The Doctor's Guardian

The Doctor's Guardian
Marie Ferrarella

He first saw Dr. Nika Pulaski hyperventilating in a trapped elevator. Ever the rescuer, Detective Cole Baker felt an instant protectiveness…and sizzling want. Her cheerfulness, not to mention her killer looks, had him reconsidering his loner status. But he couldn't trust her, the prime suspect in a rash of hospital deaths.Who was Nika Pulaski? She outlasted her colleagues at the hospital and spent every minute caring for others. But patients were dying. With every tear she shed, Cole couldn't mask his own emotions, this pull toward a potentially dangerous woman. He raced to find the killer stalking Nika's patients, even if it was the woman he loved. Was she an optimistic healer or a sociopath?

“I’d like to come up,” he told her quietly once he turned off the ignition.

She realized that it was more a question than a statement.

Nika made her choice—as if she could say anything else. “I’d like that.”

Damn? what was he doing, Cole silently demanded, bewildered. He was asking for trouble, for complications, for things he had no time for and didn’t want. Complications that inevitably aroused feelings.

And yet…

And yet there was something about her, something that made him feel alive, that connected him to a world he’d long since walked away from.

He’d forgotten he could actually feel anything.

He’d voluntarily been on the outside for so long, he’d come to believe that was where he belonged. Beyond that, he lived and breathed in a rarified zone that allowed his heart to function, to beat and oversee blood being directed to all his vital organs. But feel? His heart wasn’t capable of doing that.

At least, it couldn’t before.

Now, he wasn’t so sure.

And a large part of him resisted things changing, resisted finding out that his heart could do anything beyond beat.

But the temptation of Nika’s mouth drove his resolutions out of his head, propelling them into a zone that was packed away out of the light of day, a darkened no-man’s-land.

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Dear Reader,

Here we are revisiting that excellent New York City hospital, Patience Memorial, and its evergrowing Doctors Pulaski. It’s Veronika’s turn to find love amid the prescription pads. Nika first meets Detective Cole Baker when he rescues her from a trapped elevator. But his motives are not as noble, since she is Cole Baker’s ailing grandmother’s physician.

Their paths cross again when Cole is sent to investigate allegations that an Angel of Death is “helping” senior-citizen patients breathe their last breath. As fate would have it, the first suspect he needs to clear is Nika. What he doesn’t count on is that the soft-spoken, blue-eyed geriatrics specialist finds a chink in the armor he has around his soul and burrows her way in, making him realize that isolating himself is not the best way to go through life.

I hope that you find this latest installment of The Doctors Pulaski enjoyable. If you do and have missed any of the other stories, there are six other books awaiting your reading pleasure.

As ever, I thank you for reading and, from the bottom of my heart, I wish you someone to love who loves you back.

Love,

Marie Ferrarella

The Doctor’s Guardian

Marie Ferrarella

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

MARIE FERRARELLA

This USA TODAY bestselling and RITA

Award—winning author has written more than two hundred books for Harlequin Books and Silhouette Books, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website at www.marieferrarella.com (http://www.marieferrarella.com).

To Kathleen Creighton,

with deepest sympathies.

The heart recovers,

even when we don’t want it to.

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15