Chapter 2

Saturday morning - Luke

"What did she say?" I asked the minute Meg answered the phone.

"Umm. She's thinking about it."

My younger sister was a shit liar. She was a brilliant Ph.D. who could spout off more facts about early nineteenth-century England than anyone wanted to know. But she had no poker face.

"She said no, didn't she?" I groaned.

"At first, she said no," Meg admitted.

"But you talked her into it?" I was skeptical. Convincing one Ms. Elenor Hoffman to come down to Nashville and be my nurse while my broken arm and shoulder wound healed would take more than a couple of halfhearted attempts from my sister.

Ellie hated me. Or at least she pretended to. That was kind of our thing. We gave each other shit while mutually looking out for Meg, who we both would do anything for. Ellie had been Meg's best friend forever, so we'd known each other since we were kids. Ellie had always just…been there. And somewhere around high school, when I was a junior and Meg and Ellie were freshmen, Ellie and I started giving each other hell. I can't remember how it started. It just became our thing. And I, for one, enjoyed it. Come to think of it, my friendship—if you could call it that—with Ellie was the longest-standing relationship I've had with a woman I wasn't related to. Mostly because we'd never tried to date. And there'd only ever been one time when we'd almost— Wait. That doesn't matter. The point is I didn't do long-term commitment. I'm solidly allergic to it. Short-term equals no commitment. Just fun. Exactly how I like it.

Ellie thought I was a deadbeat and a player. Which wasn't completely untrue. Especially while I was sleeping on Meg's couch and playing whatever gigs my band could get around Milwaukee. Meanwhile, I thought Ellie was a tight-ass. A super-hot tight-ass, but far too rigid for my taste and way too easy to mess with. Of course, even without dating, Ellie was just one in a long line of women I'd managed to disappoint. Only now I needed to reverse her opinion of me. Pronto. So she'd agree to be my nurse. Easier said than done.

Ellie had gone to UW-Madison, become a nurse practitioner, and returned to Milwaukee. According to Meg, Ellie loved her job. I'd gone out to Stanford, stayed in California, became a structural engineer, and hated every minute of it. We hadn't seen each other in years. That is until, on the eve of my thirtieth birthday, I quit my very lucrative engineering job in Northern California and moved back to Milwaukee to take up singing. It took three years, but my band finally played in front of the right people, and now, a year after being signed to a recording contract, my life was totally different, and I was living in Nashville. Dream come true.

Only the dream had been put on ice temporarily two weeks ago when our tour bus crashed in North Carolina while coming around some big-ass curve on the side of a mountain. In addition to the window shattering and a piece of bent metal stabbing me in the shoulder, my left arm broke, which meant I couldn't play the guitar. After much discussion with the tour company and our managers, it was decided to postpone the rest of the tour until the end of the summer, after my arm completely healed. It sucked, but what could I do about it? I'd been just fine until the insurance company had sent out a home health care nurse who took a bunch of crazy pictures of me that ended up in the tabloids. There was even one of my junk out on the internet somewhere. The woman had managed to sneak into my room while I was in the shower. The whole ordeal had totally freaked me the fuck out.

All I can say is that I hope it was worth losing her job over. But the celebrity gossip sites may have paid her enough to make it worth her while. I have no idea. All I do know is that there's no way I'm letting another stranger into my house.

My arm was healing nicely, according to the doctor who came to my house each week. The shoulder wound was pretty bad, and my label insisted that, per the insurance company backing our tour, I had to have a full-time nurse with me at the moment. I didn't even want a nurse, didn't think I needed one either, but the damn insurance company was throwing a fit, and there was only one person I trusted. Nurse Ratched. Which was one of the many nicknames I'd given Ellie over the years. She hated it, which made it more fun for me. Turns out, giving her shit for all these years may not have been my best move because now I needed her, and she hated my guts. I'd thought we were only joking. Mostly. But I had a lot of groveling to do if I was going to get her to agree to be my nurse for the next several weeks. To that end, I obviously needed to take over from Meg. It sounded as if she'd done all she could.

"Give me Ellie's number," I said to Meg.

"I don't have her permission to do that," was Meg's prim reply. Classic Meggie. My sister had definitely turned into a much more calm, casual person since getting with my best friend, Jeremy, last year and beginning a side hustle as a romance novelist, but she was still a rule-follower at heart.

"Seriously? I'm not going to stalk her or anything," I replied.

"I'll three-way call her," Meg offered.

"Fine." A conversation was probably my best bet. I'd always been good with talking. But Nurse Ratched might just hang up on me. It was probably best that Meg's number showed up on Ellie's phone instead of mine. I cleared my throat and waited for the call to go through.

Ahem. I took a deep breath and prayed to the god of uptight, hot nurse practitioners. Let the groveling begin.