blame her. “I can’t begin to imagine how his fiancée feels. Lauren. So I am upset, Dr. Jamison. Unlike you, I am a human being. I have feelings.”
“What?”
“Maybe you’ve heard of them? I can’t always put them in a box and pretend they’re not there. We can’t all be a sphinx all the time. Sometimes those pesky feelings leak out. You caught me at a low moment. Obviously. I’m not up for being a robot right now. But don’t worry. I’ll try to be like you again tomorrow.”
The outrageous injustice of this accusation threatens to choke me out. Utter paralysis shuts me down while I try to get my jaw unstuck enough to defend myself. But the effort gets delayed while I clench and unclench my fists and remind myself that it probably wouldn’t be a good idea to give in to my frustration and rampage through this closet knocking everything off the shelves.
My only consolation? That she clearly has no idea how attracted I am to her and how it takes years of my life pretending I’m not.
Hopefully, I can keep it that way.
“Let me assure you, Dr. Harlow, that you don’t know one fucking thing about me or my feelings and how I manage them,” I say, my gruff voice deathly quiet as I stare her dead in the face and try not to get lost in those teary brown eyes. “Never presume that you do.”
With all these heightened emotions flying around, I’ve forgotten myself and edged a little too close to her. Into the danger zone. For one arrested moment, I stare down at her and she stares up at me. At this range, it’s easy to see the dewiness of her lips. The rosy perfection of her skin. The streaks of blond and the wisps of hair on either side of her amazing face. The striations of white, black and gold in her irises. During these suspended seconds, when my heart pounds in my throat, I fervently wish I could fuck her up against that wall right there. Almost as much as I hope to never lay eyes on her again.
Some of this must show in my face despite all my best efforts to keep it hidden. Her breath hitches. Her eyes widen. Her attention dips, just for a second, to my mouth.
And the reins of my control slip almost all the way out of my hands.
“Dr. Jamison,” she says, her voice breathy.
I hear it in her tone.
The desire. The need.
They perfectly mirror what’s going on inside me.
I want to be a good guy who can look himself in the mirror. But right now? I’m telling you, it could go either way. And I’m seriously starting to wonder what point there is to being an honorable human being when you’re this fucking miserable.
But…
By some miracle, I manage to back up a step and turn away from her.
“Stop crying, Harlow. Pull your shit together.” I sweep the door open for her. “Get back to work.”
She blinks then hurries stiffly through the door without looking at me.
And promptly gets plowed down from the side by someone rushing by with a supply cart whose shouted warning comes too late.
Ally goes flying. I won’t attempt to describe her yelp of pain or the sound of her precious skull intersecting with the hard linoleum floor. I don’t need to get into how red her blood is against the golden hair. Her sudden absolute stillness as she lies there, facedown and unconscious, is forever seared into my brain. Never in my life, before or since, have I felt that sort of cataclysmic terror.
It was her injury, yeah, but I feel like these are also my scars.
“Hey! Moron!” Furious honking jars me out of my thoughts. I look around and discover that I’m on my way out of the park and crossing against the light. Some asshole leans his head out of his black Mercedes sedan so he can glare at me while giving me the one-fingered salute. “People are driving here! You want to get killed? Jump off the Brooklyn Bridge and leave the rest of us out of it!”
Backing up, I wave him through the intersection and try to regulate my breath as I cool down and head back to my office. The sun is lower in the sky now. I’m drenched with sweat. Guess I had a good jog. I’ll never know. I feel like a sleepwalker who wakes up in a dark kitchen and discovers he’s in the middle