“Logan,” the doctor said, amusement—she hoped—making his mouth twitch. “Ryan Logan. The degrees are up in my office.” He jerked his head to the right. “On the other side of that wall.” She saw his attention flicker briefly to the kids, both of them already out like lights, Noah snoring softly. Dr. Logan looked back at her, barely smiling. “Looks like they’re down for the count.”
She nodded, licked her lips. Figured she may as well preempt the first round of questions. “I didn’t do that to him.”
“I didn’t figure you had. You want some water?”
Maddie nodded again; Dr. Logan poured a glass of water, handed it to her. “Just a sip, now—”
“I know, I know.”
She sipped, handed him back the glass, catching the compassion in his expression. And a boatload of questions, waiting off to the side. He picked up a cordless phone, punched a number into it. “Calling for reinforcements,” he explained. “The midwife. How far along are you?”
“I think I’m about three weeks early—”
He frowned, then spoke to the person on the other end. “Hey, Ivy, got a surprise delivery about to happen over here, was wondering if you’d… Uh-huh.” He laughed softly, etching creases at the corners of his eyes, then sobered. “Small, from what I can tell. Early, a bit. But the head’s engaged, she’s a multip… No, I haven’t. Thought I’d wait for you to do that.” He turned to Maddie, his expression unreadable. “Third baby?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How long you been in labor?”
She opened her mouth to answer, only to be strangled by another pain. Dr. Logan leaned over to massage her shoulder, his kindness adding yet another layer of achiness to the twenty worries already suffocating her.
“Yeah, they’re real strong,” he said quietly into the phone, his eyes locked with hers, silently coaching her through the contraction. “And she’s got that look on her face…. No, not yet, but I wouldn’t wait, if I were you. Membranes ruptured, maybe ten minutes ago? I doubt she’s gonna have a long second phase. Yep, door’s unlocked.”
He disconnected the phone, set it on the nightstand. When the pain subsided, she noticed the severely dipped brows, the firm mouth turned down at the corners.
“Okay, let’s back up here a second—you think you’re three weeks early?”
She didn’t miss the edge to the question. “Yes.”
“Labor came on quick then, I take it?”
“An hour ago, maybe…ooooh!”
Without thinking, she grabbed his hand with the next contraction, squeezing shut her eyes, swallowing down the howl threatening to strangle her. She felt Dr. Logan’s free hand cradle her hard belly, the other warm and steady under the pressure of her fingers. Floating over the pain, his voice eased her through the contraction.
“Minute and a half. Good.” She looked up, grateful to see his expression had softened some. He was younger than she’d at first thought, she realized with a bit of a start. A lot younger. Mid-thirties, maybe. Weren’t country doctors all supposed to have white hair and potbellies?
The bed creaked a little when he eased himself onto the edge. Not looking at her face, he pushed back her nightgown sleeve, strapped the blood pressure cuff to her arm. “By the way, I’m not in the habit of removing a woman’s underpants without knowing her name, either.” A pair of wire-rimmed glasses appeared from his pocket; he snapped them open before settling them into place. “So,” he said, pumping up the cuff. “You are?”
“Miserable.”
He smiled a little, squeezing the bulb until she thought she’d lose the circulation in her fingers, frowning slightly as the needle hitched, dropped. “Pressure’s a bit high, Miserable.”
“Might have something to do with my bein’ a little stressed at the moment.”
He grunted. Strong, smooth fingers slipped around her wrist. He focused on his watch. “New in town?”
“You could say that. And my name’s Maddie. Maddie Kincaid.”
“And…is there a Mr. Kincaid?”
The wedding ring had been one of the first things hocked, not that it had brought much. Still, Maddie found it interesting he wasn’t making assumptions one way or the other. “Not anymore—oh, Lordy!”
“You ready to push?” she thought she heard the doctor say, but since she already was, the question seemed moot.
Ryan grabbed a set of disposable latex gloves from his bag and snapped them on. So much for waiting for Ivy to do the internal. Yes, he was the doctor, but he was also a stranger. And this gal didn’t need any more on her plate right now, that was for damn sure. But she shouldn’t be pushing before he knew if she was fully dilated or not.
“Sorry,” he said, slipping down the sheet. “I really need to—”
“It’s okay.” Marbled knuckles gripped the sheet as she panted out, “But it’s not every man I’d let do this on the first date.”
Biting back a smile, Ryan quickly examined her, relieved to find all systems go. And her blood pressure wasn’t dangerously high, just enough to bear watching. Not that deliveries made him nervous—he’d done his fair share over the past ten years—but he wasn’t real excited about doing an out-of-hospital birth with an underweight woman, three weeks early—she thought—whose case he didn’t know.
“You can go ahead and push now,” he said, leaving the sheet up and peeling off the gloves.
“Like you’ve got any say in it,” she got out, just before her face contorted again. But not with pain this time. With determination.
Ryan wriggled into a fresh pair of gloves, deciding against asking her if she wanted to get the kids up. They were zonked, nobody needed the distraction right now, and if she’d wanted them up, he had no doubt she would have made her wishes known.
Three pushes later, the baby’s head crowned. No surprise there.
“Pant, Maddie, pant! Don’t push, you hear me? Pant the baby out…yeah, like that, good. Baby’s real small…the idea is to birth it, not launch it into orbit.”
For a split second, her startled gaze met his and she looked as though she might laugh…only another surge diverted her attention.
“Pant, honey! That’s right, that’s a girl… Good, good…okay…here we go…!”
He steeled himself for her screams…but they never came. One of his patients had likened giving birth to squeezing a cannonball through the eye of a needle, an image which had pretty much burned itself into his mind. Maddie Kincaid, however, either had the highest pain threshold known to womankind or was possessed of a will Ryan decided he did not ever want to tangle with.
Two blinks later, a tiny, perfectly shaped head slid out, the cord loosely wrapped around the baby’s neck. Ryan easily untwisted it, helping the little thing to rotate before easing first one shoulder, then the other, out from underneath the pubic bone, then presented Maddie Kincaid with her new daughter—five and half pounds, tops, of flailing determination, red and wrinkled and bald, but with a set of lungs capable of waking the dead in three counties.
With a sound that was equal parts laugh and sob, Maddie thrust out her arms. “Give her to me! Is she okay? She must be okay if she’s cryin’ like that, right?”
“She’s fine,” Ryan said, trying to ignore the strange, burning tightness in the back of his throat that assailed