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

by Kimberly Kincaid

  Shelly nodded slowly. “Okay. Deal.”

  “Awesome.” He gave her a gentle fist bump, hiding his relief with a grin.

  “Thanks, Connor,” Mallory said, his expression marking the sentiment as truly genuine. “Can you do me a favor and book an OR?” He turned toward Shelly. “We’ll get you upstairs and the surgical nurse on duty will prep you for the procedure, and I can answer any questions you’ve got about the surgery along the way.”

  “Is there anyone you want me to call for you, Shelly?” Connor asked a few seconds later, after the OR had been reserved and Mallory’s intern du jour, Dr. Boldin, had arrived to help with the transport.

  “Oh.” She blinked. “Um, sure. My mom is going to freak out, but I guess you should call her. I’d really like to have her there when I wake up.”

  “I’ll be sure to tell her you’re getting the very best ice cream after your surgery,” Connor promised. He took down her mother’s number and turned to make his way to the nurses’ station so he could make the phone call that would give the woman some extra peace of mind. But before he could make it even halfway across the trauma room floor, Tess appeared in the doorway.

  “You two okay in here?” she asked, dividing her gaze between Connor and Mallory.

  “Absolutely,” the doc said. “Boldin and I are headed up to the OR for a femur repair, but everything else looks stable. Did you need me for a consult?”

  Tess shook her head. “Nah. Sheridan and Drake took their patient upstairs, and Charlie’s doing a consult on mine for a possible splenic lac.” At the mention of her best friend, a.k.a. Remington Memorial’s general surgery attending, Tess smiled.

  “I do love a happy ending,” Connor said, waving at Shelly as Boldin wheeled her gurney past Tess and toward the bank of elevators. “Anyway, I’m going to make this call before I head back into the fray.”

  “Not so fast, flyboy,” Tess said, plucking the Post-It note with his patient’s mother’s contact information on it from between his fingers. “Your presence has been requested in the executive boardroom.”

  “What?” Shock rippled through Connor, quickly chased by a hard shot of dread. But no. His time spent in boardrooms was another lifetime ago, long dead. Still, nothing good could come from those words, even though he was one hundred percent certain he was solid with their rule-following chief of staff. “Why does Langston want to see me?”

  “The chief doesn’t want to see you,” came an all too frosty, all too familiar voice from over Tess’s shoulder. “I do.”

  Connor’s pulse slam-banged through his veins as he turned to look at the woman in the doorway. Sleek, light blond hair pulled back into a tasteful ponytail at her nape. Crisp blue stare. Black sheath dress that probably cost as much as his paycheck leading to mile-long legs and a pair of stilettos as pointed as her frown, and God damn it.

  There was only one thing that Harlow Davenport, the one woman in all of Remington that he wanted to avoid like the fucking plague, could want with him in a boardroom.

  She knows.

  2

  Harlow Davenport was all business, all the time. Being the only child of one of the city’s biggest business magnates would do that for a girl. Not that Harlow minded. In fact, it was quite the opposite. She’d interned her summers away at Davenport Industries from the time she was sixteen years old, watching her father and every VP who reported to him with all the attention of a sniper studying a hard target. After earning her undergraduate degree in business management from UPenn, then carving out an MBA from Harvard to match, Harlow had come back to Remington four years ago for one thing, and one thing only.

  To be the youngest—and first female—chief operating officer of Davenport Industries.

  Ambitious? Maybe. Fraught with Everest-sized challenges? Definitely. Did Harlow give a rat’s ass?

  Not even a little bit. She was, after all, her father’s daughter. She’d do whatever it took to prove her worth so she could land the second-highest position in the company he’d built from the bricks up.

  Including go along with his crazy scheme to salvage the badly failing clinic bearing her late mother’s name.

  Shifting her weight from one four-inch Jimmy Choo to the other, she snuck a glance at the big, silent, male nurse beside her. He stood at full attention, his massive shoulders locked into place beneath his light blue scrubs, hands folded behind his back, stare lasered on the up elevator button she’d pressed a few seconds ago. The same familiarity that had flickered through her when she’d come face to face with him a little less than a month ago made another appearance, lasting just long enough to frustrate the crap out of her before disappearing. She was excellent with names, and even better with faces—hello, Business 101. Harlow’s gut told her she’d clapped eyes on Connor before Natalie Kendrick had (re?)introduced them at Christmastime. Unfortunately, her usually reliable brain was having a hell of a time delivering the particulars, to the point that she’d actually started to wonder if maybe she was mistaken.

  Mistaken? Please. I taught you better than that, her father’s voice chided in her head, and okay, hashtag fact. But Connor was hardly forgettable, and where on earth she’d have encountered a hulking, tattoo-covered flight nurse with just enough dark auburn facial hair to look both a little dangerous and more than a little smokin’ hot, she really had no clue. He definitely hadn’t been one of the nurses to care for her mother a few years ago, and Harlow hadn’t ever set foot in Remington Memorial Hospital before the woman had been diagnosed with brain cancer. Only five months had elapsed between that day and the one on which she’d passed quietly at home, but Harlow remembered all the doctors, every single resident and nurse and orderly who had tended to her mother as if it had been yesterday.

  Sometimes, in the rare, quiet moments when she allowed herself to actually think about it, the pain that gripped her at the reminder of the loss was still that fresh, too.

  The elevator doors trundled open with a thump, and Harlow didn’t even blink before methodically packing her memories away. “Dwelling on the past won’t do your future any favors,” her father always warned when she’d fret over things that hadn’t gone according to plan. “A good businessperson looks forward, not back.”

  The advice was sound, considering the uphill battle ahead of her in the here and now. Granting a donation—not even one large enough to build an entire wellness clinic—didn’t come with the right to run the facility the money funded, but it did allow for certain liberties. In hindsight, she and her father should’ve insisted on having advisory privileges as soon as plans for the clinic had begun, not to mention more detailed updates on day-to-day operations once the doors had opened. Nearly every minute of the nine months that the place had been up and running had been an ill-managed shit show, and neither she nor her father had realized it until now, when the damage was nearly fatal.

  Between the misappropriated funds, the disorganized staffing and operations, and the complete lack of competent leadership, Harlow was honestly shocked the clinic had lasted that long.

  And now it was up to her to fix things.

  Connor didn’t move, despite the empty elevator car in front of them, shifting his hazel eyes toward the open doors as if to say, after you. Harlow didn’t fool herself into thinking he was trying to win her over with good manners. His deference matched the clipped “yes, ma’am” he’d given in response to her summons upstairs and the stone-cold silence with which he’d followed it, all clearly a product of his military training.

  She was the newest addition to the hospital’s board of directors. He was a nurse. He was offering respect because she outranked him, plain and simple.

  At least, she did for the next ten minutes.

  God, this was a mistake.

  But since it was a mistake Harlow hadn’t chosen and couldn’t change, she lifted her chin by an inch in acknowledgment and stepped into the elevator. Connor followed, moving in behind her to place his back to the wall.

  “So, are you go
ing to tell me what this is about?” he finally asked, his voice low and surprisingly soft. All of a sudden, she became hyper-aware of just how sexy the sound of it was, warm and rich and less than three feet over her shoulder, and an involuntary shot of heat stole across her face.

  “No.” She focused her stare straight ahead, trying to chase off her blush and her surprise at its existence. Business, especially the sort she was about to do, deserved formality that didn’t belong in an elevator. “Not yet, anyway.”

  A sound crossed his lips, as if it wanted to be a huff of laughter, but didn’t have the joy to see it through. “The suspense is killing me.”

  The heat on Harlow’s face intensified. The elevator seemed to shrink, pulling him right up against her, and oh, God, she needed to control this situation before it controlled her.

  I taught you better than that.

  The words hammered her arousal into pieces and her cool resolve back into place, and she turned to pin Connor with a brows-up stare. “If that’s the case”—she allowed her eyes to roam and a calculated smile to touch her mouth, just briefly—“then you’re not as tough as you look.”

  Any reply he might have made got lost on the sound of the elevator doors opening, and Harlow didn’t wait to move. At five ten without her heels, she could cut a pretty serious path across the floor, to the point that most people struggled to keep up with her once her stride kicked into gear.

  Connor Bradshaw? Apparently not most people. Not that she should be shocked, she supposed. Even in her heels, he still bested her by a good two inches.

  The trip to the boardroom was as silent as it was quick, and Harlow led the way over the threshold, ushering Connor past her before turning to close the door. He didn’t seem shocked to see Dr. Keith Langston, the hospital’s chief of staff, sitting at the head of the twelve-person conference table, although he sure didn’t look pleased.

  In fact, he didn’t look…anything, his expression utterly blank as he stepped to the opposite end of the table and assumed the same position he had when he and Harlow had waited for the elevator.

  “Connor,” Langston said, indicating the seat to his left. “It’s good to see you. Come on in and have a seat. Ms. Davenport and I have something we’d like to discuss with you. A proposal, actually.”

  “A proposal,” Connor repeated with caution, and Harlow nodded.

  “Yes.” She took the seat to Langston’s right, putting herself face-to-face with Connor as he sat, per the chief’s request. “As you’re no doubt aware, the Marlene Davenport Memorial Clinic has been going through some necessary changes of late.”

  Connor’s ginger-brown brows lifted up toward his hairline. “You called me here to talk about the clinic?”

  “We did,” Langston said quickly. “Unfortunately, the operations and management of the clinic have fallen short of the hospital’s original vision. As a result, the facility isn’t meeting standards as we’d hoped.”

  Connor huffed out the laughter equivalent of no shit. “That’s kind of a gigantic understatement.”

  If the way his eyes had gone wide was any indication, he hadn’t meant to let the sentiment slip. Although Harlow was tempted to be annoyed at the reminder of how badly the clinic was failing, she knew he wasn’t even close to wrong, just as she knew that holding anything back wouldn’t serve any of them at this point. This job wasn’t going to get done on anything less than balls-out honesty.

  “I think we can all agree that speaking freely will only benefit this conversation,” she said. “And you’re absolutely right. We’ve taken an in-depth look at the clinic’s financials, and we’re not so much losing money as we’re hemorrhaging it. Management, operations, services—the clinic is failing on every level.”

  “Well, the guy you had running the place was an idiot. You need someone in there who has access to a clue,” Connor said, shrugging without apology as he tacked on, “Since we’re speaking freely.”

  Again, Connor wasn’t off-base. Harlow said, “The hospital can’t afford any more mistakes with regard to running the clinic. After several discussions on the best way to proceed, the board elected to pursue assistance from Davenport Industries.”

  “Assistance,” Connor repeated, as if the word were a rattlesnake ready to strike. “What, like a corporate takeover?”

  Harlow shook her head. “Not in the traditional sense. While acquisitions is Davenport Industries’ main business focus, we also offer management services.”

  “Ah.” His expression shifted in understanding, and she’d give him this. He was sharp. “So, you basically flip companies like houses. You go in and purge everything that doesn’t work. Get everything running according to your big-business master plan, then once the company is on the level, you’re out the door.”

  “It’s not our norm,” she said. True acquisitions, where Davenport Industries had all the control over planning and execution, were more lucrative, not to mention far easier. Better to raze things and rebuild from the dirt up their way than try to cobble together broken and weary pieces for someone else. “But since we have a vested interest in the clinic—”

  “You mean, because your father made the donation that built the place,” Connor said, not unkindly, but not with an ounce of warmth, either, and Harlow’s patience slipped.

  “Because it bears my mother’s name, we’d very much like to see it succeed. So, yes. The board has voted to have Davenport Industries implement a new management system in order to make that happen.”

  “Isn’t that a conflict of interest for you, seeing as how you’re on the board and you work for Davenport Industries?” Connor asked, and she’d give him this. When it came to business, he knew his shit.

  Of course, he wasn’t the only one. “I abstained from the vote. But for the record, it was otherwise unanimous.” There were other changes to her board status—ones that stung, considering how much work she’d already put in as a member. But they’d get to those soon enough. “At any rate, after careful consideration of all the variables, Davenport Industries has decided to take a different tack with regard to the director’s position at the clinic.”

  “You’re not hiring someone new?” Connor’s shoulders hit the back of the office chair he’d wedged himself into with a soft thump. She blanked her unease before it had any prayer of reaching her face, arranging her expression to appear as if this was exactly how she’d planned things, even though she’d fought the decision every inch of the way.

  “Not one person. Not yet, anyway.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t follow.” Connor divided a look between her and Langston, settling on the chief for clarification.

  Langston folded his hands over the polished wood in front of him. “Mr. Davenport has advised that temporarily splitting the position between two directors with equal power is the most time-efficient way to make the necessary changes to the clinic’s management structure. One would be in charge of the business aspect of running the clinic. Budget, policy, compliance, et cetera.”

  “And the other?” Connor asked, and Harlow took the baton even though she wanted nothing more than to hurl it off a fucking cliff.

  “Operations,” she said smoothly. “Medicine, staffing, overseeing day-to-day patient care. So, as you can see, the two roles are quite different, but it’s become clear that both are going to be crucial in order for the clinic to operate in the black.”

  The edges of Connor’s mouth turned downward. “You mean, they’re crucial in offering care to the people who need it.”

  “Of course.” But without money, there couldn’t be any care. The money had to come first. That was just smart business.

  Connor swung his gaze toward Langston. “You said temporarily.”

  Langston nodded. “Yes. Davenport Industries will need to be hands-on at first in order to ensure that a successful business plan is implemented, but once that’s in place and the clinic is running smoothly and turning a profit, the operations director should be able to perform both sets of
responsibilities. With the assistance of the board, of course.”

  “So, the business director will be a Davenport employee?”

  “Actually, the business director will be a Davenport, period,” Harlow said, squaring her shoulders and aiming for composure even though her pulse was doing its very best to derail her. “I’ll be putting my position on the board on hold, temporarily, in order to take over in that capacity.”

  And there was the rub. Her father had been adamant that she take the job, even though she had salvaged far bigger companies under far worse circumstances, and Davenport Industries had recently acquired not one, but two businesses she’d have been better suited to take over. Her abilities were wasted on this position at the clinic, and they both knew it, not to mention she’d lose all the ground she’d gained as a board member so far by allowing an alternate member to serve in her place, even temporarily. But her father never so much as sneezed without strategizing first. If he wanted her at the clinic badly enough to insist, it was for a reason, and she would not fail.

  Especially if that reason was that he thought she wasn’t up to the task.

  Connor looked at her, the flash of his hazel stare dropping her back into the brightly lit boardroom. “Okay. You’ve got a business director. Who’s taking over on ops?”

  “Finding the right person to fill the second position has been a bit more of a challenge.” Harlow pulled in a deep breath and met his gaze head-on. “But it’s one the board believes you’re up for.”

  “Wait,” Connor said, his eyes rounding in genuine shock. “You want me to take the position?”

  She selected her answer with care. “We’re offering you the job, yes.”

  Thankfully, he didn’t seem to notice the semantics. At least, not enough to address them on the spot. “Right, but I’m a nurse,” Connor said, as if he was trying to get the reality of the offer situated in his head. “I mean, I don’t exactly suck at my job, but there’s no M.D. after my name.”