With the MD...at the Altar?

With the MD...at the Altar?
Jessica Andersen

Till death do us part?It had been two years since she’d last come face to face with Luke Freeman – and small-town doctor Roxanne Peters recalled the heartache vividly. Bringing in medical expert Luke was Raven’s Cliff’s best hope of solving a deadly illness and working long hours in close quarters led to sizzling tension between the pair.When Luke’s smouldering gaze met Roxanne’s, it was clear he too remembered all they’d once shared. But can they survive the terrifying outbreak spreading through Raven’s Cliff to make it down the aisle?THE CURSE OF RAVEN’S CLIFF – A small town with sinister secrets…

Rather than doing the smartthing and backing away fromhim, she took a step forward.

“Roxie,” Luke said, his voice low in warning. “Be sure before you start something you’ll regret later.”

“I’m not starting anything,” she said, and knew it was the truth. “I’m finishing it. Call it closure, call it once more for old time’s sake…call it whatever you want. I’m going to call it the goodbye kiss I never got.”

Working methodically when her hands wanted to shake and her pulse wanted to race, not even entirely sure what had got into her, Roxanne slipped off her gloves. Then she got him by one lab coat lapel in each hand and used that purchase to rise up onto her toes as his eyes went dark and her own blood heated.

He moved as she did, and they met halfway.

And kissed goodbye.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

Roxanne Peterson – After giving up relief medicine for a place to call home, Rox never expects to find herself handling an outbreak in her hometown of Raven’s Cliff…or needing the help of the man who broke her heart.

Luke Freeman – The hotshot toxicologist has his dream job leading a CDC outbreak team, but this is the first time he’s been called on to handle a town overrun by both an outbreak and a two-hundred-year-old curse. Will his toughest case yet cost the life of the woman he once loved?

Perry Wells – The mayor wants the best for the residents of Raven’s Cliff…or does he?

Bug Dufresne – Luke’s teammate may be key to figuring out what is making the town’s residents sick – and why some of them simply become ill while others become murderous.

Patrick Swanson – The chief of police is fighting a losing battle against a serial killer, a missing woman and a deadly outbreak. Maybe the town truly is cursed.

Theodore Fisher – The eccentric businessman has offered to lift the curse by restoring the old, burned- out Beacon Lighthouse. How is he connected to the mysterious caller pressuring the mayor to sell him the property?

May O’Malley – When Luke’s teammate becomes ill, he’s forced to face some hard truths about himself…and his past.

The Seaside Strangler – This fanatic killer believes that sacrificing a woman to the sea gods lifted the town’s curse five years earlier. Now he must kill again to save Raven’s Cliff.

The well-dressed man – He keeps an injured, unconscious woman in the caves beneath Beacon Lighthouse. What is he after?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Though she’s tried out professions ranging from cleaning sea lion cages to cloning glaucoma genes, from patent law to training horses, Jessica is happiest when she’s combining all these interests with her first love: writing romances. These days she’s delighted to be writing full-time on a farm in rural Connecticut that she shares with a small menagerie and a hero named Brian. She hopes you’ll visit her at www.JessicaAndersen.com for info on upcoming books, contests and to say ‘hi’!

With the MD…at the Altar?

Jessica Andersen

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

Special thanks and acknowledgement to

Jessica Andersen for her contribution to

The Curse of Raven’s Cliff mini-series.

Chapter One

Overtired, overworked and frustrated beyond belief, Dr. Roxanne Peterson pressed her cheek to the cool glass door of her small-town clinic. Even after nearly seventy-two hours of fighting the mysterious illness that had overtaken isolated Raven’s Cliff, Maine, she still couldn’t believe her town was in the throes of a deadly outbreak.

And it was her town, whether or not the intransigent locals accepted her as one of them rather than a newcomer.

She’d chosen this place, these people, despite the seaside town’s remote location, nearly perpetual overcast gloom and the curse that supposedly haunted the area. Honestly, she’d chosen Raven’s Cliff partly because of those things, and because her years of relief medicine in third-world countries had made her want to settle down somewhere, amidst people who needed her.

She’d never expected to be thrust back into desperate working conditions in Raven’s Cliff, fighting a mysterious deadly disease with too little help and not enough equipment or supplies.

Yet that was exactly what was happening, she thought on a long sigh, looking through the glass door of the clinic to the world beyond.

It was pitch-black and raining outside, and thick fog made it difficult to see the shops lining the main street of the seaside town, which led to the town square on one side, the boardwalk and fishing docks on the other.

In past years, even this late on a rainy night, a few locals and tourists would have been window-shopping, exclaiming over the moored fishing boats, or leaning over the cliffside railing to catch a faceful of sea spray from the breakers that pounded the rocky Maine coastline.

There was nobody out tonight, though. Not with death stalking the streets of the quaint fishing village in the form of a strange disease…and what it made its victims become.

The locals were calling it the Curse, referring to a local legend about the town’s sea-captain founder. Rox didn’t put much stock in curses, but the disease certainly had terrifying consequences. Some patients became seriously ill. Others went psychotic.

Thinking of the things that’d happened over the past few days, Rox shivered as she stared out into the rain. During her five years in medical relief work, she’d seen her share of infectious outbreaks and environmental poisonings, yet she couldn’t detect any pattern in this disease. The townspeople were getting sick without apparent rhyme or reason, with symptoms that didn’t match any known disease and had so far proved impervious to the broad-spectrum antibiotics and antivirals she’d tried in the way of treatment.

At the moment she was fighting a rearguard action with supportive, symptom-based therapies. Worse, she didn’t have enough manpower to do the work that needed to be done. Her two full-time staff members had been among the first to get sick, and the other local doctor, who filled in for her when she needed help, was out of the country. Worse, the local hospitals—the closest of which was some forty miles away—were refusing to take patients from Raven’s Cliff, and had barred their doctors from entering the town.

She couldn’t blame the hospital administrators for their decision. In fact, she supported it. With only one road leading into the town, and the only other access from the sea, the town was eminently suitable for a lockdown quarantine that would keep the disease from escaping and spreading to other portions of the state, while the experts worked to identify, contain and cure the disease.

Unfortunately, she was currently the only expert in town, and she was running out of steam.

She was working flat-out trying to keep her patients alive, treating individual symptoms rather than the illness itself because she had no idea what was causing a flu-like disease in some patients, and violent rage in others. Were the townspeople infected with something? Were they being poisoned? Was it some sort of allergin? An environmental toxin? She had no idea, and she was nearly dead on her feet trying to keep up with the work.

She couldn’t stop now, though. The death toll was up to four, the eight clinic beds were full with nonviolent patients and three of the violent patients were currently locked in the basement of the Raven’s Cliff Town Hall, in the RCPD jail.

With no response yet from the plea for help she’d sent the Center for Disease Control, she was on her own.

Tears threatened—grief for the dead, for the dying. For herself and the fact that she felt completely, utterly alone in the town where she’d spent the two happiest years of her bounced-around childhood.

“Knock it off,” she said aloud, hearing the words echo in the waiting room. “Feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to change a thing. Getting some sleep might.”

Sometimes her subconscious did a better job than her waking self when it came to shuffling puzzle pieces into place. Besides, she was so tired she was going to start making mistakes soon if she didn’t catch a few hours of downtime.

Forcing herself to push away from the clinic door, she flipped the sign from Open to Closed, though that was a formality since she was on constant call. Then she flicked off the lights, plunging the waiting room into darkness. She was just about to head upstairs to her apartment when she saw movement outside.

She stopped and stared through the clear glass door, trying to make out details through the fog.

Was someone there? She could’ve sworn she’d just seen a figure slip from the porch to the shadows beside the fog-cloaked building diagonally across the street.

Maybe it’s a dog, she thought when she didn’t see the motion again. Or a raccoon. A deer. Heck, even a bear would be preferable to what her gut told her she’d seen: a human figure hiding in the shadows long after the 8:00 p.m. curfew that Captain Patrick Swanson, the chief of police, had issued earlier that day.