When Jacqueline Clarke came from France to nurse at a Yorkshire hospital she had never known any Englishmen except her father. Soon she was to meet two very attractive ones; her farmer-cousin Guy, who ruled over his broad acres from a centuries-old farmhouse, and the distinguished surgeon of whom nurses spoke in awed whispers as “the great Mr. Broderick.”

Guy fell in love and started proposing marriage almost at once, while she wasn’t supposed even to speak to Mr. Broderick — and what a sensation there was when she did! She couldn’t presume to imagine that he would ever give her a serious thought…and yet the idea of him seemed to come persistently between her and Guy.

Nurse Kyria realized one dream in life — she had become a nurse. But her other dream — her dream of love — seemed beyond her reach.

Nurse Kyria Galonos walked as if she owned the earth and had a mortgage on the moon, for she was in love with Dr. David Nickolaides, head surgeon in the Greek fishing village on Florida’s west coast. And David was the only man Kyria ever wanted or needed. But David and Kyria both had financial responsibilities to their families — responsibilities that forced them to keep postponing their marriage.

Then suddenly two wealthy playboys entered Kyria’s life and offered her everything that David couldn’t…and love besides. Would David wake up before he lost Kyria to another man? Or would Kyria go on waiting endlessly for David and find one day that the exquisite rapture of her love had been dissipated by that waiting?

Nursing in the remote wilderness of northern Canada was a potentially perilous undertaking, but pretty Suzanne Hillard knew only exhilaration as the tiny pontoon plane splashed down on Gold Lake. Her new job as occupational health nurse for the Whiteoak Oil Company released her not only from the humdrum routine of a large general hospital but also from the overprotectiveness of her decorous aunt Geraldine.

Life at the tiny mining camp of Kupark was anything but decorous. Suzanne readily adjusted to living in a rough wooden cabin, taking her meals in the company cookhouse, and nursing out of a breathtakingly well-equipped trailer. The only thing that really bothered her — until she met Mark Bartell — was the knife she glimpsed in Pete Thunderchild’s hand. Resolutely she decided that the lank-jawed old man’s animosity would not inhibit her attempts to befriend his shy, beautiful daughter, Norell, a painter of rare talent.

And then there was the problem of the Mistaseni, the huge granite boulder that was revered as a god by the local Cree Indians. The sacred rock was right in the path of the company’s projected pipeline, and as chief engineer at Kupark, Mark Bartell would have to give the order to blow it up. A clash between him and Indian geologist Angus Bear seemed unavoidable.

Equally unavoidable was the explosive first meeting between the blond engineer and the dark-eyed company nurse, a confrontation that resulted in Suzanne’s being fired on the spot!

In the five years she had been away from her native New England, young nurse Sandra Colson had adapted quite well to her new life in Minnesota, had made friends, and had become a respected member of the staff at St. James Hospital. And yet, every fall, when the leaves started to turn color and drop from the trees, she could not free herself from the memory of New England and what might have been. What might have been if Dr. Bruce Jennings had been true, if he had meant all those things he had said.

But that was five years ago. Surely Sandy had picked up the pieces of her emotional life since then. Yet how much had she learned from that unhappy experience? Wasn’t she really in the same position with Dr. Rich Harvey, a young obstetrician working at St. James? Oh, it was true, he had never promised anything and their relationship had been strictly professional, but Sandy couldn’t help her feelings. The fact he was engaged to Aileen Gorman, her supervisor, a nurse who worked with clocklike efficiency, made things even worse. Every day Sandy had to face them both, and to see Aileen’s triumph reflected in the engagement ring she wore.

When Dr. Harvey offered her a part-time job in the Lamaze natural-birth clinic he intended to start, Sandy got a chance to use the extra courses in obstetrics she had taken. She also got a chance to see exactly how strong the armor she wore around her heart really was.

The trouble between lively, sandy-haired nurse Jane Chapin and handsome Washington attorney Joshua Blake began when they met at the Continental Broadcasting Studios. It was a simple case of mistaken identity — he thought she was an impudent receptionist and she thought he was an aspiring page boy. But what followed turned out to be an intricate matter of international intrigue that involved them both in a dangerous series of romantic double crosses; curious quirks of fate and terrifying realities that threatened both their lives and their love. The truth was the only thing that could save them — but they would have to ignore their own gnawing doubts long enough to find it.