Luke. Jill Shalvis

Carmen leaned back on her elbows, looking as if she didn’t plan on more cleaning anytime soon. “How many patients did you see today?”

      Luke sighed. “A lot.”

      “Any interesting female patients? Say…someone interesting enough to date?”

      Why was it a single man was always such an irresistible setup? “Why?”

      “Because one of them left you some cookies. Must have made a huge impression on her, Dr. Luke.”

      One big wave after another hit the shore, causing shrieks of joy from the bathing beauties. Luke inhaled the salt air, then slowly let it out.

      “Don’t you want to know who left the cookies? Let me help you remember. Blond, tall, gorgeous. And…” Carmen cupped her hands out in front of her chest. “Stacked.”

      Inhaling more salt air…

      “Are you listening?”

      “I’m trying not to.”

      “Oh, you. Do you know who left the cookies or not?”

      Lucy Cosine. He’d stitched her up earlier in the week when she’d neglected to stop at a red light and had plowed into a mail truck, putting her head through her windshield. She was late twenties, rich, husband-searching based on status (her words, not his) and apparently Luke fit the bill.

      Too bad he wasn’t on the market. “Are the cookies any good?”

      “Bah.” Carmen made a face. “Mine are better.” In front of them, one of the two women went down under a wave and came up laughing like an idiot. “Tough job you got there, doctor. Hard to believe you can’t manage to find yourself a woman.” She looked him over critically. “Maybe you have a problem with your attention span?”

      Luke studied the sharp, blue sky, amazingly void of Southern California smog today. “Funny.”

      “Love is a good stress reliever, you know.”

      “We are absolutely not going to discuss sex.”

      “I said love. Not sex.” Carmen’s voice was filled with mischief. “But sex works too.”

      A rough laugh escaped Luke at that. Always, no matter how bad things got—and they’d been pretty bad here and there—Carmen could somehow provide the comic relief. “You’re ruining my bad mood for me.”

      “Good.” Carmen beamed, and reaching over, she noisily kissed his cheek. “I just want you to be happy, Luke. Everyone deserves a little happiness.”

      “I am.” Or he had been happy enough anyway, until Leo’s ultimatum today.

      “Nah, you need a woman for that, one to share your heart, your home, your bed, and not necessarily in that order.”

      Luke would take the woman in his bed part, just about any night of the week—if he had the time and wasn’t on call—but a woman in his heart? Not a chance in hell, not when he lived and breathed his work. What woman in her right mind would want a man who didn’t have anything left to give?

      And what woman in her right mind would want a man, a doctor, who’d just been slapped with a disciplinary action that was likely going to kill him?

      Working in a natural healing clinic for God’s sake. For three months. Unbelievable.

      Truly, he couldn’t think of a worse fate.

      WHEN HER HOROSCOPE SAID the stars weren’t aligned in her favor, Faith McDowell should have believed it and pulled the covers back over her head.

      But lounging in bed had never been her style. As to what was her style, she hadn’t quite figured that out yet. She didn’t have much time for that.

      On autopilot, she turned on the shower, cranked up the radio, and lit a jasmine candle guaranteed to uplift and stimulate.

      Soaping up, she sang at the top of her lungs, because singing was an excellent energy releaser. It worked for all of sixty seconds, which was how long it took for her brain to refuse to be sidetracked by music and scents, and face reality.

      Her reality wasn’t easy to face.

      Just this week, she’d had to give herself a pay cut as Director of Healing Waters Clinic. That meant a lot of macaroni and cheese in her immediate future.

      But at least she still had a clinic, and a lovely building in South Village to house it. She’d opened the place last year, right on North Union Street, the main drag of the town that rivaled Sunset Strip in pedestrian traffic. She’d opened it after four years of being a nurse practitioner.

      Working in a San Diego E.R. she’d seen it all, every kind of suffering, and had always felt modern medicine wasn’t doing all it could. But no one had wanted to hear her ideas of natural healing, of homeopathic healing, of all the ancient and established methods that really worked, not when there were multiple gunshot wounds, motor vehicle accident injuries and other emergency traumas to deal with every day.

      Here, in her healing clinic, she could concentrate on those ideas considered outside the lines of conventional medicine, she could finally concentrate on easing suffering in less invasive ways. Shockingly, the powers that be at the local hospital had been willing to refer people to her, and later had even helped fund her efforts, and she’d never been happier.

      Until one of the local doctors, a Dr. Luke Walker, had publicly raised his nose at her work there. She’d faced such disdain before, only she’d underestimated Dr. Walker’s reputation and following. Once the public had heard his opinion, once they’d realized she didn’t have his support, she’d ended up spending a good part of her day answering questions and debating medical practices, which in turn meant more time with each patient, creating more backlog and long waits. As a result, people weren’t coming back.

      Mercifully, the hospital had stepped in, promising a quick fix. They were giving the clinic an extra hand, one that belonged to Dr. Walker himself, as a matter of fact, for three months of weekends. There, she thought, with her first smile of the day. A silver lining. So there fore, her horoscope had to be wrong.

      She was so sure of it, that when she ran out of hot water with conditioner still in her hair, it was a shock. Then the bathroom scale decided not to be her friend, and to top it all off, she couldn’t find clean socks.

      Already wary of the day and it wasn’t even seven o’clock. She went downstairs. There was one negative thing about living over the clinic on a major street in a major town filled with people who got up early. The street was already filled with joggers, bicyclists, early shoppers and workers; the majority of them young, hip, urban, and far better put together than she had ever been at seven in the morning.

      She located her newspaper, which hadn’t made it to the stoop, but had instead landed in the small patch of wet grass. Picking it up with two fingers, the soggy, chewed mess fell apart like confetti. With a sigh, she looked up into the face of her neighbor’s eighty-pound Doberman. “Again, Tootsie?”

      Tootsie lifted his chin and gave her a doggie smile before trotting off.

      “That’s what you get for living at your work.” This from Shelby Anderson, her co-naturopathic practitioner at Healing Waters, and Faith’s best friend. She came up the walkway and followed Faith into the back door of the clinic, looking more like an actress in her flowered scrubs than the real thing.

      Faith knew Shelby couldn’t help the fact that her blond hair was always just right, and that she needed hardly any makeup to glow, or that her long, willowy body was the only one on the planet that scrubs actually looked good on, but it was still a little irksome, especially so early in the morning.

      “I live above my work, not at my work,” Faith corrected, tugging at her scrubs, which most definitely were not nearly as flattering on her as they were on Shelby.

      “Above work, at work, same thing,” Shelby said. “Both suck.”

      Faith