Millicent's Medicine Man (1997)

Karen Leabo's Loveswept romance, the third of her Brides of Destiny trilogy about three high-school friends from Destiny, Texas, pairs Millicent Jones, a mother of three, with the doctor Jase Desmond, who reaches her flooded farmhouse by ambulance on the night her fourth child is born. The author's note says the story turns on children, seven in all. (Open Library)

Watches

Timex (unidentified model): When Jase Desmond's ambulance reaches the farmhouse in the rain, Millicent Jones is in labor under a tarp on her porch steps and insists there are no hours to go. Her daughter Nancy, who called for help when she could not reach her grandparents, has been watching from the sidelines with a chrome Timex in her hands, timing the contractions: the last one came less than two minutes after the one before, which sends Jase into motion. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: "The pains are coming pretty fast," said the little girl, Nancy, who'd been watching solemnly from the sidelines. She held a chrome Timex watch in her hands. "That one was less than two minutes from the one before." (Karen Leabo, Millicent's Medicine Man, scan cataloged as Bantam Loveswept, 1997, p. 20, where the OCR renders "the little girl" as "die lit- tle girl"; Millicent Jones is named by the paramedic on the same page and Nancy is called her daughter on p. 21; the copyright page dates the book June 1997; Internet Archive scan OCR)