Epilogue
COLE
Nine months later
I woke up to Harper’s feet pressed against my calves.
“Babe!” I grumbled, still half-asleep. “Your feet are ice.”
“Then warm them up,” she said, rolling over, then scooting closer until she was pressed up against my side with her head on my chest. She slung one leg over me, her thigh slotting right between mine in a way that was not conducive to staying asleep.
I cracked one eye open. Sunlight filtered through the blinds, and a quick glance at the clock on the nightstand confirmed it was past seven. But it was my day off. No surgeries. No rounds. No residents.
Just me, this woman I fell in love with, and no reason to leave the bed any time soon.
A shrill beep cut through the peace of the morning. Harper made a whimpering sound, reaching over me to the nightstand. She grabbed her phone to silence it, then returned her head to its preferred place of rest—my chest.
“We have no plans this morning. Why did you set an alarm for nothing?” I asked her, dropping a kiss on her forehead while my palm wandered the slope of her hip beneath the blanket.
“Not nothing. I want to get some unpacking done.” She tucked her face deeper into the hollow between my neck and shoulder, planting sweet kisses on my skin. “And eventually, we have to make it over to my parents’ for dinner.”
I raked my hand over her silk sleep scarf, massaging her scalp through the fabric with an absent-minded tenderness. “Mmmmm,” I said, “but how about just having sex all morning?”
“Tempting, but Ms. Patricia is already grumpy about the boxes that have been sitting around.”
It had only been a few weeks since Harper moved out of her condo in preparation to put it up for sale, but it had been a busy time at RMC and neither of us had the hours or the energy to deal with her belongings.
She’d started moving in gradually—a toothbrush propped next to mine, a few pairs of soft socks rolled into my dresser.
Clothes she wore to my place were washed and put away in my closet instead of returned to hers. When the scarf she wore to bed was draped over the bathroom doorknob, I knew there was no turning back.
The guest room had become a forest of half-unpacked boxes stacked chest-high. I personally loved the chaos if it meant I had Harper with me day in and day out.
Ms. Patricia, on the other hand, was serious about getting Harper settled and feeling at home.
“So, you getting up, then?”
“Five more minutes,” she mumbled.
“You said that yesterday.”
“I know you aren’t complaining, Cole.”
“Nope, I’m not. Because we were productive.”
She lifted her head, one eyebrow raised. “That’s what we’re calling it?”
“You came twice.”
She swatted my chest, laughing. “You’re ridiculous.”
“But did I lie? And you love that about me. Ever since you were a little girl, you wanted to love a ridiculous man.”
“I really did.” She kissed me, slow and lazy, then sat up with a sigh. “And I really do love you.”
“Love you too, morning breath. So what time do we need to be at the house?”
“Mom wants you there by one o’clock to help cook.”
“So we leave at twelve thirty.”
“Thereabouts.”
“Good.” I pulled her back down against my chest. “Then we have time to celebrate new developments in our lives properly.”
She tipped her head up. “Haven’t we been celebrating?”
“Not enough for a new address and a promotion.” I pressed my lips to her temple.
She was quiet for a second, then said, “My family’s going to be so extra today. They’ve been like this ever since I started bringing you to Sunday dinner.”
“Good. Let them be extra about you.” I pinched her chin, tilting her face up so I could look her in the eye. “You earned this, baby. Now is not the time to be shy about good things happening for you.”
“I’m not being shy. It just feels like it took forever between the announcement that Liz was leaving RMC and when they officially promoted me to Vice President—”
“You mean when you chased her out of the hospital and took her job?”
She laughed. “That is not what happened, Cole.”
“That’s how I’m gonna tell it to our kids.”
The Greene case was still sending aftershocks through Ridgeway.
According to hallway gossip and the RMC group chat, the hospital CEO was displeased with Dr. Rice’s handling of the inquiry.
Bringing the institution into Vincent Cross’s orbit and risking a valued member of the surgical team over a donor who barely made a blip on the fundraising radar was evidently not what the board meant by deal with this issue.
Dr. Rice was offered a generous separation package. She’d already lined up her next role at a hospital near Stanford University.
“She actually came to find me before she packed up her office,” said Harper. “I think she expected me to make departure easy for her.”
“And did you?”
Harper gave me a look that told the whole story. “About as easy as she made it for me to work with her.”
She folded her hands together with a satisfied smirk on her thick, pretty lips. “She said she hoped I understood what I was walking into. That the job was harder than it looked. Then she wished me luck.”
“In that way where she didn’t really mean good luck.”
“In exactly that way.” Harper tilted her head up so her eyes met mine. “I thanked her and told her Stanford was lucky to have her.”
“In that way where you didn’t really mean lucky.”
“Stanford is lucky to have her. Far away from me and my hospital.” Harper bit her lip, then allowed a proud grin to spread. “Vice President of Risk Management and Patient Advocacy is kind of a big deal, isn’t it?”
“Kind of a big title. Kind of a big paycheck. Kind of a big corner office on the Admin floor.”
Harper gasped, shooting up, hissing as she lurched toward her phone. “Shit! I needed to make sure Rowan ordered a few things for my new office. They’re moving us tomorrow—”
I caught her by the waist before she could tumble off the mattress, rolling her so I was on top. “Baby, it’s Sunday. Leave them alone. Besides, I thought we were celebrating.”
“I’ll forget. I’m going to just text them.”
She half-twisted in my grip, reaching for her phone on the nightstand with one hand, swatting my hands away with the other. Sleep scarf slipping to the side, face set in determined concentration. She was the world’s most beautiful workaholic.
“You done?” I asked, snatching the device from her hands and tossing it to the other side of the nightstand.
“Yes,” she answered, flopping back as if out of breath. “If they don’t enter the supply request first thing, it’ll get kicked to next week and I want them this week.”
She sighed, finally relaxing again. I was close enough to kiss her…but didn’t. Instead, I leaned on one elbow, dragging the sheet down so I could get a better look at her nude form. I wasn’t mad at the view.
Harper flashed me a suspicious look. I almost never delayed a session of morning sex.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing. Just thinking.”
“About?”
“Dr. Webb, actually,” I answered, after a few moments of hesitation.
She cringed, frowning. “You’re in bed with me on a Sunday morning? Thinking about that man who couldn’t even have your back when your ass was on the line?”
“It’s just…we were talking about Dr. Rice and I remembered that he called me Friday. He wanted to tell me about his decision to retire.”
Harper gasped and started to sit up, moving so rapidly that it threw me off of her. She propped herself up so we were face to face. “You thought he might. He’s doing it, then?”
I bobbed my head in a nod. “End of the quarter.”
“Did he ask you to take over as department chair?”
“He mentioned it. He said he has a lot of pull in who RMC chooses.”
“And?”
“And…” I paused, bobbing my head. “I turned him down.”
Harper went still, almost holding her breath. “Cole. That’s—”
“I know. I know it would be—”
“—the job you’ve been working toward your whole career.”
“I thought that’s what I was working toward. What I wanted out of this whole move to this region, this job at this hospital. Turns out that’s not what I want.”
“Okay. News to me,” she replied. “What do you want, then?”
I reached for her, tugging her closer. “Well, this, mostly. But you know what I did last Thursday?”
She shook her head.
“I spent six hours in the OR with a nineteen-year-old kid. Motorcycle accident. Ruptured spleen, liver laceration, massive internal bleeding. Real touch-and-go type situation.”
“Oh. Did he make it?”
“We pulled it off. Kid’s hanging out in ICU, but he’s alive. I was there, doing what I’m trained to do. What I love to do.”
“So you’re choosing surgery.”
“I’m choosing to do the work I love instead of managing people who do the work I love. Webb spent years climbing that ladder. Now he’s retiring because he’s burned out and tired and he can’t remember why he wanted to be at that level in the first place.”
I shook my head. “I know a lot of people want that for me, but I don’t want that for me.”
“What did he say when you told him no?”
“That I was making a mistake. That I’d regret not taking this opportunity to guide the next generation. I think I can guide the next generation better on this side of the table.”
“Do you think you will? Regret turning it down?”
I let the question hang for a minute, actually pondered it, because my answer to Dr. Webb had been quick, a knee-jerk response.
“Honestly? I don’t think so. Webb didn’t support me like I thought he should. He chose hospital politics over doing the right thing. I’m not interested in becoming that version of a leader.”
Harper was contemplative for a moment. Then she said, “I almost turned down the VP appointment.”
I pulled back to look at her. “What?”
“When they first offered it to me, I thought about saying no.” She bit her lip.
“It felt like they were promoting me to make themselves feel better about what happened between me and Dr. Rice. And to keep me from calling Vincent Cross, honestly. It felt like a ploy to cover their asses, create better optics.”
“But you took it,” I reminded her, eyes wide. “Because you deserve that appointment.”
“They can give me the job for whatever reason they want, but I’m going to do the job the best way I know how for the right reasons.
I can make sure no other staff member feels like this hospital doesn’t have their back.
I can protect people instead of protecting the hospital’s reputation.
And I can be a guiding light to young Black medical professionals coming up through the system. ”
I grinned, beaming with pride. “That’s an aggressive agenda, Ms. Sutton.”
Harper scooted closer, tucking herself in under my arm. “I’m an aggressive woman, Dr. Vaughn. We’re both stubborn as hell, you know that?”
“Oh, yeah,” I replied. “It’s why we work so well. We’re not in the habit of backing down from doing the right thing.”
“Quiet as it’s kept, we don’t back down from doing each other, either.”
“And neither of us are kept quiet. That’s exactly why I moved you to this house.”
Harper laughed, then kissed me with her whole soul, like she was trying to memorize my very being. I groaned, slipping a hand up the inside of her thigh. She was already wet and so, so warm it made my dick twitch.
I teased her, running my fingers over her clit, back and forth, slow and hypnotic. Harper whimpered a tight little sound, barely there, like she was trying to hold it in but it escaped.
She hated being teased. But loved being teased.
I slid one finger, then two inside her and fucked her slow until she began to buck in rhythm to my strokes. She pushed out a loud, sensual hiss as her hips rolled in time.
“You shouldn’t start shit you don’t plan to finish,” she whispered.
“We just talked about not backing down. I’m not that type of guy.
Besides,” I said, rolling us over so she was pinned beneath me, legs spread and ready.
I positioned myself, heaving a relieved sigh as I entered her, like it was the first time I’d ever entered her. “I said we’re not done celebrating.”
We languished in the bed, reveling in the sound, touch, and taste of each other until we had both come completely undone and then some. I was still breathing heavy when Harper took advantage of my sated state and flipped me over onto my back.
I laughed as she straddled me. This woman was something else. A dream come true for real.
Later, we’d get up, pick through some boxes, put more of her things away.
We’d shower and dress and drive to her parents’ home for Sunday dinner, where her mother had become accustomed to bossing me around her kitchen.
We’d eat too much and laugh too loud, then drive home with leftovers we couldn’t refuse.
We’d have a glass of wine and something sweet Ms. Patricia had left for us.
Then fall into bed and do what we did for each other better than anyone.
And it would be exactly what we’d almost run away from but couldn’t deny.
Love.