Virgin Nurse For The Grumpy Billionaire

Chapter 1 RONAN

Ronan

“I quit.”

Nurse Number Four stands in the middle of my room with the medication chart clutched to her chest like a shield, which is itself progress, since most of them at least make it to the driveway before they announce it.

I finish the sentence on the laptop I’m not supposed to be looking at before I look up. “Congratulations.”

“That’s all you have to say?” Her eyes narrow, and for a split second I think she might throw the chart at my head, which would be the most initiative I’ve seen from anyone in scrubs in three weeks.

“I’m not sure what you’re hoping for. A farewell party seems excessive for six days.

” I shift against the pillows of the hospital bed they sent over—adjustable, humiliating, installed in a downstairs guest room because the stairs to my own bedroom may as well be a mountain range.

The movement is a mistake. Pain bites through my ribs and shoots down my leg, my body’s ongoing reminder that four weeks ago a drunk driver ran a red light and slammed into my SUV.

“If you’re leaving, we can dispense with the exit interview.

It seems inefficient to waste both our afternoons. ”

“You tried to get out of bed on your own this morning.”

“I made it most of the way.”

“You made it most of the way because I got to you before the floor did.”

“An important distinction.”

She closes her eyes briefly. “You’re the single most difficult man I’ve ever cared for.”

“That has been suggested.”

“Good luck, Mr. Sinclair.”

“I don’t believe in luck.”

She gives me a look that suggests my name is about to become part of a cautionary tale. Then she leaves like they all leave, with a great deal of dignity and a slammed door.

The house is mine again. All of it. Every silent room I can’t walk into, in a house built for a man who never intended to share it.

I know I’m not supposed to be alone. I know that if I go down again, there’s no one to get to me before the floor does.

I’d rather take the floor.

Three weeks ago I signed myself out of the hospital over the enthusiastic objections of every medical professional involved in my care.

Including my sister. Especially my sister.

The compromise was a live-in nurse for the duration, which at the time seemed a small price for escaping another week of strangers debating whether I could be trusted to shower unsupervised.

In retrospect that was optimistic.

What no one explained is that live-in nursing care consists largely of someone hovering at my bedside asking, in increasingly disappointed tones, whether I’ve taken my medication.

The answer is no. The answer has always been no.

They keep asking anyway. Yesterday Sadie informed me she was proud of me for putting on a sock without assistance.

I founded a billion-dollar software company.

My leg throbs. The scar along my jaw pulls when I set my teeth. The quarter is in my pocket and I roll it between two fingers without deciding to, the metal worn smooth from a habit older than the company, older than the money, older than the version of me that decided he would never need anyone.

Someone knocks at the open door, and Frank walks in without waiting for an answer, because Frank has a sixth sense for the precise moment my dignity is at its lowest and a gift for arriving to witness it.

He takes in the empty room and sighs. “Another one.”

“Apparently.”

“That’s five.”

“Four.”

“The occupational therapist counts.”

“She wasn’t a nurse.”

“She was medical personnel who fled this house. Same column.”

“I refuse to count her.” I wave Frank toward the chair. “Sit down. If you’re going to scowl at me, you may as well do it off your feet.”

He drops into the chair by the bed and levels the same look at me from it, which I’ll grant is more effective seated. “You know,” he says, “most people recover from an accident without developing a personal vendetta against the medical profession.”

“I don’t have a vendetta. I have standards.” I close the laptop. “What’s the problem, Frank? You didn’t drive two and a half hours to check on my medical progress.”

He leans forward, forearms on his knees. “Valence is nervous.”

I stop turning the quarter.

Valence is our biggest client, and right now they’re nervous, which means everyone who watches Valence is nervous too.

Word got out that I was hurt. Not dead. Not retired.

Just unavailable. Apparently that’s enough.

A month ago every call went through me. Every decision ended on my desk.

Now clients are asking whether I plan to return this quarter, and competitors are suddenly finding reasons to schedule lunches with people they’ve ignored for years.

The company is performing exactly as it’s supposed to. That’s almost the problem. Synapse is proving it can survive without me. I built it that way. I hate discovering it works.

“I could stay,” Frank says, more carefully, because Frank is careful about exactly two things and I’m one of them.

“Not for Valence. I can run Valence from a parking lot. For the part where you’re alone in a house you can’t get around, refusing your medication and driving off everyone Sadie sends to help. ”

“No,” I say. “Keep the building standing. Send me the file. I’ll handle Valence from here.”

“Ronan—”

“Send me the file, Frank.”

Frank opens his mouth to argue about it, and that’s when the front door opens again, without a knock, because only one person in the world walks into a house she doesn’t own as though the deed’s in her name and doesn’t wait to be received.

“Hello, Sadie,” I say, before she’s even in the room.

My sister appears in the doorway carrying enough irritation to make Frank sit back in his chair. She takes one look at my face, one look at Frank’s, and one long look at the conspicuously nurse-free room.

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“Don’t you ever knock?”

“Where is she?”

“On her way home, I’d imagine.”

Sadie closes her eyes, which means she’s about to say something neither of us will enjoy. “You drove off another nurse.”

“She left voluntarily.”

“After six days.”

“She seemed confident in the decision.”

Frank makes a sound suspiciously close to a laugh and converts it, badly, into a cough. Neither of us acknowledges it.

“You promised me,” Sadie says. “You promised me you’d keep someone in this house.”

“I promised whatever I had to promise to get discharged. You were there. You signed things.”

The room goes still, even Frank, because that’s the truth and all three of us know it. I’d have agreed to nearly anything to get out of that building.

“You’re not fine,” Sadie says.

“I’m recovering. There’s a difference, and I’m getting tired of explaining it.”

It comes out sharper than I intend. The problem is that it’s true.

It was never the nurses, or the medication, or the endless conversations about healing.

It was control. The crash took mine in the space of a single afternoon, and everyone’s solution to that loss seems to be the same.

Accept help. Lean on people. Trust the process.

Let someone catch you. As though the answer to losing control is handing over what’s left of it.

I would genuinely rather do it all myself, badly, than have it done for me well.

Sadie studies me for a second. The frustration drains from her face, leaving something I trust a lot less. “You know what your problem is?” she asks.

“I suspect I’m about to.”

“Oh, you absolutely are.”

But she doesn’t tell me. She picks up her bag, taps Frank on the shoulder on her way past, and stops in the doorway. “Enjoy the quiet, Ronan.”

“That sounds like a threat.”

“Take your meds,” she calls over her shoulder, already walking out the door.

And then she’s gone, and the quiet she told me to enjoy settles back in.

Frank stands, looking more relieved than a man losing an argument has any right to.

“Don’t,” I say.

“That,” he says, “is your sister handling you. Which means I don’t have to.”

He doesn’t leave. He picks up his bag and takes it down the hall to the room at the end, and the door closes, and I understand that the two of them settled this somewhere I wasn’t.

I spend the evening exactly as I prefer it, with the untouched pills and the light dying on the water, certain I know precisely what’s coming, because I’ve done this four times now.

The agency sends the same woman wearing a different face every time, some veteran nurse with sensible shoes and no patience for nonsense, who’ll call me hon.

She’ll quit by Friday.

They always do.