Then he slid his tongue right between her legs, and gentle wasn’t in the same universe as what the move made her feel.
“Ah.” The sound Harlow made was purely primal, but she didn’t care. Connor fit his shoulders in the cradle of her hips—not an easy freaking task, considering the breadth of his shoulders—repeating the slow glide of his tongue once, then again.
Pleasure made her breath hitch, even as her pussy squeezed with need for more.
“Connor,” she moaned, moving her hips to match the rhythm of his lips and tongue. For a split second, she remembered the morning she’d put her own fingers exactly where he was kissing her now, making herself come as she’d called out his name.
Then, it had seemed like a harmless fantasy to imagine him pleasuring her, to guess what his mouth would feel like on her aching clit, how his tongue would fit if he pressed deeper inside the slickness of her sex. But now, the pleasure felt like everything, and Harlow surrendered to it willingly. She let herself do nothing but feel as Connor stroked and licked and kissed, her body like a coil, locked down and primed to—
“Oh…my God.” Harlow’s gasp crowded her throat, and she arched higher, thrusting against Connor’s tongue in wild, swift, right-on-the-edge movements.
He didn’t budge, but to move right along with her. His gray-green eyes glittered with want that matched her own, and as she met his stare, she read the unspoken words there.
I’ve got you, sweetheart. I’ve got you.
Her orgasm pulsed through her so intensely that she couldn’t speak or breathe or think. All she could do was feel as she came undone in waves, her release capturing her tight, then letting her go, over and over. Connor worked her through each second, easing his contact with her body as her cries grew softer, finally parting from her only when she went lax against the bed.
“Did you mean it?” she whispered, looking at him through the deep shadows holding them close. “The more I want, the more you’ll give?”
Connor nodded. “I did.”
Relief spilled through Harlow, followed by some other feeling she had no label for. But now that she’d let her emotions in, and Connor along with them, she didn’t want to stop.
“Good.” Pressing to her knees, she dragged him in for a long, hard kiss. “Because all I want is you”—she reached into the space between them, loving the jump of his muscles against her fingertips as she lifted his shirt over his head—“inside me”—the drawstring on his scrubs was next, and she worked his pants open, then away, as fast as her hands would allow. He had the foresight to pull a condom from his bedside table drawer in the process of losing the last of his clothes, and the spare seconds gave Harlow a chance to slide to the center of the mattress before finishing with,
“Right now.”
Connor was on her in less than a breath. The intensity of his closeness, of his big, powerful body right on hers, was enough to knock her breath loose in her lungs. Once again, Harlow knew she should feel vulnerable. All of her emotions were on display like butterflies in a museum, her want and her aching need spilling out of her with each exhale.
Only, she didn’t. Even with Connor’s huge frame pressing over her, his hands snapping hers up to lock them against the bed on either side of her face, the only thing she felt was right.
He filled her with one hard thrust that made them both moan. Harlow’s slick muscles contracted at the pressure, the sensation lighting off a brand-new arousal, way down deep. She widened her thighs, hooking them over either side of Connor’s well-muscled hips, and he grunted a filthy swear that made her even hotter.
“I’m here for it, too, Connor,” Harlow murmured, starting to thrust against his cock. “I want it all.” She lifted her hips again, taking him as far inside of her as she could, and all of her feelings broke loose on three little words.
“I want you.”
He thrust back. There were no pleasantries, and Harlow didn’t want them. Every push and retreat made her blood rush with pure feeling, and she gave in to the sheer intensity. Connor fucked her in hard, sure strokes, and all too soon, release beckoned from deep inside.
“There,” Connor said, reading her like a billboard. “Take it, sweetheart. Take all you need.”
Her orgasm crashed through her all at once, as if it had been at the mercy of his words. But her pleasure didn’t slow him down. His movements grew more focused, each thrust filling her pussy with no room to spare, and she looked up at him and said, “Take it, too, Connor.”
His body began to shake, his eyes squeezing shut and his teeth clamping down on his lip. Every one of his muscles clenched for a brilliant second, his fingers gripping into hers and his cock buried deep. Then he unraveled, whispering her name like a benediction, over and over as he came.
Harlow stayed right there with him in the moment, holding him close and whispering back, and even when their breathing had slowed and their bodies untangled, she still felt him everywhere.
24
Harlow lay awake, watching the shadows dance over the ceiling in Connor’s bedroom. They’d gone through a makeshift routine to get ready for bed, with him offering up the spare toothbrush he must’ve gone out to buy at some point this week and an oversized, over-soft T-shirt for her to sleep in. They hadn’t spoken much as they’d climbed into bed and he’d slipped his arms around her. But rather than feeling settled and content, Harlow’s feelings still churned around in her chest, her thoughts moving fast enough to overwhelm her.
She hadn’t felt emotion like this, so close to the surface, since her mother had died. Then, she’d pushed it down, knowing that if she hadn’t, it would have surely consumed her.
But now those feelings were back, with new, even bigger ones on top of them, and damn it, how was she supposed to hold them at bay?
More importantly, how was she supposed to deal with the fact that part of her didn’t want to?
“Do you want to tell me what’s on your mind?”
Connor’s sleepy murmur slid over her like a blanket, taking another chip out of her resolve.
She clung to what was left. Letting all of her feelings out in bed was one thing—sex was evocative, especially great sex. But this, now? Harlow had to stay strong. She had to fix the problems in front of her at the clinic and cope with her emotions rationally. Or, better yet, just shove them down.
Even though she irrationally wanted nothing more than to let them loose.
“Sorry,” Harlow whispered. “I didn’t mean to keep you up.” She turned toward him, selfishly nestling into the crook of his arm to try and ease some of the jumbled mess growing in her chest.
Connor rumbled out a laugh. “I’ll take that as a no.”
Well, crap. She should’ve known better than to think she’d be able to dodge the question fully. She opened her mouth to tell him she was fine and that all she needed was a good night’s sleep.
What flew out instead was the truth.
“I’m scared.”
Connor stilled, his body tight against hers. “Of what?”
But even though Harlow could feel the concern in his words, he also felt warm and steady, his arms not yielding to his shock or anything else, as if no matter what she said, he’d still be there. Holding her. Having her back.
She’d trusted him in bed. Now, as crazy as it might’ve felt even a day or two ago, she wanted to trust him with everything.
So she said, “I’m scared Evie won’t be safe, even though we did our best to help her. I’m scared we won’t be able to fix the clinic in time to save it. And I’m scared that I’m lying here in the dark, telling you what I’m scared of.”
“Well, let’s tackle the closest alligator to the boat,” he said, his breath soft in her hair as it carried the reply. “Evie will be safe. We promised to take care of her, and we did.”
“But—”
“No, Harlow. No buts.”
The argument was soft, yet dead certain, right there for the believing, and oh, she wanted to.
“How can you be so sure?” Harlow whispered.
“Because we took care of her,” Connor said. “We came up with a smart, solid plan for her well-being, and we put it into action. Could some weird circumstance pop up to throw a wrench into things? I suppose it’s possible.” He lifted the shoulder she wasn’t leaning on, just a little, before letting it drop against the bed sheets. “But even if it does, we’ll figure it out. We’ll keep Evie safe.”
As if he could sense her hesitation, he added, “Sometimes, you just have to take a leap of faith and trust things you can’t see.”
“That’s not exactly in my wheelhouse,” Harlow admitted. How could he talk about faith so easily, as if hope couldn’t turn on a dime and leave you nine and a half cents change while crushing you?
Connor traced his fingers from her shoulder to the center of her chest. “Maybe not. But you have it here. All you have to do is trust your feelings to work with the rest of you.”
Ha. All. “I suppose it’s the same for the clinic, then? I just need to believe we’ll find a way to balance the budget and keep the place running, and it’ll happen?”
“If you mean continuing to do our best to tackle all the obstacles there by coming up with well-planned strategies, then yes. That part is the same. But as for having faith…believing in something with your brain is different than feeling it.”
Harlow’s heart tripped, beating faster and faster. Her feelings were messy. Unpredictable. Dangerous and raw. She’d locked them away for a reason, damn it, and that was because they couldn’t be controlled. “I’m not sure I can do that.”
“Of course you can,” Connor said, honesty infusing every word. “You can start right here, with me. You don’t have to worry about lying here in the dark, telling me what you’re scared of. I know you like to keep your feelings close to the vest,” he added, likely because he’d anticipated her counter. “And if you don’t want to let them out, I’d never make you. But what I said before? About being here for it?”
Connor paused, but only long enough for Harlow to nod against his bare shoulder. “I didn’t just mean in bed, sweetheart. I meant here, too.”
He slid a hand between them again, this time letting it rest not just on the center of her chest, but on his chest, too, and God, how could such a simple touch make her feel so deeply?
“I’m so scared, Connor,” Harlow whispered, knowing her voice would tremble, but hating the sound of it anyway. “What happened to Evie is…”
Nope. Horrible wasn’t going to cut it, and not even Harlow’s Ivy League education could provide a word that would fit.
“Trauma comes in a lot of forms,” Connor said. “Managing those hard cases as a caregiver can be really difficult. Especially when you’re not used to it. The emotions you’re juggling are all very, very normal, though.”
God, how could that even be? “It doesn’t feel that way. The feelings are just so…I don’t know. Big,” Harlow confessed. “Far too big for me to handle.”
For a minute, he was quiet, to the point that she wondered if she’d revealed too much. Then, he said, “I almost got kicked out of the Air Force during Basic Military Training.”
She blinked, certain she’d misheard him. “What? Why?”
“Because I had a hard time learning the most basic rule they live by. See, I was raised on the concept of every man for himself. It was practically Duke’s motto. ‘You’ve gotta look out for number one, boy’.” He paused for a shrug. “But then I realized that relying on my unit-mates didn’t make me weaker, even when they saw me at my most vulnerable. It made me stronger, Harlow. When shit got too big—thoughts of my past, ops we’d run, lives we’d lost—I learned to share the load. I learned to trust myself and my team, and I learned how to hope.”
“No,” she said, her pulse rising in true panic now. God, this had been a mistake. “I just need a better plan for the clinic. That’s all. I cannot hope.”
“Why not?”
He didn’t push. But he didn’t need to. Every feeling, every emotion that Harlow had crammed away, stuffed down and pushed back, was right there on the surface, screaming for release.
And all it took were those two simple words to bring them crashing upward, rising out of her like a storm surge. “Because hope is dangerous, Connor! It lies.”
Her throat threatened to close, and damn it, she wanted it to. She wanted her windpipe to knot and her lips to stop working and the bone-deep pain that was ripping through her to go back into the hole she’d created for it.
But, of course, the words kept coming, crowding out of her in all their ugly, uncontrollable glory. “Hope isn’t enough! Don’t you get it? If that were true, my mother wouldn’t have died! She needed a plan. If she’d gone to see a doctor sooner, if she’d taken those headaches more seriously, she might have had more options.”
“Harlow—”
“No. No.” She was too far gone right now. Too angry to be calmed. Too everything to think.
All she could do was feel, and, oh, it hurt.
“Don’t tell me to hope, Connor. Not with something so big on the line. I did that once. I put my faith in the doctors. In the medicine, in the treatments. In all of it! I knew my mother was facing an uphill battle, that the cancer was bad, but like an idiot, I dared to believe that against all odds, she’d live. I had hope, enough for me and her and my father combined. But she didn’t live. She… she…”
Now, Harlow’s throat did close over a sob. But rather than tell her everything would be okay, or—worse yet—tell her to have hope—Connor simply held her, his arms strong and his chest unyielding.
And his strength, his surety in the face of all of her ugliest emotions, undid her.
“My mother died,” she said, out loud, in those words, for the first time since the funeral. “She was always there for me. She was my team. And now she’s gone, and some days, it hurts so much, I can’t breathe. I want my mother back. I miss her so much.”
“I know you do,” Connor whispered. “But you don’t have to carry that pain all by yourself anymore. I’m here, Harlow. Let me lighten the load on your heart. Let me carry you for a while.”
And then, she did the one thing she’d been resisting with all her might since the moment her mother had been diagnosed with a brain tumor three years ago.
Harlow let go of her emotions and cried.
Connor had needed a lot of strength in his life. He’d had to train himself to handle the highest tides of adrenaline and emotion and pain. But nothing, not even the worst of ops as a medic or the most harrowing of cases in the ED, could have prepared him for how hard Harlow’s sorrow had slammed through him. Somehow, he’d managed to dig deep and find the power to hold her, trying to absorb at least some of her sadness to ease her burden. To think of how long she’d been carrying those emotions, all that sadness and loneliness and fear—it damn near yanked Connor’s breath from his lungs all over again. But now, with the worst of the sobs spent and her tears finally dried, she’d have to sort through the pieces in order to move forward.
And he’d have to pray that hope lay somewhere beneath them.
Shifting to pull Harlow closer, he placed a soft kiss on top of her head. She didn’t move away—in fact, she held him tighter—and even though it killed the part of him screaming to care for her and protect her and banish her pain to some faraway place, he waited for her to be ready to talk.
“I’ve been holding that in for a long time,” she finally whispered into the space between his neck and shoulder.
“I know.” The fact took one last jab at his sternum for good measure. Christ. “You want to talk about it now that it’s out?”
She surprised him a little, he had to admit, by nodding. “I’ve always been practical. Driven by the facts. Good at taking emotion out of the equation to form logical solutions.”
Connor thought about this for a second. “I guess that’s why you’re so good at business.”
“Yes, but it makes me not so good at processing
emotion when it does come. I thought I could set my feelings aside when my mother got sick.” A soft exhale of irony crossed her lips, then his skin. “She needed me and my father to be strong for her. He took care of all the details. Every test, every consult. He knew every dose of every medication, right down to the milligram.”
“Which left you to be her emotional support.” Damn, they saw this sort of thing all the time in the ICU and ED. How had Connor missed something so obvious?
“I wanted to do it,” Harlow said, and he believed her. Still…
“That doesn’t mean it was easy on you. She was your mother.”
Harlow nodded. “She’d always been there for me. I wanted to be strong for her in return. I know it sounds dumb, but I guess I thought that if I had hope, she’d see it and have hope, too. I just never thought”—she broke off for a shaky breath that ripped at Connor’s resolve—“I never thought I’d be wrong. Or that she’d get so sick, so fast.”
“You had no way of knowing,” Connor said, his voice adamant in the shadows. While doctors never lied to their patients or their patients’ families, they were careful not to invite despair to the party. Emotional state had a huge impact on wellness. Plus, he’d read the stories online. Marlene Davenport’s glioblastoma had been as unpredictable as it was aggressive. “And that hope you had? It wasn’t a bad thing.”
“Hope is a leap of faith, and there are no guarantees.”
Connor’s body had moved before his brain even knew it would happen, pulling Harlow over him until they were heart to pounding heart, his stare locked in and steady on hers.
“Life is a leap of faith. I didn’t know your mother, but my guess is that she’d still want you to live it.” I want you to live it. “Risks and emotions and all.”
Harlow trembled, signaling the truth in his words and making him want to hold her until the hurt eased from those gorgeous blue eyes. “I’m still scared. What if we do all that we can for the clinic and fail?”
Between Me & You: An Enemies to Lovers Workplace Romance (Remington Medical Book 3) Page 24