When her doctor fiance was killed while serving in Vietnam, lovely nurse Leah West wanted only to forget. Gratefully she accepted an assignment to care for a child seriously injured in an auto accident, for it meant going to live in the isolated mansion of Sand Castle, far from painful memories.
But soon Leah found it was not that easy to escape. In her appealing, yet tragically embittered young patient, Leah had to meet her greatest test as a nurse. And in the impassioned rivalry for Leah’s affections between the child’s wifeless father, the brilliant and sardonic Alan Saber, and his handsome playboy brother, Hutch, Leah had to face her most agonizing test as a woman.
Once the bus left Key Vaca, the knowledge that she was almost there took possession of her entirely. Simone began to tremble with it. A deep trembling that did not reflect itself on the surface; not in any visible unsteadiness of her hands, not in any perceptible quickening of her breath.
This place they had quit, this town called Marathon, was only seven feet above sea level — or so the guidebook open in her lap had assured her. Here ended the Upper Keys, part of the continental plateau stretching northward and westward from Florida for thousands of miles. From here on, the incredible bridge linked only true islands. And on one of them, one of the smallest of them, one of the most insignificant dots along this last lap of Route One’s coastal sweep from Maine to the Florida Strait, she would find Pete.
Galleon Key! she thought. And: Only a little farther now!
The watery world outside her window shimmered unstably, less as if it were actual waves and sunshine than as if it existed only by illusion, like a heat mirage on a melting black tar roadway. The big bus, a laggard through the towns of the upper archipelago, suddenly found wings. It hit Seven Mile Bridge with the rush of a balloon-tired tornado, seemingly intent upon gobbling the span’s entire length at a gulp.
The bus was filled, except for scattered vacancies. Simone herself sat beside one of those, in the second seat behind the driver but on the opposite side. Through the wide windshield, she had an excellent view of miracles to come; of miracles, if not of the most important one.
Pete…she thought. He might have been in the spare place beside her. He might have been holding her hand. He might have been — Pete!
Could Nurse Felicity give up her beloved mountain town and childhood sweetheart to marry a young city doctor?
Nurse Felicity grew up in the Georgia hill country and watched her father doctor the sick there. She understood the natives and they trusted her.
But Felicity loved a strong-willed mountain lawyer who resented her work. Could she forget him and start a new life with young Dr. Aleck Potter, somewhere away from “injun medicine and voodoo witchcraft”
“Perhaps I’d like to work in the maternity ward because it’s about the one place in the hospital where I won’t run into the new S.S.R.” Camilla Camden confided to her partner at the hospital Fancy Dress Ball.
It was just as well Camilla didn’t realize just who she was talking to!
Hope Bradshaw found happiness in nursing, because helping others gave her a sense of dignity and purpose. Her life seemed to be complete when the young resident at her hospital, Dr. Ray Shelley, asked her to marry him.
But then came the day when her fiance made a mistake which caused the death of a patient and Hope was faced with a terrible dilemma. Should she confess to his error and thereby save the career of the man she loved — or was her integrity as a nurse more important?
