Joan Marlow Golan

      Senior Editor, Silhouette Desire

      Bachelor Doctor

      Barbara Boswell

       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      BARBARA BOSWELL

      loves writing about families. “I guess family has been a big influence on my writing,” she says. “I particularly enjoy writing about how my characters’ family relationships affect them.”

      When Barbara isn’t writing and reading, she’s spending time with her own family—her husband, three daughters and three cats, whom she concedes are the true bosses of their home! She has lived in Europe, but now makes her home in Pennsylvania. She collects miniatures and holiday ornaments, tries to avoid exercise and has somehow found the time to write over twenty category romances.

      Contents

      Chapter One

      Chapter Two

      Chapter Three

      Chapter Four

      Chapter Five

      Chapter Six

      Chapter Seven

      Chapter Eight

      Chapter Nine

      Chapter Ten

      Epilogue

      One

      Operating room one was crowded with observers watching Dr. Trey Weldon, neurosurgeon extraordinaire, at work. The patient’s condition had been deemed hopeless until his referral to Dr. Weldon, who had offered a ray of hope in a daring yet promising experimental procedure developed by the gifted surgeon himself.

      â€œIt’s mobbed in here today,” a wide-eyed medical student murmured to no one in particular. “This is the hottest show in the entire med center. Everybody wants to observe the master at work.”

      â€œYeah. Dr. Weldon rules!” enthused another awestruck med student.

      â€œQuiet!” A nursing student reprimanded the pair. “Dr. Weldon is speaking.” The name was said with hushed reverence.

      Dr. Trey Weldon, in the midst of explaining the intricacies of AVMs or arteriovenous malformations—tangled or malformed arteries or veins in the brain that over time became dilated, exerting pressure or bursting—overheard the students and automatically lifted his eyes to meet the eyes of his chief scrub nurse, Callie Sheely.

      Their gazes connected for only a fraction of a second, but it was long enough for Trey to see a flash of humor light those big dark eyes of hers. He knew she had overheard the students, too, knew that she was smiling beneath her surgical mask.

      His lips twisted into a smile behind his own mask. He’d known Callie would find the students’ overexaggerated hype as amusing as he did.

      There had been a time, not very long ago, when he wouldn’t have seen the humor in such remarks. Of course, he wouldn’t have considered the students’ adulation to be overexaggerated hype, either. Over the years he had grown so accustomed to lavish praise that he simply accepted it as a given.

      Until Callie Sheely. From her he’d come to view certain things—like extravagant compliments—from a different angle. Trey thought back to that fateful time he’d spied Callie grinning in the background while some junior colleagues expressed their excessive admiration of him, to him.

      When he asked her about it later, she’d snickered, unrepentant. It amused her to hear people fawn over him, she’d said. Listening to his minions try to outdo each other while shoveling the…praise, invariably gave her a hearty chuckle.

      Minions? Shoveling? Trey well remembered his own astonishment at her frankness. No one had ever made such a remark to him before, and only Callie Sheely continued to make similar impertinent jests about him, to him.

      But instead of being irked—Trey admittedly didn’t tolerate frivolity or nonsense very well—he had found himself seeing the humor. Sharing her amusement.

      â€œOf course, they genuinely do admire you,” she’d also assured him, and Trey had found himself snickering, a rare event in itself. As a rule he did not snicker.

      However, Callie’s warm assertion had touched a humorous, previously unstruck, chord within him. As if he cared whether he was admired by junior toadies, as if he needed anyone’s assurance about anything! The very idea was laughable.

      And now whenever anyone laid on the compliments or the hero worship a tad too thick, he looked at Callie, and they would share a silent, mutual moment of mirth.

      Trey continued performing the operation, explaining the procedure to his audience while he worked, all the while contemplating Callie Sheely’s irreverence toward his lordly reputation.

      He had been blessed with the ability to think and do several different things simultaneously, while keeping each separate and exact. It was a gift he took for granted, having always possessed it.

      He flicked his finger slightly, and Callie immediately handed him what he wanted, a small sharp scalpel, an instrument