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‘I need a shower. I’ll find Joyce.’
Ten minutes later, Hailey had showered and changed into a pair of scrubs. It wasn’t ideal but she only had a couple of hours left to make do. Joyce was wheeling her mop and bucket out of the bay as Hailey approached.
‘Thanks for mopping up, Joyce.’
‘No worries, love.’
Hailey stood at the entrance to the bay and watched Callum still deep in conversation with Timothy. He was sitting on the edge of the low chair, bent forward at the hips with his elbows propped on his thighs, Timothy safely cradled in his outstretched arms. He was slowly rocking him, his big hands supporting Timothy’s head and neck expertly.
She’d spent five minutes in the shower trying not to think about Callum Craig’s expert hands and what they’d done to her body. Dear God, pull yourself together! She strode into the bay annoyed with herself and her one-track thoughts.
‘Thank you, Callum,’ she said briskly, desperate to maintain a professional façade in front of him when in reality she was wearing underwear she’d washed out in the shower and dried to the best of her ability in a few minutes and her brain was remembering acutely every second of their passionate clinch last week.
‘Shh,’ Callum scolded quietly, looking up at her.
He tried hard not to do a double-take when he saw her. She was fresh from the shower and in scrubs and looked way more appealing than he’d ever thought possible. What was that old song? Something about women in uniform? He had a sudden urge to retrain as a surgeon.
Her hair was damp around the edges the odd wet tendril fell from a hastily constructed ponytail. Her face was free of make-up and he could see the freckles across her nose that had fascinated him so much at the ball.
Hailey looked down at the efficiently wrapped bundle, looking even smaller in Callum’s comparatively giant-like grasp. ‘Oh, he’s asleep,’ she whispered, momentarily caught up in Timothy’s button nose and cute bow mouth.
She crouched down in front of Callum and gently stroked Timothy’s forehead, being careful to avoid the taping of the scalp vein IV. He looked like a glowworm toy all swaddled in his polar fleece bunny rug, only his head visible.
Callum watched Hailey’s face soften. She’d marched over here all businesslike but one look at Timothy’s cuteness and she had collapsed like a house of cards. It was the last thing he needed to see. More evidence of how good she was with kids.
He cleared his throat quietly. ‘I examined him while you were gone. There’s a definite olive shaped mass in his stomach now. I think an ultrasound would be a waste of time. I’m going to see if we can schedule him for OT at the end of this afternoon’s list, tomorrow morning’s if not.’
Hailey looked up at him. She knew that the lump Callum had felt was the muscles of the pylorus at the distal end of the stomach which had become thickened and enlarged. That made it difficult for food to travel through, and eventually over the first few weeks of life, as in Timothy’s case, they become more contracted, resulting in forceful vomiting, failure to thrive and dehydration with sometimes severe electrolyte imbalance.
‘Do you want us to fast him?’
Callum nodded. ‘I’m pretty sure his stomach is empty now so, yeah, let’s fast him and I’ll write you up an increase in his IV fluids.’
Hailey nodded. Crouched as she was, their heads were quite close. The urge to touch his hair returned and she clenched her fists.
‘I’ll see to it.’
Callum nodded. He was reluctant to move. Holding a baby again was nice. It bought back such lovely memories of Tom at this age—before Annie had died, before the leukaemia. Hailey was looking at him with a similar appreciation of such a tiny bundle and he felt that connection with her again. The one he’d felt since the ball.
Hailey was distracted by his hair again. It just begged her to touch it. She shouldn’t be but suddenly she was wondering how it would feel rubbing against her skin. Rubbing in places that were entirely inappropriate to be wondering about at work.
She looked away, embarrassed, but not before she’d seen Callum become aware of her blush.
‘Hailey? Everything all right?’
She closed her eyes. She couldn’t bear the tone of his voice. The one that spoke of shared intimacies. That wasn’t how their relationship was going to be.
She looked up, looked him straight in the eyes, and gave a nonchalant shrug despite her heart hammering like made. ‘I was just wondering why you wore your hair so short. Are you covering up some premature balding. Or greying?’
Callum laughed. ‘None of the above. I made a pact with Tom. When he started to lose his hair, I shaved mine off too.’ He shrugged. ‘I kind of got used to it. It’s low maintenance and I don’t have to brush it ever.’
