The Mountain Midwife (9 page)

The driver lowered his window. “Is this the midwife’s house?”

He talked like a northerner. No greeting, no introduction, just the abrupt query—well-modulated and smooth and oddly familiar.

“It is.” Ashley took a step to the side so the sun didn’t blind her and she could see the man better through the lowered window.

“Finally.” The man cut the engine on the SUV, opened his door, and stepped onto the drive. “I’m Hunter McDermott. I left a
message on someone’s voice mail a little while ago.” He extended his right hand, well-shaped and tanned despite this being late October. “Are you Ashley Tolliver?”

“I am.” Against the rich smoothness of his cultured tones, those two words of hers sounded as mountain country as the speech of any of her patients, an accent most people automatically considered a signal of ignorance and little education. Flustered that she cared about her mountain ways all of a sudden with this stranger, she forgot to shake his hand, keeping her own fingers inside her jacket pockets, one still gripping her phone.

He dropped his hand to his side, drawing attention to what a snub she had dealt him. Her cheeks heated despite the chill of the air and lack of warmth in the sunshine. She needed to say something more to him, but now that she had been both rude and sounded like Elly May on
The Beverly Hillbillies
, she didn’t want to open her mouth.

With a forefinger, her visitor shoved his glasses up his nose. “You are related to the local midwife?”

“Right now,” she responded automatically, her shoulders going back and her chin up, “I am the local midwife.”

“I see.” He tugged his glasses off his nose and wiped them on his sleeve in a way sure to scratch the small, rectangular lenses on a button.

And giving her an unobstructed view of his face, of his eyes in particular. Spectacular eyes the color of sapphires. If he hadn’t been wearing glasses, she would have suspected he popped in contact lenses to achieve that particularly deep and brilliant blue.

He not only had better speech than she did, he possessed prettier eyes. Hers were merely brown like her father’s. Though Momma’s and her brothers’ eyes were pretty, being a bright sky
blue, they didn’t compare with these bloodshot but still startling gemstone-blue eyes.

She must have been staring, for he gave her a quizzical glance, then slid his glasses back onto a bony nose in annoyingly exact proportion to the rest of his face, not small and a little too high-bridged like hers.

“But you’re too young.” Frowning, he shoved his fingers through his slightly curly dark hair.

With that gesture, Ashley recognized him. Now the name clicked home, along with the voice. Not so long ago, she had been drooling—figuratively speaking—over his pictures on TV.

“What are you doing on Brooks Ridge?” The question popped out before she thought better of being so blunt.

He lifted his shoulders and rolled them back as though dislodging a burden. “I’m looking for a woman who was a midwife here thirty-two years ago.”

“My grandmother. She’s been gone for six years.”

“I was afraid of that.” His broad shoulders drooped. “My . . . father said I should call ahead, but it was the middle of the night . . .” He trailed off and cast a glance of loathing at his vehicle, a Mercedes she noticed now that it was up close. “I suppose you wouldn’t know anything about her patients?”

“I suppose I would. She kept meticulous records.”

She knew about the records of every midwife in her family for the past two hundred years. All the women’s journals and patient logs were clear and detailed except during and right after the War Between the States, when paper was expensive and scarce.

“But they are confidential without permission from the patient herself.”

“That’s the difficulty. I’m trying to find the patient herself and
hoped I could do so through the midwife.” He hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his bomber jacket and gazed at a point beyond Ashley’s shoulder. “I just drove nearly six hours to get down here.”

“It’s that vital?” Ashley stared at him. “I mean, for you to drive all night after all you’ve been through?” He looked impossibly more weary than she felt with his red-rimmed eyes and shoulders that appeared strong enough to bear tremendous burdens, but had just been laden with the last straw. “Is this personal or business? I mean, you can get a warrant.”

He could be a federal agent of some sort, though his dress of leather jacket and jeans was a bit casual. But wait. Hadn’t the news reported that he did something else more cerebral or, no, physical?

That picture of him with his shirt plastered to a rather fine body flashed through her mind, and the sun suddenly felt like mid-summer heat on her face. That titillating glimpse of a buff male body had done exactly what the news station wanted—titillated her. Shame on her. Now she couldn’t look at him without thinking of that picture. The poor man had been objectified when he was only trying to keep a little girl from running into a busy street—a little girl in another country. That meant he must have traveled for hours and faced the media circus before he drove six hours from Washington, DC, in search of her grandmother, and Ashley was keeping him standing at the foot of the drive in still-frosty temperatures.

“I wish I could invite you to the house for coffee.” A twinge of guilt pinched her, as she didn’t wish for any such thing. She wanted sleep, not someone else’s problems, for at least four hours. “Mr. McDermott, I recognize who you are and realize you must be worn out.” She went for practical suggestions, as though he were one of her patients. “Don’t you think you oughta get some sleep and find another way to hunt up . . . whoever it is you want to find?”

“That would be the logical thing to do.” He smiled.

Ashley’s stomach spiraled into a loopty-loop like an out-of-control roller coaster. That smile softened the planes and angles of his face. Devastating to her lowered immune system—immunity to attraction to the opposite sex bolstered by her ambitions.

She took an involuntary step backward and hugged her arms across her middle as though he carried something contagious. “I can’t help you, you know. I wish I could, but we midwives are bound by HIPAA laws just like any other medical professionals are.”

“I understand that.” He reached behind him and rested one hand on the window frame of his SUV. “I was hoping Mrs. Tolliver might be able to get in touch with the patient and see if she would see me.”

Ashley opened her mouth to ask what the reason was, but an enormous yawn took over. She clapped her hand to her lips and tried to hold her jaws rigid, a feat that made her eyes water. Sure she was going to melt with the heat of her mortification, she half turned away. “If you will please excuse me, it was a rough night for me.”

“That makes two of us.” He settled into his vehicle and restarted the engine. “If you have a mind to look, the birth was thirty-two years ago. October first. The mother’s name was Brooks. Sheila Brooks.”

Ashley snapped her head around, sending her braid swishing across her back. “What do you want with a Brooks?”

His eyebrows, straight, dark, and thick without being caveman bushy, shot up his high forehead. “You know the Brookses?”

“This is Brooks Ridge. Of course I know the Brookses. I know at least a hundred people by the name of Brooks—first and last.” And every one of them related to her somewhere on the family tree. “Though I can’t say I’ve ever encountered a Sheila Brooks.”

“Then it’s just a matter of finding the right Brooks, isn’t it?” Flashing that stomach-dropping smile again, he nudged the SUV forward to come level with her and held out a business card. “My e-mail and cell numbers are on this. If you find out anything you can tell me, will you be so kind as to contact me? You, um, do have e-mail and cell service out here, don’t you?”

“Why, yes sir, we do.” She couldn’t keep the sarcasm out of her tone. She might have even thickened her accent a tad. “And we even have running water and electricity.” She shoved the card into her pocket.

She’d better get used to the DC snobbery and sense of superiority again if she wanted to return to attend medical school there—if she could get accepted to medical school there. The minute she opened her mouth, they would look at her askance until she proved herself capable of competing academically and socially.

To give him credit, he ducked his head, his smile sheepish. “That was rude, wasn’t it?”

“Just a little.” She relented. “But you have a name, why don’t you call her?”

“I can’t find a listing anywhere, and when I tried to call back the number on my caller ID, I got some doctor’s answering service.”

“Weird.” A wave of curiosity—and a few ripples of attraction washed through Ashley. “If I get a minute, I’ll see what I can find.” She faced him fully. “But may I ask why you are trying to find Sheila Brooks?”

“You can ask.” He drummed his fingers—long, strong fingers—on his steering wheel and stared straight ahead out the window. “I have reason to believe she’s my mother and needs me to rescue my sister . . .” He took a deep, audible breath. “A mother and sister I didn’t even know I had.”

“And your father’s name?” She posed the question slowly, hesitantly, already guessing the answer. More quickly she explained, “It might make finding information easier.”

His face felt tight. “You’ll have to find my birth without that information. He apparently doesn’t exist.”

H
UNTER WATCHED
A
SHLEY
Tolliver’s reaction to his announcement from the corner of his eye to see if it had any effect upon her demeanor—a bearing cooler than the mountain morning. He didn’t catch more than a swift motion, a raised eyebrow, a jerk of shoulder. What those movements conveyed by way of emotional or any other kind of reaction he couldn’t be sure without having seen her full-on. But a full-on look was probably not a good idea at the moment, in his weakened state of being physically and emotionally drained.

Quite simply, Ashley McDermott was just too beautiful to look at face-to-face without the buffer of sleep and intellectual strength.

He had always considered brown eyes uninteresting and dull, too much like the dirt he sometimes saw too much of in his work. But Ashley Tolliver’s eyes were more than brown. They shimmered with sparks of golden light despite the hint of redness in the whites suggesting she was as fatigued as he was. Likewise, her face sagged with weariness, yet the bruise-like circles beneath her extraordinary eyes emphasized the height and clear shape of her cheekbones, and her complexion could not be more pure and smooth had she been created of porcelain and cloth like a doll’s visage. Her loose jeans and heavy jacket disguised a feminine shape. He could only see that she was a little above average height for a female and on the
slender side. With a face like hers, who cared what her form was. And that braid of hair shining in the sunlight would make any normal man want to tug the band from the end and pull the tightly bound strands free to see if they truly did ripple with half a dozen hues from honey to maple to gold.

She took a step toward him, halted, then shook her head. “I don’t know what to tell you, Mr. McDermott, except—” Facing him fully, she worried her lower lip for a moment, then her shoulders rose and fell as though she heaved a deep sigh. “I may as well suggest that you not go hunting through the mountains on your own.”

“I go to some pretty remote and dangerous places in the world. I know how to defend myself.”

“Not that.” She laughed aloud, a ripple of liquid sunshine to warm the day. “We aren’t a bunch of trigger-happy rednecks waiting to shoot anyone who comes near. Not that I don’t think some of those kind exist, but mostly folks around here are friendly. I am more concerned about you getting lost or that fancy car of yours getting beat up on the roads. Most of them aren’t paved and some of the hills get pretty steep and you won’t always find guardrails where you think you should.”

“Nothing can be worse than some of the places I’ve been in South America or Africa, or even Europe.”

“Suit yourself, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” She started up the drive again, then paused long enough to toss over her shoulder, “I’ll do some hunting if I have time.”

“That’s all I can ask.”

But not all he could do. As she had said herself, this was Brooks Ridge. Surely someone would know where to find Sheila Brooks. She had lived in those hills for fifty years or so. She had to shop, work, go to church, do something in one of the small towns
dotting the gaps between mountains. Surely the roads between towns were paved and marked well enough for him to begin his search there.

He waved to Miss Tolliver out his window, but he didn’t think she could have noticed on her way up to the house he saw only from the end of the driveway because of the leafless trees. In spring and summer, the house would be hidden from the road—hidden and isolated.

Was she there alone? She hadn’t seemed frightened when he pulled up. Surely, if a woman was safe alone in these hills, warnings from his parents and business partner were unfounded. Miss Tolliver claimed people didn’t run a body off with a shotgun if they accidentally got on their property. Still, he would proceed with caution. Before going anywhere into the depths of the hills and hollows, he would research at the nearest library and then return to his motel and get some sleep.

He backed onto the road and headed for town. On the console beside him, his cell phone rang. He ignored it. Several messages pinged into place. He resisted the urge to glance toward the phone. The road before him twisted and curved and looped its way through ranks of old-growth trees arching overhead like a cathedral. Occasionally, a driveway broke the forest line. Even more occasionally, a road bisected the main one, one or two of those mere tracks someone had tried to cover with gravel. Most of the rock seemed to slide down to pile at the bottom of the steep inclines. Those roads must be nearly impossible in a rainstorm. He was confident his SUV could handle about any kind of terrain, but a muddy road that curved around a drop-off could prove as dangerous as ice. If he was to explore along these mountain tracks, he needed to pray no rain fell to hinder his progress.