lovely, thanks.”
“They’re secondhand. I nabbed them from the party.”
Aaannnd . . . seduction ruined. “You stole someone’s going-away flowers?”
“With permission. She had plenty more where those came from.”
Okay, so he hadn’t driven into town and back to get me a gift, but what in the fuck did I expect? Who did I think this guy was to me?
“It’s the thought that counts,” he pointed out.
“You’re right.” I wandered to my bed and took a seat, weariness redoubled. Kelly must have sensed it, as he said, “Excited to spend your first morning off practicing choke holds?”
“Oh yes, thrilled. Though I’d rather do it with you than a patient.”
He crossed his arms and leaned against the door frame.
“You can come in, if you want.” I pointed to a chair that didn’t match its desk, all the furniture secondhand, castoffs like my flowers. Like every stitch of clothing I’d owned growing up, even the shirt I wore now, inherited from some ex-boyfriend whose face I could barely conjure.
Kelly’s gaze flicked around the room, but after a pause he shut the door behind him and pulled out the chair. My room was small to begin with, but stick Kelly Robak in the middle and it seemed all at once tight and hot. My womanhood suddenly felt much the same.
I cleared my throat.
“Seems like you’re finding your feet,” he said. I thought I could smell him, behind the lilies, but it was probably a delusion.
“I’m starting to get the routine. I know where stuff is, know some people’s names. Thanks, for letting me tail you at the party. It’s the least square-peggish I’ve felt so far. Overdressed or not.”
His eyes darted around again, and not in a sexy, Which wall shall I nail her to? kind of way.
“Is my room creeping you out?”
“Nah, not quite. It’s just weird. It’s so much like one of the rooms from the locked ward, but a different color and without the bars, and with like, stuff on the walls. I keep thinking, ‘slashing hazard,’” he pointed to a framed photograph that’d been there when I moved in. “Suicide risk.” He nodded to a belt of mine, draped around a bedpost, then to a bottle of perfume on my dresser. “Accelerant. Search the room for matches.”
I smirked. “You haven’t clocked out yet.”
“After four years, I never really do. Not ’til I’m through those gates and halfway to Darren.”
What a grim thought. Happy frigging birthday.
Kelly stood and strolled around my cell, taking stock of what little there was to note. He stopped before my bed, staring out my window with his hands clasped behind his back. “Nice view,” he said, gaze on the dark woods.
“Even better when the sun’s out,” I said dryly.
He looked down at me and smiled—the first real smile I’d seen from him all day, even during the party. It heated me just as it had at the bar, filled me with bad ideas.
“What?”
He took a seat beside me, dipping the mattress. “We got a little something between us, don’t we?”
Caught off guard, I deflected. “How little?”
Another smile, a deeper one with a flash of teeth. “Cute. But I’m not imagining it, am I? There’s something here,” he said, wiggling his fingers between our chests. He stared pointedly at the Red Wings logo on my shirt. “Plus you clearly dressed to seduce me.”
“If you say so.”
He winced like I’d just tried to knee him in the balls. “Okay, we can be like that.”
Behind whatever blank expression I’d managed to slap on my face, my common sense and my libido were rolling around, pulling each other’s hair, slapping and spitting and fighting to come out on top. Or to come out underneath Kelly Robak, in the case of my libido. Luckily it ended in a draw.
“No, there might be something,” I admitted. “But not the kind of something I want to do anything about with a colleague. Not my first week at a new job.” My pussy had added the caveat, opportunist that it was.
Kelly’s expression went cool, more calm acceptance than bruised ego, I ho
ped. He nodded. “Understood.”
And with that, what could have been quite a memorable twenty-eighth birthday present rose and headed for the exit, bouncing the mattress beneath my butt.
“Enjoy your flowers.”
I followed, frowning. “Wait. Did you really come here thinking you’d get laid? Off some stolen lilies and thirty seconds’ smooth-talking?”
Another smile. “Haven’t known you long enough to have expectations. Maybe I’ll try back again with roses sometime. I’ll be sure to bring a receipt.”
“Oh, fuck you,” I said through a laugh. The fucking nerve. But I was only half-insulted, the rest a mixture of flattered and amused.
He opened the door and I held it. With the possibility of witnesses strolling past in the hall, we both shrugged into semblances of friendly professionalism.
“Happy birthday.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
He gripped the door frame and leaned in real, real close, close enough to kiss. But his lips offered nothing but a smarmy-ass grin. “This is your room, so I’m letting you get your way—”
“Letting me?”
“Come by my place some weekend and maybe I’ll show you mine.”
“Your way doesn’t sound like it takes no for an answer.”
“You’re welcome to find out.”
“Good night, Kelly.”
He straightened. “See you beneath me on the gym floor tomorrow.”
Eyes narrowed, I watched him disappear around the corner, listening until the sound of his boots clomping down the steps faded to the thrum of my thumping pulse.
I shut the door, opening and closing my fists to quell a faint shaking.
He’d just said all that, hadn’t he? Not those cocky parting quips—that there was something between us. Something he wasn’t opposed to acting on.
Was I opposed? Yes. Definitely. Probably.
I didn’t know. I wasn’t even sure what Larkhaven’s policy was, on office romance or whatever. Ward romance. Not that Kelly Robak seemed the type to let institutional mandates dictate whom he may or may not deign to make his conquest.
