Saving Dr. Ryan Read Free

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.”
    â€œMight 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?”
    â€œYou could say that. And my name’s Maddie. Maddie Kincaid.”
    â€œAnd…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! ”
    â€œYou ready to push?” she thought she heard the doctor say, but since she already was, the question seemed moot.
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    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.
    â€œSorry,” he said, slipping down the sheet. “I really need to—”
    â€œIt’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.
    â€œYou can go ahead and push now,” he said, leaving the sheet up and peeling off the gloves.
    â€œLike 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 wantedthem up, he had no doubt she would have made her wishes known.
    Three pushes later, the baby’s head crowned. No surprise there.
    â€œPant, 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.
    â€œPant, 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?”
    â€œShe’s fine,” Ryan said, trying to ignore the