A Doctor In Her Stocking. Elizabeth BevarlyЧитать онлайн книгу.
Donna, finally, gave him a funny look. “Yeah, really. Boy, it doesn’t take much to interest you, does it?”
Seth threw her a salacious grin and cocked one blond eyebrow. “You might be surprised.”
Donna tossed him a pretty lascivious smile right back. “Oh, yeah?”
Reed cleared his throat in a manner that was by no means discreet. “Uh, do you think you could go ahead and place that order now?” he asked. He was, after all, going to take a bite out of the table if someone didn’t put something edible in front of him soon.
“Yeah, sure thing,” Donna said, turning.
Reed was about to add that extra part about onion rings before she could get away, but before he had a chance Seth caught her gently by the elbow and said, “So this Mindy has nothing in the world, is about to be bounced out of her apartment, along with her unborn child, but she squeezed out a few bucks from her tips just so this old guy she’d never met before could have a decent birthday dinner?”
Donna scrunched up her shoulders and let them drop. “Didn’t I just say that?”
Reed nodded and released her. “Yeah, you did. But I wanted to make sure my friend here heard all the details.”
“I heard,” Reed muttered.
As always, Seth ignored him. “Thanks, Donna,” he said instead, releasing their waitress so that she could place their order. Finally.
“No problem, big guy,” she returned with a bright smile. “I’ll be right back with your coffee.”
And then she was gone. Before Reed could tell her how much he wanted those onion rings. He sighed with much disappointment.
“Did you hear that, Reed?” Seth asked, turning to sit forward at the table again.
“I heard,” Reed repeated.
“Mindy, that big, selfless, generous sweetheart, did that out of the goodness of her heart.”
“I heard.”
“Just because it was the right thing to do.”
“I heard.”
“Because she’s a kind, decent human being.”
“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