A Miracle For The Baby Doctor. Meredith Webber

you cook?’

      He grinned at her, alerting all the bits she’d just damped down.

      ‘You make it sound somehow shameful,’ he protested. ‘I enjoy cooking—well, barbecuing—and patients bring us food so I feel obliged to cook it. Some of them have so little, yet they give whatever they can. But tonight there’s no free gift so we might as well eat out.’

      He hesitated for a moment, then said, ‘You probably want to shower and change before we go. We’ll leave in an hour? Is that okay with you?’

      ‘I won’t need an hour to shower and change,’ she said. ‘Embryologists still get called out at night from time to time, so I’ve retained my get up and go skills.’

      He smiled again, something she was beginning to wish he wouldn’t do because being attracted to a man she’d only just met was ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as reacting to something as simple as a smile.

      ‘Ah, but in our case, remember, we share the bathroom, and after a morning wrestling with a pelican I, too, need to use it.’

      ‘A pelican?’

      ‘I’ll tell you later,’ he said, and for some obscure reason it sounded like a special promise.

      ‘So the shower? You’ll use it first?’ he prompted, before adding with a teasing grin, ‘Unless, of course, we shower together.’

      She didn’t blush—she hadn’t, even when she was young—but she knew if she was a blushing type she’d have been ruby red. Not that she could let him guess that reaction.

      ‘And wouldn’t the other staff view that as unprofessional behaviour?’ she asked, hoping she sounded far cooler than she felt.

      ‘Maybe they wouldn’t know,’ he replied, the teasing note lingering in his voice. ‘They don’t live in, you know.’

      He wasn’t serious, she was one hundred per cent sure of that, yet there’d been an undertone in his voice that unsettled her even more than she was already unsettled.

      An undertone she didn’t want to think about.

      Except the conversation did suggest that he had felt whatever it was that had arced between them...

      ‘I just want to check something back at the lab,’ she said, turning on the spot and hurrying away, calling over her shoulder, ‘so you can have first shower.’

      She was being ridiculous.

      As if he’d be interested in her.

      It was his way. Teasing and maybe a bit flirtatious—laid-back like the islanders—he was that kind of man.

      Could she flirt back?

      The idea excited her but deep down she knew she couldn’t play that game. She’d never been able to flirt.

      Oh, for Pete’s sake, what was she doing, standing in this makeshift lab having a mental conversation with herself about flirting!