His Forbidden Love (Manhattan Billionaires #2) - Ava Ryan Page 0,2

Ally? I’d hoped I’d see you here.

Something like that.

Don’t screw this up, Jamison, I warn myself, and for one euphoric second, I feel like I won’t.

So it’s with grave internal disappointment that I open my mouth and bark the following in the exact same tone with which I used to order her to get a complete blood count on a patient:

“Harlow. Thought that was you.”

She stiffens, her breath catching. It takes her a beat or two for her to turn her head and look at me, a delay long enough to give me the crazy idea that she recognizes my voice, that she needs to collect herself before facing me. Then her eyes meet mine, and I feel the connection as a pulse of electricity that makes all the fine hairs on my body stand on end before shooting up my nape and out through the top of my head. Swear to God, it feels powerful enough to light the entire island of Manhattan from Harlem to the Financial District the next time we have a blackout.

“Dr. Jamison. Hi.”

It’s hard to notice and catalogue every single detail about a person during a two-second increment of time, but I manage it like a pro as I stand there watching her. The clear, musical quality of her voice, exactly the way I remembered it. Those big, whiskey-colored eyes, a bit older and wiser now. That honeyed skin. The way her wide cheekbones taper to a pointy chin, giving her a heart-shaped face. The perfect cupid’s bow atop those lush lips. And that hair. There’s a Disney movie—Brave, I think—where the heroine’s red hair does its own thing. Almost as though it’s a living being with a pulse and a personality. Ally’s hair is like that, only it’s the perfect marriage of light brown, blond and this golden color that makes me think of unfiltered sunlight. It curls. It spirals. It falls on either side of her face and swings past her shoulders. It flutters with the breeze. It features prominently in my fantasies of her, where I fist it in my hands as it trails over my belly. Fantasies that have been plentiful since the second I laid eyes on her and which, as you can imagine, were damn inconvenient back when I was married.

Anyway, she said something. Now I should say something. That’s how it works.

I open my mouth. Nothing comes. Probably because I’m grappling with a tinge of despair in realizing I didn’t imagine or exaggerate anything about her. The unmistakable warmth is still there in her bright eyes. The musical quality in her voice is still there. If anything, she’s more than she was before, the human equivalent of a finely aged bottle of wine.

I’m not sure that’s good news for me.

I’m not sure at all.

“I was wondering if you’d be here,” she says.

This information feels like a lotto win.

Tell her you were hoping she’d be here, whispers the voice inside my head, a smarter version of myself whose advice I don’t follow often enough.

“Yeah?” I say instead, trapped inside my reserved personality like a rat in a cage.

“Yeah. I know Dr. Smith was your chief resident when you were an intern.” She hesitates. “And I’d heard you were back from Los Angeles.”

Fun fact: Ally and I last saw each other at a bar near the hospital one night at the end of my year as chief resident and her year as my intern. After which I headed to UCLA for my fellowship and she took a brief leave of absence. I wasn’t big on moving out west, but Patricia got that job, and, like I said, I wanted to save my marriage if I could. God knew she’d sacrificed enough for me and my medical career. God also knew that I needed to leave the hospital, because saving my marriage and fighting my attraction to Ally while working with her at the hospital every day were mutually exclusive. Unfortunately, it turns out that geographical changes don’t save failing marriages. Something I wish someone had told me sooner.

The upshot? I packed up my shit and booked a flight back to NYC as soon as Patricia and I finalized our divorce.

Now here we are.

“I’m back,” I say. “Were they appropriately abusive to you residents after I left?”

“They were,” she says with a dramatic shudder. “It was torture. I still have the scars.”

“Good.”

She grins, activating her dimples and flashing her white teeth. The effect is dazzling, like the lights coming up