“If I repaired cars instead of bones and we’d met, say, at the grocery store in the produce aisle, would you go out with me?”

      Jacqui’s mouth twitched with what might have been a reluctant smile. “That’s a lot of ifs.”

      Mitch shrugged, but didn’t look away from her face.

      “Okay, maybe,” she said after a moment. “If all those things were true—which they aren’t—I might consider going out with you. But even then, I doubt it would go anywhere. There are other things that would get in the way.”

      He figured they could work on those other things later. At least they had established that she wasn’t entirely indifferent to him. He smiled. “Then let’s pretend and see what happens. If it doesn’t work out—then there’s nothing lost, right?”

      “I’ve never been very good at pretending.”

      He lifted her chin and brushed a light kiss over the lips he had been wanting to taste for much longer than he’d acknowledged even to himself.

      Dear Reader,

      I was once asked if I have a recurring theme in my writing. After thinking about the question for a while, I decided my theme is “home.” By home, I don’t mean a house or apartment—but a refuge. Home can be a physical place, certainly—where one feels safe and accepted and free to be oneself. Home can also mean family—biological relatives or friends to whom you are so close they feel like family. A soulmate, perhaps. A bond that soothes and sustains no matter where you are physically.

      A Home for the M.D. explores this theme in more depth. Jacqui Handy has spent her entire life searching for a home; Dr Mitch Baker has begun to take his own lifelong refuge for granted. They are drawn to each other, but before they can make that commitment, they must each define the meaning and importance of “home.” Is it a place—or a feeling? Perhaps they’ll each conclude, as I did many years ago, that the phrase “home is where the heart is” is the best definition of all.

       Gina Wilkins

      About the Author

      GINA WILKINS is a bestselling and award-winning author who has written more than seventy novels. She credits her successful career in romance to her long, happy marriage and her three “extraordinary” children.

      A lifelong resident of central Arkansas, Ms. Wilkins sold her first book to Harlequin Books in 1987 and has been writing full-time since. She has appeared on the Waldenbooks, B. Dalton and USA TODAY bestseller lists. She is a three-time recipient of a Maggie Award for Excellence, sponsored by Georgia Romance Writers, and has won several awards from the reviewers of RT Book Reviews.

      A Home

      for the M.D.

      Gina Wilkins

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      As always, for my family—John, Courtney,

      David, Kerry and Justin—my own definition of “home.”

      Chapter One

      Dr. Mitchell Baker arrived at his rented duplex just as the firefighters extinguished the last flickers of flame. Glumly, he stood in the rain, surveying what remained of his home for the past six years, now a smoldering, blackened shell. Heavy clouds obscured what little natural light remained at 9:00 p.m., so the firefighters had set up portable lighting to assist them as they wrapped up their work. Normally, street lamps and security pole lights would glow at this hour, but the power was out on this whole street.

      One of Arkansas’s infamous summer storms had crashed through earlier, bringing high winds, booming thunder and dangerous lightning strikes. Somewhere on this tumultuous Thursday night in July, a tree had fallen over a power line, knocking out the electricity to this part of Little Rock almost two hours ago. Mitch’s neighbor in the other half of the duplex—the woman he referred to as “the ditz next door”—had lit candles all through her rooms for light and then left to buy fast food for a late dinner. When she returned, the duplex was fully engulfed in flames.

      Water trickled down his face and dripped off his chin. He reached up to swipe at his eyes with the back of one hand, clearing raindrops from his lashes. The rain was little more than a trickle now, but without a hat or raincoat, he was soaked. He made no effort to find shelter. Instead, he watched the firefighters gather their equipment and listened to the ditz next door as she told her tale to a woman who appeared to be a newspaper reporter. She wasn’t even smart enough to make up an excuse for the fire, he thought with a shake of his wet head. She freely admitted that maybe the dozen or so candles she’d left burning had caught something on fire.

      Maybe? He’d always believed the forty-something bottle-redhead was short a few watts in her mental chandelier, but now he figured most of the bulbs were permanently dimmed, to carry the metaphor further.

      He thought regretfully of a few valued possessions he’d lost in that fire. A quilt his late grandmother had made that he’d used as a bedspread. Electronics equipment. Souvenir T-shirts from college and medical school activities and from his few travels. Pictures.

      Fortunately, his laptop had been in his office at the hospital, and he kept files backed up online, so he hadn’t lost the music and digital photos stored in his desktop computer. Most of his truly precious treasures—things that had belonged to his father and grandfather—were safely stowed in plastic bins in his mother’s attic because the duplex had been too small to provide much storage. But still he regretted the things he’d lost. All his clothes, for example. The only clothing he owned now was a couple of shirts and two pairs of jeans stashed in his office and the sneakers he wore with the blue surgical scrubs in which he’d left the hospital.

      “Dr. Baker? Are you all right?” The woman who lived in the nearest half of the matching duplex next door approached beneath a big, green-and-white golf umbrella. She and Mitch had met not long after he’d moved in, when he’d helped her retrieve her new kitten from a tree that stood between the two rental properties. That kitten was now a fat, lazy cat who liked to come visit him on Sunday mornings and beg for treats. Both Mitch and Snowball would miss those visits.

      “I’m fine, Mrs. Gillis. Thank you.”

      She looked mournfully at the steaming remains of the house, then distastefully at the ditz, who was dramatically wringing her hands for the benefit of a television camera. “I figured that woman would cause a tragedy in this neighborhood, but I thought it would be because of her reckless driving. The way she zips down this street without any regard for anyone—and you know she hit Miss Pennybaker’s mailbox just last week. Now this.”

      “At least no one was hurt, and none of the other houses were damaged.” Mitch smiled reassuringly at her. “All the other stuff can be replaced.”

      “I’ll miss having you as a neighbor. Not many nice young doctors want to live in this neighborhood. They all want to move out to those fancy houses in west Little Rock or some place like that.”

      When he’d moved into the rental, he’d been a very busy, twenty-five-year-old intern who’d been given a month’s notice to find a new place after his former apartment had been sold to a developer. He’d looked for someplace available, convenient to the hospital and reasonably priced, all of which he’d found in the tidy duplex in an aging but respectable midtown neighborhood. He hadn’t intended to stay more than a few months, but those months had stretched into years while he’d spent sixty to eighty hours a week at the hospital and what little time was left over helping his widowed mother.

      Now, two months into his pediatric orthopedic surgery practice, he could afford to buy or build, but he couldn’t think about that now. Not while almost all his worldly possessions were still smoldering in front of him.

      Heaving