A Doctor In Her Stocking

“I heard, dammit.”

Seth leaned back in his seat, crossing his arms with much satisfaction, grinning triumphantly. “Can you imagine?”

Reed ground his teeth hard. “According to our waitress, she’s also pregnant,” he pointed out. “It was probably just some kind of maternal instinct or hormonal reaction kicking in.”

Seth chuckled. “Yeah, you wish.”

There was no way Reed was going to get out of this one, he thought. Seth had gotten lucky tonight. He’d taken a chance that they’d encounter some bleeding heart like himself, and for once in his life, the guy’s gamble had played out. Which meant no golfing vacation in Scotland. No bottle of thirty-sixyear-old, single-malt scotch. But worse than all that, now Reed was going to have to do something…nice…for somebody.

In a word, ew.

“All right, you win,” he conceded. “I’ll perform a good deed. Can I just write a check to the Salvation Army?”

Seth smiled. “Of course you can. But don’t think for a moment that doing so will settle our wager.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

“You have to perform a good deed,” his friend reminded him. “A physical act of niceness and goodwill. Check writing is too impersonal. But by all means, you can include a check to some deserving organization as part of your payment for your debt.”

“Fine.”

“But you know who could probably really use a helping hand right about now?” Seth added.

Reed narrowed his eyes. He could tell by the other man’s tone of voice that he wasn’t going to like the suggestion that would inevitably follow.

“Mindy, that’s who.”

Yep, Reed had known he wasn’t going to like his friend’s suggestion at all.

“I mean, think about it,” Seth continued. “She’s pregnant, she’s about to be evicted. And just three weeks before Christmas, too. Evicted, do you believe that? What kind of scumbag landlord does such a thing?”

Reed frowned at him. “Uh, yeah, I do believe that, Seth. I’m the one who expects the worst from everybody, remember?”

Seth gave that some thought. “Oh, yeah. Well, there you have it. Sometimes you’re right. Not usually,” he quickly interjected when Reed opened his mouth to pounce on the concession. “But sometimes. Anyway, getting back to Mindy.”

“I’d rather not.”

“I think she’d be a likely recipient for your goodwill,” Seth went on, ignoring, as always, Reed’s objection.

“Fine. Then I’ll write her a check.”

Seth shook his head. Vehemently. “No, no, no, no, no. You’re missing the whole point. You have to do something nice for her. A good deed.”

“Hey, writing a check is doing something. It involves a physical activity.”

Seth made a face at him. “You know what I mean.” Then, before Reed could utter another word, his friend lifted a hand and called out, “Oh, Mindy! Excuse me, Mindy?”

Reed squeezed his eyes shut tight. He could not believe what was happening. He felt as if he was in seventh grade again and his best buddy, Bobby Weatherly, was about to reveal the crush Reed had had on Susan Middleton. Man, that had been humiliating. To this day, Reed simply could not speak to any woman named Susan without feeling embarrassed. Now it looked as if he was going to have the same problem with all future Mindys.

The little blond waitress appeared to be understandably confused as she approached their table but she didn’t seem at all anxious. As she drew nearer, though, Reed saw that she looked even more fragile and exhausted than she had from a distance. Her eyes were smudged by faint purple crescents, her cheeks were overly pink, as if she’d exerted herself far too much this evening. Her face had a thin, pinched look to it, as if her pregnancy so far had left her drained.

As a doctor, even if he was a cardiologist instead of an obstetrician, he knew pregnancy hit different women different ways. Some women continued on with their lives as if there were nothing out of the ordinary going on with their bodies. Some women had more energy than ever. And some, like Mindy, were left looking almost ghostlike, thanks to the extra work their bodies were forced to perform in order to generate life.

She wrapped her sweater more tightly around herself as she paused by their table. Her gaze lit first on Seth, and then on Reed, then quickly ricocheted back to Seth, as if she’d been troubled by something in Reed’s expression.

“Can I help you?” she asked.

Her voice, too, was thin and fragile, soft, but warm. She looked to be in her midtwenties, Reed thought, even if she did carry herself like an old woman. The other waitress’s words came back to him, almost as if he hadn’t heard them clearly the first time. She said Mindy’s husband had “gotten himself killed,” thereby leaving this young woman a widow. She’d suffered a very significant*md;and very recent, seeing as how her pregnancy was barely showing—tragedy, and now she was about to suffer another in being evicted from her home.

Why did life do that to some people? he wondered. Why did it just keep hitting them and hitting them and hitting them, then kicking them again for good measure when. they were down? Why were some people singled out from others to receive the lion’s share of misfortune? It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. People like this pale, fragile woman surely deserved better than that.

“My friend and I couldn’t help but overhear that rousing rendition of ‘Happy Birthday,”‘ Seth said, scattering Reed’s thoughts. “Nor could we help but notice that you seemed to be leading the choir.”

Mindy smiled. “Yeah, it was great, wasn’t it? Well, not the singing necessarily,” she quickly qualified with an even brighter smile. “I know I have a long way to go before I could be a Supreme. I meant it’s great that Mr. McCoy has reached his eightieth birthday. Eighty! Isn’t that amazing?” she asked, her voice growing more animated. “I mean, think about it. He’s lived through the Roaring Twenties, the Depression, World War II, the Race for Space, the Cold War, Vietnam.”

“And he survived leisure suits and the disco era, too,” Seth added. “No mean feat, that.”

Mindy nodded. “Exactly. The world has changed so much in his lifetime. And he can remember all of it. It’s incredible.”

Reed looked over at Seth and found his friend hanging on Mindy’s every word, as if she were revealing the secrets of the universe to him. “Incredible,” he echoed in a voice that Reed had heard before, the one Seth used when he was fast falling for a woman he shouldn’t be falling for, fast or otherwise.

Of course, Seth fell fast for a new woman nearly every hour, which meant that Reed should put a stop to his descent right now. That way he could spare the innocent Mindy the ugly aftermath of his friend’s wandering ways.

“Miss, uh…” Reed began.

The waitress turned to him, but where she’d had a sunny smile in place for Seth, her features quickly schooled into a polite, if bland, expression for him. “Mindy is fine,” she told him.

Yes, Mindy is indeed fine, Reed thought before he could stop himself.

That thought was immediately followed by another, one that essentially went, Holy cow! Where did that come from? Immediately, he pushed both thoughts away. She was pregnant, for God’s sake, he reminded himself. No way did she deserve to be ogled like a.like a.like a beautiful woman, he finished lamely. Even if that was precisely what she was. She was a beautiful woman. One who was waif thin and delicate looking.

She was in no way the kind of woman he normally ogled, anyway, pregnant or otherwise. He preferred women his own age, professional women in his own income bracket, women who’d shared some of the same life experiences he’d had himself. Strong women. Women who didn’t look so damned exhausted and.well, fragile.

“Mindy,” he said. “You’ll have to excuse my friend here. He’s easily impressed.”

She nodded, but somehow he knew she had no idea what he was talking about. “Well, enjoy your dinner,” she said hastily, turning away.

“Wait,” Seth exclaimed, halting her progress, “don’t go.”

She spun around again, but this time her expression was unmistakably wary. “Was there something else? I’ll be happy to go get Donna for you.”

“No, no,” Seth told her. “It’s what we can do for you. Or rather, what my friend and colleague can do for you. Because, Mindy, sweetheart, Dr. Atchison here is about to make you an offer you can’t refuse.” Seth turned his attention pointedly on Reed and asked, “Aren’t you, old buddy, old pal?”

Mindy eyed first the blond man in the booth before her, and then the black-haired one…and felt the hairs on the back of her neck leap to attention. The two men were like color negatives of each other: one handsome, fair and blue-eyed, the other handsome, dark and brown-eyed. Their dispositions, too, seemed to be utterly opposite each other. Where the blonde put Mindy immediately at ease and seemed pleasant enough, the dark-haired man sent every sense on alert and made her entire body hum with electricity.

Not that he seemed scary by any stretch of the imagination. Not in a dangerous way, at any rate. He did, however, inspire a kind of caution, the kind a woman felt when faced with a man who had the potential to break her heart. Strange, that, she thought, seeing as how she’d only known him for about thirty seconds now.

Although both men were certainly attractive, the blonde was a bit too boyish in his looks, a bit too adorable in his presentation, for Mindy to find him anything other than kind of cute. The dark-haired man, however.