I shook my head. “Weirdly, it’s really not. Dr. Romero made progress with Harlow really fast because she was responsive to EMDR, and they do long cognitive sessions every day. Yeah, she’s faced a lot of challenges, and she still has some ahead of her, but Harlow is a strong woman. She doesn’t drag me down. In fact, it’s just the opposite. I like being with her.”
“Oh, fuck no,” Cooper groaned. “Please don’t tell me that you’re getting personally involved with a woman you’re supposed to be advising. You know better than that, dude.”
“I’m not,” I lied.
“Bullshit,” Cooper answered morosely. “You’re attracted to her, right? I recognize that look in your eyes. It reminds me of Hudson when he’s waxing poetic about Taylor.”
I probably should have known better than to stretch the truth with Cooper. He might be cranky, but he still had the best intuitive skills I’d ever seen. “Okay. So, I’m attracted to her. Hell, I have been for a long time. I met her in the lab two years ago, and I liked her so much I asked her out for dinner. She turned me down, and that was the end of it. I can’t just turn off being attracted to her. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be her advisor and a friend.”
“In what universe does that kind of arrangement work out?” Cooper scoffed. “It’s completely impossible to want to fuck a woman and be her friend at the same time. The only thing that kind of arrangement will get you is blue balls, and a whole lot of heartache, Jax. I don’t understand why you signed up for this in the first place.”
I slammed my fist on the desk. “Because I couldn’t not fucking do it,” I growled. “I tried to get in contact with Harlow for months to talk to her about her resignation, and to convince her to take a monetary payment from Montgomery like we gave to Mark’s family. Just like Taylor, she wanted nothing to do with the money. All I got was her voicemail, and an occasional hang-up. Maybe that should have been a noticeable clue that something was wrong since she’d have no problem telling me off instead of avoiding me. Unfortunately, the truth didn’t knock me in the head until I started to track her progress, and I saw that she’d completely refused an advisor, or any of the other things we’d suggested. She was doing some kind of video counseling sessions with someone who had absolutely no experience treating severe emotional trauma like Harlow’s. And they were only meeting once a week. Sometimes less because her so-called therapist cancelled on Harlow fairly often. That’s why I signed up to be her advisor. I knew something wasn’t right, and that someone had to get through to Harlow. Once I saw her in person and realized just how bad things had gotten for her, I wanted to kick myself in the ass for waiting so long.”
I leaned back in my chair, knowing I’d just lost it. I was still breathing hard from releasing the pent-up frustration that had been eating at me for a long time.
Cooper released a long breath. “And you thought you were the only one who could help her?”
“I knew I was the only one who could get through to her. I’m probably the only person who’s more stubborn than she is, and who would refuse to take no for an answer. Even Marshall tried to get her into decent treatment for months, and he failed,” I told Cooper irritably. “Failure was not an option for me. Not after it was perfectly clear that she wasn’t recovering.”
“You did help her, Jax. She’s on her way to recovery. She’s under Dr. Romero’s care. It’s time for you to bail out now before you care too damn much to do that. Before it’s too late.”
“I do care, dammit! And it may already be too late. We’ve been together every single day for nearly three weeks, Coop,” I explained. “Maybe you don’t believe it’s possible, but we have become friends. In some ways, being with Harlow has been good for me, too. You have no idea how good it feels to just be able to hang out with a woman who doesn’t give a damn about my family name or my money. There’s never been a female in my life like her. She actually wants to know me, and not the billionaire co-CEO of Montgomery.