He needed to pull her into his arms and hold her. He knew that once he saw her that everything would be okay. He’d be able to deal with what happened and figure out how he was going to fix this. He just needed–
“She’s not coming back.”
Chapter 1
Emerald, Florida
One Year Later…
Sloane pulled the lollipop out of her mouth with a soft pop as she leaned forward and whispered to the woman who was a cross between Mary Poppins and the Pillsbury Doughboy, “She seems really nervous about something, doesn’t she?”
The Mary Poppins/Pillsbury Doughboy straightened to her impressive height of five-foot-one with a huff, putting her nose up in the air as she pointedly ignored Sloane. Not that Sloane could blame the woman. With the insane amount of money that was being offered for this particular job she was willing to overlook the fact that their potential employer, a woman in her mid-thirties, wearing a rather tasteful suit, and who seemed unable to move from her spot in the doublewide driveway, had apologized a grand total of twenty-three times for a man that none of them had met yet.
“Again, I’d like to apologize for how we’re doing this interview today,” Mrs. Harris said, bringing the number of apologies to a grand total of twenty-four.
Two of the women applying for the position looked nervous while the other two looked absolutely terrified.
That was good…very good.
If Mrs. Harris was able to scare off two of them, Sloane was pretty sure that she could help the other two come to a similar decision. She’d pretty much do whatever it took to get this job. Well, almost anything. She did have lines that she never crossed. She would never kiss anyone’s ass, put out for a job, or cut corners in patient care.
Patients were a job, nothing more, and that’s how it had to stay if she wanted to continue working in this field. If she allowed herself to care, she’d die a little inside every time she had to move on or she lost a patient.
Other than her three major rules, Sloane would do anything to get this job, including scaring off the competition. It wasn’t because she was desperate to work with this patient. To be honest, she didn’t know much about him other than he was a thirty-two-year-old man who’d broken most of the bones in his body and wasn’t adapting well to his new life. The other thing that she knew about him, which really didn’t matter to her except that it meant that her paycheck probably wouldn’t bounce, was that he came from a very wealthy family.
No, her reasons for wanting this job were very simple. She was returning to her hometown after five years and she had nowhere else to live. Well, there was that offer from her parents and brothers, but they would just end up driving her out of her goddamn mind, so it was probably for the best if she didn’t take them up on their offer. She had more than enough money in the bank to find her own place, but she preferred to work as a live-in and save her money.
So, here she was at one in the afternoon, standing in the driveway of a large one-level home, sweating, admittedly already a little bored, and determined to do whatever it took to get this job while her potential employer repeated herself between shooting nervous glances back at the house and throwing them apologetic smiles. Interesting. It seemed that Sloane wasn’t the only one to notice either.
Good, very good…
The faster that she got rid of her competition, the sooner she could move in. She really wasn’t looking forward to sharing a bubblegum-pink bedroom with her eleven-year-old niece and her unnatural love of boyband posters, but that’s what would happen if Sloane didn’t get this job. If she had to hear Emily cry one more time because some pop star that she was destined to marry was seen kissing another girl, Sloane was going to kick her brother’s ass for not sending the kid to a convent.
“Are we going to interview with the patient one at a time?” a woman who reminded Sloane of her old fourth-grade teacher asked.
Mrs. Harris shuffled her feet, trying not to look nervous, but by this point, it was really a lost cause. She cleared her throat and then did it again, trying to find the right words and failed. “No, I think it would be best if the five of you