The Blessing (1998)

Jude Deveraux's 1998 novel sends Jason Wilding, a New York businessman whose raised eyebrow makes executives quake, home to Abernathy, Kentucky, where his brother David, the town doctor, tricks him into spending Christmas week in the run-down house of the widowed Amy and her baby son Max. Minding Max turns out to cost him something. (Open Library)

Watches

Breitling (unidentified model): Having seen off a rival for the evening, Jason builds a fire in Amy's smoky fireplace, pulling Max away from one life-threatening situation after another every three minutes. He wins the peace by getting the baby interested in his Breitling, and the narrator adds in parentheses that the watch would never be the same again. The maker is named; the model is not.

Source text: But at last he had the fire going without too much smoke, he had Max interested in his Breitling watch (it would never be the same again), and Amy entered the room with an enormous tray full of food. (Jude Deveraux, The Blessing, scan cataloged as Pocket Books, 1998, though its copyright page identifies the copy as the 2004 Pocket Books edition of Simon & Schuster UK, p. 84; his full name is on p. 1; Internet Archive scan OCR)