“Tell me about him.” I didn’t really care, but I didn’t want Lissy to go home, either.
Two months ago I broke up with a fellow I’d been dating from church. To be truthful, the relationship was more serious on his side than it was on mine, but I do miss his company. Nights are longer without him to talk to on the phone or drop by.
It was for the best. Hank Marcus has a plan for his life. It includes a wife, which could have been me had I said yes, and a fast track in his business. He’d begged me to marry him and come with him to Mississippi where his company is opening a new plant. That was a huge part of the problem. My life plan does not currently include marriage or Mississippi. Although I miss Hank, I’m not devastated without him, either. When I marry, it will have to be to a man I refuse to live without. And that, I’m learning, may take some time to find. The prospects are dim right now, but I’m so busy it doesn’t really matter.
“I don’t know much about him. No one does. He keeps to himself. He’s well respected in the medical community and when he speaks, people listen. The board is giddy with joy at having him here, of course. His patients love him and the nurses are scared of him because he is so meticulous and exacting. He spends almost no time in small talk with anyone. He leaves immediately after his work is complete and doesn’t ever tell anyone where he is going or what he is doing. I’ve heard he has a child, a little boy. He’s great with kids. I’ve seen him with the brothers and sisters of new babies. I’ve never heard anything about a wife, but who knows? He’s certainly not telling.”
“For not knowing anything about him, you seem to have quite a bit of information,” I observed. I dug into the bag of chocolate chips Lissy brought to the table.
“People talk, I listen.” Then she grew serious. “Listen, Molly, I really think that since you are the first doula ever to darken Dr. Reynolds’s doorstep, so to speak, you should tread very carefully if you want him to give you his stamp of approval. He’s got a lot of influence in this hospital.”
“How did he get so powerful, anyway?”
Lissy looked at me, shocked. “You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“Bradshaw Medical Center. Dr. Everett Bradshaw?”
“Sure. He funded the hospital forty years ago. He was a relatively young man at the time. His picture is hanging in the front lobby where no one can miss it.”
“Exactly. Dr. Reynolds is Clay Bradshaw Reynolds. His grandfather funded this hospital. If it weren’t for the Bradshaw family, this facility wouldn’t exist. When he moved here to be on staff, the buzz was that when he spoke, everyone was to listen.”
My heart sank. He really could put the kibosh on my idea for a fledgling doula program at this hospital.
“He hasn’t been as demanding as everyone expected,” Lissy continued, “but he is fanatical about what happens to what he calls ‘his’ mothers. All I can say is, watch your step.”
His mothers? And all along I’d thought they were my mothers.
Chapter Two
“How’s my favorite Irish lassie?” Tony DeMatteo grinned at me and dangled a Snickers bar in front of my nose. “Want to share?”
“Of course I do, but only if you promise to quit calling me a lassie. I feel like you’re talking to a dog every time you say it.” I took a swipe at the candy bar, and he pulled it neatly away.
“That’s the last thing you are, Molly.” His dark brown eyes twinkled with warmth. “But a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
Tony is the only male nurse on the ob-gyn floor, a Shakespeare buff and an incorrigible romantic. Combine that with his unquenchable enthusiasm for living, passion for good food and lots of fun and Tony is virtually irresistible. All the single women in the hospital are, or have been at one time or another, madly in love with Tony. He has a knack of dating and breaking up with women and leaving them still loving him. He is a professional bachelor and masterful at it. At one end of the spectrum, Tony is the ultimate charmer. Dr. Reynolds, according to the hospital rumor mill, is the other. The men at Bradford Medical Center run the gamut.
I love Tony, too, but as a friend. I might have succumbed to his charms myself if I hadn’t watched him sweep woman after woman off her feet and then, after a few weeks or months, let her down gently. It was easier, I decided, to go directly to friendship with Tony. I’m glad I did. He might have been harder to resist than Hank had he decided to propose to me and move to Mississippi.
“I have Almond Joys in my locker,” he whispered seductively. “An entire unopened bag of miniatures. Want to go to the cafeteria with me and eat them with whole milk?”
“What are you trying to do, make me fat?” It’s a joke around the hospital that Tony can eat anything and not gain an ounce. That’s another reason I’ve avoided a romance with Tony. The women who date him usually gain ten to fifteen pounds during their relationship.
“Why don’t you ever fall subject to my charms?” he asked conversationally as we walked toward the lunch room.
“You’re a slippery slope, Tony. I just don’t get too close to the edge.”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “But you could be coaxed a little nearer, couldn’t you?”
I glared at him. “Don’t get any ideas in your head about romancing me, big guy. I’ve got your number. You love women and you love dating. You just hate committing.”
“Commitment. Such a problematic word.” He sounded put-upon just saying it.
We entered the cafeteria and picked out our lunch. Cottage cheese and a pear for me, three slices of pizza, a strawberry shake and a Dove bar for Tony. Oh yes, and several Almond Joys—with milk.
“I just haven’t found the right one yet, that’s all. Once I do…” He gazed thoughtfully toward the large aviary outside the cafeteria’s glassed windows. “‘Journeys end in lovers meeting, every wise man’s son doth know.’”
“What’s the Shakespeare stuff, anyway? Why do you always quote it?”
He grinned. “I figured out by the time I was fifteen that girls love romantic junk, poetry, flowers, candy. I could get ‘older’ women, the seventeen-and eighteen-year-olds, to date me with that stuff.”
It probably didn’t hurt that you looked like a young Adonis, either, I thought.
“The unexpected part was that, while I was researching good pickup lines, I discovered I liked it—Shakespeare, Byron, Keats, Shelly.” His eyes twinkled again. “Better yet, I found I couldn’t go wrong with those guys.”
“You are an incorrigible, totally irredeemable, unmitigated flirt.”
He leaned back to look at me and put his hands behind his head. The fabric of his white uniform stretched tight over a great set of pectorals. “I know. Ain’t it grand?”
Tony’s gaze flickered from me to something just over my shoulder. I turned to see what had attracted his attention.
It was what—or rather, who—was attracting everyone’s attention these days. Dr. Clay Reynolds.
“Have you worked with him yet?” I asked.
“He’s a perfectionist,” Tony said, “and a control freak during delivery.”
“I just had my first experience with him.”
“How’d it go?”
“I didn’t feel very welcome. It probably didn’t help that my client kept telling Dr. Reynolds that she wouldn’t have been able to get