Marisa Carroll - Family Practice

Welcome home…

Dr. Callie Layman isn’t looking forward to going home to White Pine Lake, Michigan. She isn’t looking forward to taking over as the physician in charge of the community clinic after only recently becoming a doctor. She isn’t looking forward to facing her new stepmother, stepsiblings or the changes in her relationship with her father. And she certainly isn’t looking forward to going head-to-head with Zach Gibson, the handsome former combat medic who’s been running the clinic and will now be her assistant.

And yet the community needs her expertise. Her family needs her to help them heal. And, she learns, so does Zach. Callie decides she has to try to help them, but ultimately can she be everything they need her to be?

Maybe he was right....

Maybe Callie couldn’t spin all the separate ends of her family ties together into a long, strong yarn that could be woven into a whole. But she had to try.

Zach lifted his hand and touched her lips, just a brush of his fingertip, but it felt as if her skin had been seared by fire. “I know you have to try. I wouldn’t expect anything less of you. You want what’s best for everyone, but sometimes that just doesn’t happen, Callie. And that’s not your fault. Sometimes you can’t make it all come out right.”

Tears blurred her vision. She blinked them away. She didn’t like being this vulnerable. She didn’t like having her innermost hopes and dreams exposed—particularly to a man as perceptive as Zach Gibson.

And she knew what was going to happen next. He was going to kiss her….

Dear Reader,

Marian and I are thrilled to be contributing our story, Family Practice, to the Harlequin Heartwarming line. For many years we’ve wanted to be able to write a book that concentrated on the emotional aspects of falling in love and staying in love and less on the physical side of the equation. Thanks to Marsha Zinberg and her wonderful editorial staff, we’ve been able to do just that.

Callie Layman is a newly minted M.D. She returns to her small northern Michigan hometown—with real misgivings—to care for its colorful inhabitants and to try to blend the disparate elements of her own complicated family situation, including precocious and antagonistic eleven-year-old stepsiblings, a pregnant stepmother and rebuilding the bond between herself and the mother who abandoned her years before. On top of everything else, she finds she’s obligated to share her practice with handsome physician’s assistant Zach Gibson, who, unlike Callie, knows exactly what he wants from his life. And one of those things he knows he wants is Callie.

Will Callie be able to have it all? A career, a love of her own, a happy life in White Pine Lake? Will she be able to weave all these tangled strands of family and romance into a seamless loving whole, or will it all be too much? Will she end up with her happy-ever-after or will Callie turn her back on everything and everyone she cares about rather than risk it all for love?

We hope you enjoy reading Family Practice as much as we enjoyed writing it.

Sincerely,

Marisa Carroll

(Carol Wagner and Marian Franz)

Family Practice

Marisa Carroll

www.millsandboon.co.uk

MARISA CARROLL

Marisa Carroll is the pen name of sisters Carol Wagner and Marian Franz. They have been writing bestselling books as a team for more than twenty-five years. During that time they have published more than forty titles, many for the Harlequin Superromance line and Feature and Custom Publishing. They are the recipients of several industry awards, including a Lifetime Achievement Award from RT Book Reviews and a RITA® Award nomination from Romance Writers of America, and their books have been featured on the USA TODAY, Waldenbooks and B. Dalton bestseller lists. The sisters live near each other in northwestern Ohio, surrounded by children, grandchildren, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, cousins and old and dear friends.

Before you start reading, why not sign up?

Thank you for downloading this Mills & Boon book. If you want to hear about exclusive discounts, special offers and competitions, sign up to our email newsletter today!

SIGN ME UP!

Or simply visit

signup.millsandboon.co.uk

Mills & Boon emails are completely free to receive and you can unsubscribe at any time via the link in any email we send you.

To Marsha Zinberg

For all your years of excellent editorial advice,

steadfast friendship

and your uncanny ability

to choose the restaurants with the best crème brûlée.

Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CALLIE LAYMAN STEERED her eight-year-old Jeep off the pavement and into a small, scenic turnout. Luckily, it was momentarily devoid of camera-wielding tourists and their bored offspring, and so for a precious few minutes she had the parking lot and the spectacular view of the Sleeping Bear Dunes to herself.

She had a love/hate relationship with this season. Tourism was the mainstay of the economy for this semi-remote region of Michigan’s northern Lower Peninsula; it was also its bane. Tourists came for the unspoiled natural beauty and the opportunity to commune with nature. They stayed, in droves, to complain that their internet connections were too slow, their cell-phone reception was spotty at best and nonexistent at worst, and that the nearest Starbucks was more than an hour away. Through it all, the citizens of White Pine Lake, her hometown, smiled and nodded and kept their opinions on city folks’ strange ways to themselves, as their cash registers jingled and the motel rooms and rental cottages filled up.

The problem for Callie was she felt like one of those city folks these days, one of those barely tolerated outsiders. She’d been gone from White Pine Lake for over a decade, attending college and medical school. She wasn’t ready for what she had agreed to do this summer—assume responsibility for the health and well-being of the citizens of her old hometown. What if she wasn’t up to the challenge? What if she failed them? Luckily, just days before she headed north, she’d gotten another job offer—an escape plan if things here didn’t go well.

She had left Ann Arbor in the early afternoon. It was now a little after eight in the evening. Five hours with only one stop. Not bad travel time on the two-lane state highway. Especially on a late-July weekend when mud-splattered RVs pulling all shapes and sizes of boats and trailers loaded with camping equipment slowed traffic to a crawl.

She was tired and stiff, but she’d managed to arrive a day ahead of schedule. No one expected her until tomorrow, and she was in no hurry to resume her journey. So she unhooked her seat belt and rested her forearms on the steering wheel, soaking in the quiet and the view. Below her the ruffled blue water of White Pine Lake was dotted with fishing boats and the red-and-white sails of small sailboats. The occasional Jet Ski cavorted among them, rooster tails streaked with iridescent rainbows shooting high in their wakes. The sun was just dropping behind the horizon, painting the sky with a dozen shades of red and gold. At the far edge of the lake was the town of the same name, the place where she’d grown up.