Page 20 of Breaking Bristol

“What are you doing here?” I asked, crossing my arms and rubbing my biceps to stay warm.

He bent down and grabbed a bag with either hand, then nodded at me. “First, I’m getting inside where it’s not freezing.”

“Excuse me?”

“I just got off three nights in a row, and it took me two hours to get here from Lawless because the roads are so slick. Can you pretend to be annoyed after I get inside?”

All I could hear was that it took him two hours to get here, and I nodded. “God…yes. Sorry.” I stepped aside, and as soon as he walked in, I closed the door and locked it.

He brushed ice off his boots on the mat, dropped the bags on the floor, and glanced around. The battery clock on the wall said it was after nine, so I figured I’d slept for about an hour.

“Are you okay?” he asked.

“I’m fine. Are you?”

He nodded and answered, “Yeah.” Even though his teeth were chattering from the cold.

“Now that you’re inside, do you mind telling me what you’re doing here?”

“I knew my aunt and uncle were out of town, and I couldn’t stop thinking about you here all alone, so here I am.”

That was sweet, but I didn’t want him doing any more sweet things for me than he already had. “Like I said, I’m fine. They had Beau bring me more wood and a couple of other things. You didn’t need to drive all the way out here.”

“I wanted to.”

“Well, now you’ve seen for yourself that I’m doing okay, so you should go before it gets worse. I’d offer you a cup of coffee to warm up, but I don’t have any… I can boil water to make you some hot chocolate for the road, though.”

He tilted his head, smirked, then went to the fireplace and threw more logs on.

“Um. What are you doing?”

“Starting a fire.”

“I can do it myself.”

Dr. B ignored me and lit the logs much more efficiently than I did, then took his sherpa-lined denim jacket off and tossed it on the back of the chair angled next to the fireplace. He turned to me and came closer but stopped a couple of feet away. “This shit outside is only gonna get worse. You’re a woman alone in a secluded cabin with no electricity and nobody around for miles. If something happened to you nobody would know because you can’t make a call and you’d slip on the ice if you tried to walk. I’ve got four days off, and until things get better, you’re stuck with me.”

“I’m not comfortable with that.”

He shrugged. “The roads are not only horrendous but news radio said the county was shutting them down, so I’ve got no choice but to stay. I’ll sleep in my truck if it’ll make you feel better.”

“Stop saying the right things.”

He smirked again. “I’m not going to hurt you, Bristol. You’re alone, and I’d be home alone, too. Might as well be stuck inside with another person to help pass the time.”

Before Shane, I was a good judge of character. I’d been on dates with creeps and had no problem leaving in the middle of dinner and telling them it wasn’t going to go anywhere. If I liked a guy, I let him know it. I didn’t play games or waste anyone’s time.

And everything about Dr. B told me he was one of the good ones. So why wasn’t he married? Why didn’t Lou and Heidi ever bring him up to me? He knew I was talking to Cheyenne at New Year’s, but did she know him well? And if she did, how come she never mentioned him to me? I needed to know things that had nothing to do with what I was running from. “If you’re going to stay, I need you to answer three questions.”

“Fair enough.”

“You have to respond right away,” I warned. “No contemplating it and saying what you think I want to hear.”

“Hit me.”

It was already warming up, so I pulled the hood off my head, and his eyes went to my hair as I smoothed it out. “Why aren’t you married?”

He rubbed the back of his neck and said to the floor, “I was working overseas at a military hospital and came home after a year to find my wife in bed with another man. I divorced her and haven’t been interested in dating since.”

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