The Single Dad's New-Year Bride. Amy Andrews

smiled. He was seeing a different side to Hailey. She was holding Henry tightly reminding him of a mother lion with one of her cubs. Like the way she’d drawn Tom close the other night. He’d been right earlier—she was a natural. She’d known instinctively that Henry had needed comfort. Just as she had known how to talk to Tom the other night. Not like a bratty, unwelcome kid, but like an equal.

      ‘Thank you. You were great.’

      ‘Really?’ She grimaced. ‘I felt all fingers and thumbs.’

      He nodded, still stroking Henry’s back. ‘You were very cool under pressure.’

      She did laugh this time. ‘Didn’t feel very cool inside.’

      He shrugged. ‘That’s only normal. We wouldn’t be human if something like this didn’t freak us out a little.’

      Hailey rubbed her cheek against Henry’s head as he snuggled into her neck. ‘You, too?’

      ‘Just because I wear a white coat, it doesn’t mean that an emergency situation won’t send my blood pressure up.’

      Hailey nodded. She’d dealt with quite a few emergency situations over the course of her nursing career but they still managed to turn her into jelly on the inside. It was nice to hear an experienced paediatrician admitting to similar feelings.

      ‘He’s asleep.’

      Hailey looked down into Henry’s sweet, sleeping face. ‘I’m sure he’s utterly exhausted, poor darling.’ She laid him gently back in his cot.

      Callum watched as she covered him with a colourful bunny rug and lingered, caressing his cheek. She obviously cared about her young charges. She would make a great mother. The kind of mother Tom had been nagging him about to give him that baby brother.

      ‘I’d better get back to my paperwork,’ he said, dragging his thoughts away from the realm of fantasy.

      Hailey watched him go, her hand still on the sleeping bundle in the cot. Working side by side with Callum to bring Henry back from the brink had been real nail-biting stuff but she couldn’t deny how alive it had made her feel or how long it had been since she’d felt this invigorated.

      It would be wrong to read too much into it.