Velvet is about to breathe her last and doesn’t even know it when Patrick O’Leary lays her on the bed in a very strange house. When she does awake from a fever-induced coma, she finds herself in a cabin with Dr. Hoyt Baxter, who’s hateful, mean and spiteful and doesn’t care if she lives or dies, so long as she’s out of his house and his life as soon as possible. Which is exactly what Velvet wants, but she has to have the strength to walk out the door before she can actually do it. Hoyt had stopped practicing medicine a year before, vowing he’d never be a doctor again, but when it came right down to the wire, he did bring Velvet Jane Dulan back to life, a choice he would live to regret for many weeks. She interfered with his self-imposed hermitship. She shook the rut he’d been living in all the way to the roots. He just wanted her to be gone, but every plan he made to get rid of her backfired, and he found himself stuck with the unwanted woman. Until finally he realized that he did want her to stay. However, it was too late. Or was it?