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“I’d like to speak to Dr. Concannon,” Bridget requested.
“Did you wish to make an appointment?” was the crisply professional reply.
“No, I would just like to speak to the doctor.”
“Regarding what? Are you one of our patients?”
“No. It’s a personal matter,” Bridget explained.
“He’s with a patient. Let me see if he can take your call now. Who’s calling, please?”
“Bridget O’Shea.”
“Oh!” The woman’s voice immediately became bright and cheerful. “Of course he’ll take your call. Just give me a minute to pull the stethoscope out of his ear and hand him the phone. He’ll be right with you. Hold, please.”
Bridget waited, anxiously watching the shop door, hoping she would have no customers until she had spoken to Jonas. There was a vague fluttering of her heart as she realized that nothing stood between her and Jonas any longer. They could be together.
“Hello, Bridget.”
His voice, when he answered the phone, was calm and level, as though he saw nothing momentous in the occasion, while Bridget was suddenly all nervous and jittery.
“Jonas!” she spoke his name in glad relief. “I called to tell you I talked to my father last night in private.”
“And?”
“And he told me exactly what you had.”
“Good,” Jonas said decisively.
“When I think of the things I said to you and what I thought all these years, I—”
“There’s no need to apologize,” he interrupted smoothly. “You didn’t have all the facts. I should have put you straight in the beginning. You misunderstood, and you were scared.”
“Maybe, but I—” But that wasn’t important anymore. “When will I see you, Jonas?” she asked boldly.
“I’ll be attending a convention this weekend, so I’ll be out of town.” He sounded so distant. “Let’s make it a week from Saturday.”
“So long?” Bridget frowned. “Jonas, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong.” Then he hesitated. “Bridget, I want to have time to think very seriously about us. We’ve waited more than ten years. We can wait more than a week.”
“I love you, Jonas,” she said.
Those three little words seemed to stop him cold. She waited anxiously for a reply.
“Tell you what,” he said after a long pause. “What with one thing and another—okay, let’s leave out the passionate kisses and runaway horses and crazy arguments for now—we’ve been doing pretty well at getting to know each other. Agreed?”
She thought it over. “I guess so—I mean, yes. It’s been an amazing, um, almost a year.”
She heard him chuckle. “Yup. But the acid test of any relationship is—drum roll, please—the holidays.”
Bridget glanced at her calendar. Thanksgiving. Christmas. Fooling around in summer and looking at fall foliage just didn’t have the emotional weight of those two occasions. Her parents would expect her to—
She set down the receiver.
“Bridget?” she heard him say. “You there? Wait just a sec—” He didn’t hang up. Someone in his office was talking to him and he’d probably slung the receiver over his shoulder, judging by the muffled tone of the exchanged words.
She twisted her hands in her lap, her last thought echoing in her mind. Her parents would expect her to … her parents would expect her to … do what? And what if she didn’t? Her life had been all about their expectations for too long. Maybe it took someone who’d been away as long as Jonas had to make her see that clearly.
