THE girl was quite lovely.

The clock on the wall said three o’clock, and Tessa’s hospital bed was bathed in afternoon sunlight. Mike had stuck his head around the door three or four times during the morning but each time Tess was still sleeping soundly. Now she opened her eyes as he entered, blinked twice and tried to smile.

Tess was in a single hospital ward, small and comfortably furnished, with windows looking out over a garden to rolling pasture beyond. It was cattle country, if she had the energy to look.

She didn’t. She stared across at Mike as if she was trying to work out just who he was.

This was a different Mike to the one she’d seen the night before. He’d told her he was a doctor and, after his treatment of her shoulder, Tess had had no grounds for disbelief. But now… In clean clothes, his black curls brushed until they were almost ordered, a white coat over his tailored trousers and a stethoscope swinging from his pocket, he was every inch the medico.

He still had the bedside manner she remembered from the night before. He stood at the door and smiled, and Tess was forced to smile back.

And then her gaze dropped in astonishment. A vast liver and white basset-hound was sauntering into her room beside him.

‘Awake at last?’ Mike’s lazy smile deepened as he strolled over to her bed, trying not to appreciate her loveliness too much as he did. The fact that the look of her almost took his breath away didn’t make for a placid doctor-patient relationship at all. ‘Welcome to the land of the living, Miss Westcott.’ His eyes were warm and twinkling. ‘How’s the shoulder?’

‘It seems fine.’ She kept on staring at Strop. ‘So there really was a dog,’ she said. ‘I thought he was part of my nightmare.’

‘What, Strop?’ Mike grinned. ‘He’s no nightmare. He’s solidly grounded in reality. So well grounded, in fact, that if he gets any closer to the ground we’ll have to fit him with wheels.’