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“There is nous.”
His brows dipped into a dark ridge as he scanned her features. “Rapid respiration, flushed lips. Wide eyes, pupils dilated. I don’t need to be a physician to know what physiological arousal looks like. God, Rowan, I can even smell it on your breath.”
Heat climbed her collarbones, igniting her neck, her cheeks, even her goddamned ears. “Great diagnosis, Doctor. Will you bill my insurance, or do I need to pay up front?”
He drew away like she’d slapped him.
Rowan went on the offensive. “You want to get clinical with me, Harrison? Play the doctor game?”
His answering frown was apocalyptic. “Why the hell won’t you call me Harry?”
“So we’re playing thenamegame, then.”
“None of this is a game. I’m talking about real feelings.”
“I’m talking about feeling, too.” She moved closer, letting her exhale wash over his neck, weaponizing his attraction to her.
His eyes rolled and flickered closed for an instant, and his jaw locked. “No, you’re only talking aboutsensation. I’m talking about emotion.”
Rowan pitched her hips forward into his persistent erection. “Emotion didn’t dothisto you, Dr. Brady.”
Stripes of color lit his cheeks, and a sound of frustration vibrated in his chest. “I’m talking aboutboth.”
“We’re just two bodies, acknowledging each other as biologically favorable mates—”
“Holy shit, are you serious?”
“Try me. Let’s go back to your truck.”
He threw a glance at the sky, then back at her. “I’m not going to be pulled into some sexual game with you. There’s something bigger here. More than infatuation, or lust, or biological urges, or whatever the fuck you said earlier.”
She spoke slowly, like she was explaining a complex idea to a child. “There are two reasons humans have sex. To try to make babies, or to get off. I don’t plan on having babies, so you do the math.”
Genuine confusion creased his forehead. “You have got to be the only person who uses sex as a way todistanceyourself from someone.”
“How did an obstetrician develop such puritanical opinions about sex?”
Muscles pulsed at his temples as his jaw tensed and released. “Don’t mock me.”
They weren’t dancing anymore. Instead, they barely swayed in place, matching glares firing between them. “Do you really think all of those babies you’ve delivered were conceived inlove,Dr. Brady?”
“That’s reductiveandignorant, Dr. McKinnon,” he volleyed back.
“Now you’re mockingme. Why is this making you so angry?”
“You’re punishing me,” he growled. “I wounded your pride earlier today, and now you’re making me pay for it.”
“It was an innocent, impulsive kiss, asshole. And you jerked back like I’d spit in your face.”
“Try me again,” he echoed her phrase from earlier. “I won’t make the same mistake twice.”
The tension in him felt seismic. His restraint hovered over an active fault line. Beneath his gentle exterior lurked a well-managed intensity Rowan recklessly wanted to agitate free. Harrison Brady seemed incapable of feeling things halfway—the pain resonating out of him made everything somehowmore. Magnified.
Fascinating.
God,he’d probably be incredible in bed.
But he wanted the kind of access she’d never grant again. He wanted to explore and expand the palpable chemistry between them, and she simply wanted to delve it for sensation and release. Harrison Brady was too wholesome for her—latent, newly discovered temper notwithstanding—and she had enough kindness in her to recognize it before she drove them both to self-destruction.
