Doctor O: A Friends to Lovers Romance

by Ash Harlow

  She looks up with the brightest smile.

  “You’re looking happy,” I say.

  “You mean this?” She draws a circle in the air around her face.

  “Yeah, that. It’s a cat who got the cream kind of look,” I tease.

  “It’s better than that, dah-ling,” she says in this fake sex siren voice. “This is the face of the cat who found the Stroke Master, and you know how much a pussy likes to be petted.”

  While Steffi’s doubled over laughing, I swear my blood turns to ice.

  Fuck!

  I’m trying to laugh with her, but can’t raise anything resembling that. Stroke Master was how I referred to Zer-O’s new man in our chats. And, how Zer-O referred to him when she wrote her farewell message.

  It can’t be. This has to be a coincidence.

  Steffi recovers and gives me a questioning look. “What? You don’t like my sex-bomb persona?”

  “I adore it,” I say, taking her in my arms. “But, Stroke Master? It makes me sound like some leather-clad guy in a bondage dungeon.”

  “I just might find that sexy,” she says.

  I do the only thing I can do under the circumstances. I kiss her hot, sexy mouth and work a hand up under her sweater and across her smooth skin. Cupping one breast, I lightly thumb a nipple until she groans in my mouth. I break the kiss, but she grabs the back of my head and pulls my mouth back to hers.

  “I don’t know what you’ve done to me,” she says against my lips, “but I’m horny again.”

  “You’ll have to be patient. I’m due to test drive another car in a few minutes. Come with me.”

  “We can christen it,” she teases.

  “You’re insatiable. Grab a coat, this could be breezy.”

  “You’re test driving a sports car?”

  “Wait and see.”

  15 ~ Steffi

  Rather than a car yard we arrive at the back of an industrial block on the way to Arrowtown. A couple of guys are working in a garage, with vehicles in pieces all over the floor and other parts hanging off chains. We’re taken to another unit where a restored Land Rover is revealed behind a roller door.

  “Land Rover Series 2a soft top. 1969.” Noah swings around to face me. “I’ve always wanted one of these. What do you think?”

  “Classic. I love it.”

  The owner starts it for us and runs through a couple of things with Noah, then we both climb in to take it for a drive.

  “It’s quite noisy,” I shout.

  “You’ll get used to that.”

  “And breezy.”

  “The suspension’s a little different to your car.”

  We fall in and out of a pothole on the rough track we’re driving on and I almost hit my head on the roof. Twenty minutes later Noah’s found a shingle river delta to drive on. He’s wearing a massive grin, and he handles the vehicle well. A few minutes on, punctuated by a lot of whooping and laughing, he pulls out of the river bed and into a clearing.

  “What do you think?” he asks.

  “I love it. You do, too, don’t you?”

  He reaches over and squeezes my knee. “I do. I’ve wanted one of these since I was a kid. I’m not used to getting what I want, and it’s a pretty weird feeling being in a position to buy this.”

  “Do it,” I say. “You’ve worked so hard and sacrificed so much.”

  He nods, his grin broad, his blue eyes glacial. “I’m going to.”

  “Good. She needs a name. She’s kind of a Mabel. I think it’s the beige paintwork.”

  “Mabel’s paintwork is ‘limestone’, I’ll have you know. She’s much too smart for beige.” He starts the engine again. “Let’s go and pay for her. Tomorrow we can go out and have some real fun.”

  “What’s the next thing on your shopping list?” I ask.

  He doesn’t answer for a while. “You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I might want to buy that old hut I lived in as a kid. The memories are shitty, in most ways, but that location, down past Harebrook where everything’s more rugged and remote, I fucking love that area.”

  “Does this mean you’re definitely staying in Queenstown?”

  He shrugs. “If I’m offered the position at the clinic I’m pretty sure I’ll accept it.”

  “Oh, that’s a given. That position hasn’t even been advertised.”

  “Nothing, Steffi, is a given until contracts are signed. Wherever I finish up, I’d still like to have that piece of land.”

  “What happened to it? I mean, after your father died.”

  “He never paid his council rates, and he’d borrowed against it. I think it went to the bank. Let’s do the deal on Mabel and then we can take her out there for her maiden drive.”

  “I don’t think Mabel’s much of a maiden. More an old dowager.”

  While Noah goes through the paperwork and payment for Mabel, I drive my car home and wait for him. He’s back within the hour and, armed with a hat and scarf, I climb in beside him and we follow the edge of the lake, past Harebrook on the road to Glenorchy, to Noah’s old home on the side of Mount Isaiah. The scenery is pure drama. White caps whipped up on the lake, steep-sided mountains that stop at the water’s edge.

  Noah swings off the main road onto a smaller dirt road that climbs steeply and ends after a couple of hairpin bends. I’ve never been here off the main road and, judging by the weed growth, nobody else has for a while. We leave the vehicle and fight our way through the thigh-deep undergrowth to a gate. There’s a faded and peeling realty sign half hidden by scrub.

  “Looks as though it’s still on the market,” Noah says. “Come on, let’s go and see what’s left up here.”

  We climb the gate, and Noah takes my hand, leading me along the track.

  “The feral goats have moved back,” he says, kicking at reasonably fresh poop with his boot.

  “How big is this block?”

  “It’s a couple of hundred acres of completely worthless land.” He drops my hand and looks around. “Nobody in their right mind would buy it, or want to live up here.”

  “Do you feel in your right mind at the moment?” I have to ask. His demeanor has changed since we pulled off the main road. His barriers are up. I’d forgotten he could do that. They were always up the first year he lived with us. In later years, on the odd occasion when he slipped off the rails, that barrier was the first thing to go up right after his temper exploded or he accidentally let some emotion show.

  He answers my question with a somewhat stony look. “Let’s see if the hut is still standing.”

  “Is this stirring up ghosts?” I ask, hurrying along the track behind him.

  “We’ll see. Maybe I shouldn’t have come up here. But I had to. Despite all the shit, this is where my roots are.”

  The track leads us around a massive rocky outcrop and there, hidden in the lee of the rock, sheltered from the bitter southerly wind that must rip through here, is the hut. It’s nothing like I imagined as Noah’s home when I was a kid. My idea of a home was like the ones in town. A few bedrooms, living rooms, kitchen, maybe a deck or a patio. This looks as though it has only a couple of rooms.

  “How long since someone lived here?”

  Noah cocks his head, still studying the dilapidated building. “Ten years, I guess.”

  I don’t know if it was ever painted, but there’s none on the exterior walls now. The base is stone and schist. Noah runs his hand across the weathered wood of the upper exterior walls.

  “This is kauri,” he says, almost to himself. He steps back and looks up. “Roof’s fucked.”

  There are holes in one of the window panes as if someone’s fired a shotgun at it. I want to go and peer inside but I feel as if I’m trespassing on something that’s private to Noah. He never invited us up here when he visited his father.

  Finally, Noah approaches a window, cupping his hands around his eyes and peering in. “Still full of the old man’s crap,” he mutters.

  The wooden porch has warped itself
off the front wall of the hut. Small pits in the ground show where the rabbits have done test diggings for suitable burrowing sites. A few rusted tin cans and an old cast-iron kettle are scattered about. Noah disappears around the back where a small shed still stands. The door opens with a shoulder nudge and he’s soon back out and on the porch. His large frame all but hides the front door. He’s found a key and is jiggling the lock before he turns side on and leans. Looks as if all the doors need a shoulder to help them open.

  “We’re in,” he says. “Let me clear the mice and god knows what else.” He stamps his feet a few times and, sure enough, a mouse shoots out the door and ducks through a hole in the porch floorboard before I have time to yelp.

  My heart thumps around anyway, just in case I need to run. “Is it safe?”

  “Yeah, ding-dong, the old man’s dead.”

  There’s no appropriate response to that remark so I step inside, tiptoeing for some peculiar reason, as if someone will hear and be along promptly to arrest me for breaking and entering. I like a belt of adrenaline as much as the best of them, but my thrills come from speeding down a mountain, bouncing over rocks on my bike, or being tossed about in a rubber raft on an angry river. That’s my sort of daring. Not breaking the law. “Are we breaking the law?” I ask, just to be certain.

  “Not really. Probably. I don’t know.” He’s picking up stuff and putting it down. Blowing off dust. Opening cupboards. “He died up here. Do you remember?”

  “No. I thought he was in a retirement home.” When Noah’s father passed I would have just become a teenager—self-obsessed and caring little about anything beyond the confines of my small world.

  “He went missing one night from his room. Two days later, they found him up here. Dead. He always said they’d carry him out of here in a wooden box. He must have known he was on the way out. It’s the only sign he ever gave me that he had a heart, or a soul, or…fuck, I don’t know.”

  We’re in a small area that has a kitchen at one end, a tiny table with three unmatched chairs, and a sofa and two armchairs. I follow Noah through a door and there’s a bedroom, a basic bathroom, and what would be a back porch, except it has a single bunk squeezed into a space not much larger than the iron frame. He points to it. “My bedroom. Freezing in winter, hot as hades in the summer. No cowboy curtains or spacemen on the wall for me. But it was ideal. If the old man was in a dark rage, I could nip out the door and be halfway up the mountain before he got the chance to take his anger out on me.”

  “Jesus. I can’t even imagine.”

  “Good,” he says, placing his hands on my shoulders and turning me around, walking me back to the kitchen. It’s only a few steps, the place is that small. “I’m glad you can’t imagine. I don’t want you to ever have to imagine or know the kind of life lived in a place like this, with a man like my father and a mother capable of abandoning her son to him.” He turns me until I face out the window. “Look at that view.”

  “It’s stunning. It’s unimpeded. Just lake and mountains. You can’t see the road from here, or another house.”

  “That’s why I want this place. For all those reasons, and because I need to exorcise the ghosts. I didn’t realize that until I came up here. It doesn’t make me sad. I feel as though the hut’s sat in a state of dormancy, waiting for me to return. It wants some life and joy.”

  He steps outside and I follow him. The door is locked again and he returns the key to the shed. I sit on the edge of the porch, wondering what the hell happened up here. It can’t all have been bad. He wouldn’t want to come back here if all the memories were bad.

  “I had fun up here, too,” Noah says, as if reading my mind. “Imagine being a kid with this as your playground.”

  “That must have been incredible.”

  “Would you live up here?”

  It’s not an invitation, just a simple question. “Yeah, I would, actually. In a heartbeat. Some of my favorite hiking trails join up over the back of Isaiah. And there’s this stunning view. Peace. You’re smack between Queenstown and Glenorchy if you want to be social.”

  “Really? You use those trails?”

  “They’re a bit overgrown, but I love them. You know the wall of stars?”

  He gives me a quizzical look.

  “I’ll take you there. We could go now, but I think we’re losing light.”

  “What is it?”

  “Secret. I can’t explain it, but I can show you. I discovered it by accident. I was hiking over the back with some friends and a few dogs. One of the dogs shot off after a rabbit and when I found it, it was drinking in the pool beneath the wall of stars.”

  “Is it a waterfall?”

  “Not really. I’m not going to say. I’d rather show you.”

  “I’d love that. Let’s get into town before the realtor closes. We can come up again tomorrow.” He stops. “Shit, you have to go to lunch or something with Cam and the others at a winery. I got out of it.”

  “Then, I will, too. I’ll call Cam tonight. I didn’t say I’d go when he invited me. I said I might be training.”

  Noah’s step is lighter now, as if a burden has left him. We take a different track back to Mabel. When we reach the road I give the old Land Rover a pat on the hood. “I can see why you wanted something like this, if you’re going to be coming up here.”

  “You know, it’s weird. None of this was planned. I woke up this morning after a night of the best sex ever, although, sadly, I found myself alone in bed,” he says, tapping my nose with his finger. “I didn’t have a single plan for the day, yet this is how it unfolded.” He turns me and bends me back over Mabel’s hood, his face inches from mine. “Best. Sex. Ever,” he says, his warm breath caught by a sharp gust of wind, whipping over my cheek like a slap.

  I lean forward and grab his mouth with mine, and together we kiss away all the angst that infiltrated the closeness between us at the hut. The barrier rises, and Noah is back.

  “You’re so good for me, and so bad, Steffi.” He eases me upright.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your family will lose twenty grades of shit if they find out I’ve been messing with you.”

  “They won’t—”

  “Cam warned me off today.”

  “Oh, god.”

  “That’s right,” he says, leading me around to my door. He opens it, boosts me inside, buckles up my belt and climbs in the other side. “So, let’s get this freaking work contract signed, and we’ll sort you and I out from there, because I don’t know about you, Stephanie Paxton, but I like what we’ve got going, a whole fucking lot.”

  16 ~ Noah

  By the time we get back to town the realtor’s office is closed, so I grab a property magazine from the bin out the front. We head around to the market and pick up a piece of venison and some vegetables for dinner. We linger in the wine section. I read the label on bottle after bottle. “So many wines in this region now. Help me choose.”

  Steffi doesn’t hesitate, selecting a couple of bottles of Pinot Noir. She holds up one. “This is amazing,” she says, then lifts the second bottle. “And this one’s exquisite. You can normally only get hold of it at the cellar.”

  “Happy to take your word for it. Do we need anything else?”

  “No, let’s get home. I’m famished.”

  I build the fire and get it roaring while Steffi makes a start on dinner. I really haven’t cooked in years, and my skills are rudimentary at best. I worked my ass off in Dallas and survived on utterly forgettable food from the hospital cafeteria, and eating out when I had a few days off. Back home with its abundance of fresh and home-cooked food I’ve been enjoying has awakened my taste buds.

  I feel wired as I open the wine. Our visit to the hut has stirred all kinds of things inside me back to life. Not all of them are necessarily good. You don’t grow up the way I did without having a trunkload of emotional baggage to weigh you down. I’m very good at keeping the lid firmly locked, the straps tight, but today I fee
l ready to tackle the bogeyman.

  On the other side of the kitchen island Steffi does things with vegetables in time with the music she’s playing. Looks-wise, she got the best of both of her parents, and her mother, Felicity’s casual grace.

  As an angry teenager I’d latched onto Felicity as a female role model because, god knows I needed one that wasn’t going to abandon me. Then, every so often, for reasons I can’t explain, I did my best to drive her and Arch away. In retrospect I guess I wanted them to prove, over and over, that Felicity wasn’t going to walk out the door and never return, and that Arch wasn’t going to take to me with his fists.

  That’s what a therapist would say.

  But I wonder about Steffi. I don’t want to drive her away. I’ve been brave enough to tackle one serious adult relationship, but it was doomed from the start. Was that why I’d chosen it? Someone socially perfect, someone whose connections would have helped drive my career to a high place in any direction I wanted it to go. But I had to test her, to see if I pushed her hard enough, whether she’d leave me. And she did. And I was relieved because I didn’t want her in the first place.

  I have to tell Steffi about O-Zone, and all the erotica I’ve published under a pseudonym. But I’m so fucking scared that’s going to drive her away. If she hadn’t been part of it—and I’m sure she’s Zer-O—I could shut it down and put it behind me. Except I couldn’t do that because the foundation of a relationship will collapse if it’s built on secrets.

  I’m certain I don’t want to drive her away. And I have no need to test her, but I want to be honest. I can’t seriously go forward in a relationship with all this stuff I’m hiding.

  “You’re quiet. Have you been through the property magazine?” she asks.

  “Doing it now,” I say, flipping open the cover to reveal a double page spread of a massively overpriced property with enough rooms to host a state visit. I flick through page after page and the hut isn’t there. Why would it be? There wouldn’t be anyone to fund a marketing budget. I’m guessing it’s the bank selling, and because the property has sat on the market for years, they’ve probably given up on it.