Chapter One
“Be careful, Molly. Dr. Reynolds’s bite is worse than his bark.”
I spun around to see my friend Lissy Franklin hurry past me pushing a med cart. “Tiptoe softly,” Lissy mouthed before turning into one of the birthing rooms on the third floor of the Bradshaw Medical Center.
I took a deep breath and recalled all I’d heard about Dr. Reynolds in the few short weeks he’s been at Bradshaw General. It isn’t pretty, at least not from my professional perspective.
He’s a great ob-gyn physician, no doubt about that. His reputation preceded him from his former position at a large hospital in California. He’s only been practicing medicine in the Twin Cities of Minneapolis-St. Paul for three months and already women are booked weeks in advance to be his patients. I, however, hadn’t had a client who was his patient until today.
He’s cute, too. Gorgeous, actually, with dark hair, impossibly blue eyes and a trim physique that, it’s rumored, comes from running and working out two hours a day. Where a doctor gets time like that, I don’t know, but maybe it helps take the edge off his temper. It’s his personality that gets low points from all the nurses. He demands perfection and settles for nothing less. Felicity, or Lissy as I usually call her, says he can make them cry with a look.
Maybe not all the rumors are true. Fortunately, at least one of my personal experiences with him has belied that opinion.
“I’m so glad you agreed to come to this visit with me,” new mother Tiffany Franks had told me several weeks ago as we sat together in the waiting room of her pediatrician’s office. “I didn’t want to go to the baby’s first doctor visit alone. My husband said he couldn’t take time away from work and no one else was available. I’m still so nervous with the baby.” The baby in question was a solid sleepy lump in my lap, hardly a reason for Tiffany’s anxiety.
A week or two of experience would resolve that. “The doctor will tell you little Max looks great and you will feel a hundred percent better in no time.”
We were examining Max’s chins—all four of them—when a man strode into the office and up to the receptionist’s desk. “Is Dr. Harley in?”
The receptionist looked up at him and her eye-lashes began to flutter like hummingbird wings. “Why…uh…who?”
“Dr. Harley,” the insanely handsome Dr. Reynolds said. “Your boss?”
“Oh, yes.” She blushed. “Do you have an appointment?”
“Do I look like I should?” he snapped impatiently as he opened his hands to show that there was no baby in them.
His legs, however, told a different story. A blond toddler with lemonade curls and sapphire-blue eyes had glommed onto his left leg. She held her teddy bear in one hand and clung to his calf with the other. On his right leg, a little boy proceeded to run a Matchbox car up and down as if his expensive trousers were a vertical racetrack. Two or three other children were creeping closer to get a good look at the man.
“I’ve never seen anything like it!” Tiffany whispered. “He’s like the Pied Piper. The children don’t seem to have any fear of him at all.”
He appeared accustomed to being a human jungle gym.
“I’m Dr. Reynolds,” he told the starstruck receptionist. “We’ll be working closely since I deliver babies and he picks up where I leave off. I need to talk with him.” His words were clipped.
“Of course. I’ll just…” The woman’s voice trailed off. She seemed to have lost track of her job description under his expectant and impatient gaze.
“Now.”
That woke her up. She jumped to her feet and trotted toward the examining rooms.
As she did so, Dr. Reynolds picked up the blond cherub. “Hi, baby girl. How are you?”
The child gurgled gleefully and patted his cheeks with her little palms. “Where’s your mommy?”
A young woman in jeans stood up and came forward.
“She’s beautiful,” he said as he handed her the child.
The woman flushed with pleasure. Dr. Reynolds might have said more, but the little boy with the toy car held his arms out to be picked up.
“He’s a kid magnet,” Tiffany whispered. “They aren’t the least bit afraid of approaching him even though he snapped at the receptionist. Remarkable.”
I’d thought of the incident several times since. Dr. Reynolds has subsequently put a number of Bradshaw employees in their places for minor infractions and he has the personnel tiptoeing on eggshells. What did little kids know about him that the staff didn’t?
As I pondered the question, a nurse’s aide walked by. Her eyes were wide.
I caught her arm. “What’s going on?”
“Dr. Reynolds, that’s what. He just kicked everybody out of the birthing room because they were in the way. He said no one but the baby’s father could stay. The family is up in arms, and he won’t budge. He’s stubborn, that one.”
She looked at me appraisingly. “All I can say is that I’m glad I’m not you. When you come in with one of your clients, he’s going to chew you up and spit you out.”
That’s not a rosy prospect. The kid thing at the pediatrician’s office must have been an anomaly. Too bad.
What is a driven man like that going to do with me, an innocent doula, whose client unfortunately insists her baby be born at this hospital, with this attending physician? Bradford is a private hospital that hasn’t experienced a lot of birthing coaches in the past, and from what I’ve heard of Dr. Reynolds, that pattern won’t be changing anytime soon. I’m not too eager to be the bomb-sniffing dog who is first to go in and check for booby traps.
So far I’ve chalked his negativism toward my profession up to lack of sleep, pressure and the fact that he’s not yet settled into the routine at the hospital, but those justifications are wearing thin.
I walked into my client’s room. Brenda Halbert’s face cleared and her shoulders relaxed, but she still kept her telephone to her ear. She patted her belly, which looked like a gigantic haystack hovering under the bedding.
“You have got to cover for me on the Smyth case. We were supposed to meet today at three, and there’s no way I’ll make it.” She scowled at the response from the other end of the line. “I’m having a baby, not getting my hair