Would his arrangements include putting the baby up for adoption?

How would she fare in the ranks of adoptive parents? A single parent who worked full time? There were so many childless couples out there, and those who could be full-time parents—social workers would surely favour such families for a healthy little baby like Emmaline. And shouldn’t she have been on a list?

Her mother would love a grandchild and she’d be happy to mind her while Marty worked.

But surely there was that list of hopeful adoptive parents—a list without the name Marty Cox even at the bottom…

Private adoptions?

She’d read of them, but did they really happen?

She glanced at the man again, but trying to read his face was like trying to read a blank sheet of butcher’s paper.

‘You are concerned?’

She’d turned away so had to look back at him.

‘Concerned?’

‘You sighed.’

‘I never sigh!’

‘Never? Not in the dead of the night when sleep won’t come and your thoughts are too confused to be sorted into shape? Not even when people’s stupidity creates problems for themselves and others? Why would you not sigh?’

‘Because it’s defeatist!’ Marty snapped, remembering something her mother had told her when she’d been very young and had probably been sighing about the unfairness of fate. ‘Why bother sighing, when you could be doing something about whatever is wrong? And if you can’t do anything about it, then again, why sigh? It doesn’t achieve anything.’

‘But it does release some tension or emotion, does it not?’

‘So does Tae Kwon Do, and it has the benefit of keeping you fit at the same time.’

‘But you can hardly kick out at your opponent in the operating theatre,’ Carlos said, and Marty, hearing something in his voice, turned to see a slight smile on his face.

He was teasing her!

And she didn’t like it one bit!

Did she really never sigh, or had she simply been making conversation?

Carlos studied his companion as she strode along, her eyes focussed on the path ahead of them, her thoughts who knew where?

Her slight figure moved briskly—a no-nonsense woman, this Marty Cox—no-nonsense, like her name. No-nonsense hair, cut short to hide, he suspected, a tendency to curl. No-nonsense muddy blonde, not highlighted as so many women wore their hair these days. It feathered around her neat head, a lighter colour at the tips, where it brushed against the almost translucent skin on her temples.

And though slim, she had curves in all the right places, and his body had already registered an attraction.

Not that she’d respond!

No-nonsense through and through would be his judgement, except that her eyes belied it. He remembered them slanting towards him as he’d asked a question—a greenish, bluish colour with gold pinpoints around the pupils. Dreamer’s eyes!

He shook his head. The sleepless night could be blamed for this fantasy, although not for the attraction he felt towards this woman. Had Natalie’s princess-like beauty captured Marty’s imagination, prompting her deep compassion, her involvement? Was that why she’d taken so much interest in Natalie’s baby?

Natalie’s baby?

He hadn’t thought of the baby that way before.

And wouldn’t again if he could help it—the idea distasteful somehow.

As the forthright Marty Cox had pointed out, Emmaline was his baby.

But Emmaline?

A fantasy name from the forthright woman?

She was indeed an odd mix.

She was also unclipping her pager from the waist of her jeans.

‘Hospital—A and E,’ she said briefly, picking up the pace of their progress, taking strides that seemed too long for such a petite woman.

He paced beside her.

‘What is your usual procedure with a page? Do you phone in?’

‘I would if I was at home, but we’re only minutes away now, so I’ll be there almost as soon as a phone call. The specialist on night duty must have his hands full for A and E to be paging me.’

They crossed the road and she led the way through a back entrance into the emergency department, lobbing her small backpack onto a shelf behind a manned desk by the door and grabbing a folded scrub suit to pull on over her clothing.

Then, as she thrust her arms into the sleeves, she turned towards him and smiled.

‘Well, get yourself ready. We’re on!’

Her smile wasn’t at all forthright. It was sweet, and slightly shy, as if unrelated to her confident manner and brisk words.

He glanced towards her, hoping she’d smile again, but she was talking to the nurse behind the desk, explaining about the page.

‘Oh, it must be the woman in the car they want you for,’ the nurse said. ‘Her husband’s driven into the laundry bay out the back. Let me check.’ She leafed through some notes on her desk then explained, ‘Full term, breech presentation, feet already out.’