To Win the Doctor

By Sara Jenkins Cunningham

“How do you like being an incurable disease, Beautiful?”

Nurse Mary Pendleton is the assistant to Chief of Staff Vince Collier, and how could she help but love him? Fifteen years her senior, he is handsome and kind, and openly admires and depends on Mary. If he is married, he foolishly chose Roxanne Collier for her money, which allowed him to build a successful career as the head of a major sanatorium for tuberculosis patients. Only his deep guilt, the feeling that he has been handed everything on a silver platter belonging to his father-in-law, seems to keep him tied to Roxanne.

Now Mary, deciding she needs to stop torturing herself and get on with her life, tries to resign from her post working alongside Vance, but he instead finds another job for her, working for young Dr. Tom Hazard, whose new ideas are causing uproar throughout the hospital. Soon Tom is beginning to unbend from his nose-to-the-grindstone habits enough to notice that Mary is beautiful and intelligent, and to wonder if she might be the woman of his dreams. But when Roxanne—the perfect doctor’s wife, beautiful, stylish, a brilliant hostess, even if she hates every minute of it—takes up with Dr. Fritz Bascomb, it might be the push Vance needs to walk out of his marriage and into Mary’s arms. Which will win out—Mary’s newly sparking interest in Tom, or her long-smoldering love for Vance?