Heating up the Holidays

by Jill Shalvis

  And yeah, okay, she was hot.

  That didn’t hurt.

  He had to do something to say he was sorry for his asshole behavior all those years ago. He owed her big-time. Maybe take her to lunch, or bring her some flowers or…

  Or what? He didn’t even know if she was married, or had a boyfriend or if she still even liked guys.

  Well, hmm, he was almost positive he hadn’t seen a ring on her finger. He had a second-nature habit of scanning women for one. But maybe what he owed her most was to leave her alone.

  Still…

  At the very least, he needed to apologize to her. But would that just remind her of something she’d rather not think about? Would she even remember now what a jerk he’d been? Was he just crediting himself with too much significance in her life?

  No, he needed to just leave her alone. If their paths ever crossed again, he’d take that as a sign and find a proper way to apologize, but until then, there wasn’t really anything to be done.

  The moment he thought it though, he found himself wishing “until then” would happen right away. Like today, or tomorrow, or…no later than the day after that.

  3

  L ORELEI could feel the heat from the fire, but she didn’t smell smoke. The foot of her bed was on fire, flames licking the air and singeing the heirloom quilt her grandmother had made. She tried to pull the quilt away from the fire, but it was too late. Ruined.

  Only when she saw that she couldn’t save the quilt did she think of saving herself. Terror seized her as she scrambled off the side of the bed. The flames were spreading across the floor now, engulfing the entire bed and half the room-blocking her way to the door.

  She tried to cry out, but no sound came from her throat. And then, as if she’d been heard anyway, someone burst in the door.

  Across the flames, she saw Ryan Quinn. He aimed his hose at the bed and fired a blast of water that instantly put out all the flames.

  With the fire extinguished, she could see that he wasn’t wearing a shirt, only his fireman’s pants and boots, and a red hat that looked oddly like the flimsy plastic kind she saw kids wearing when they played fireman. His chest was all sculpted muscle and smooth tanned skin. God, he was gorgeous.

  Was that just a costume he was wearing?

  “You got here fast,” she said.

  He tossed aside the fire hose and crossed the room, then took her into his arms Rhett Butler-style.

  “I thought you’d never call,” he said in a breathless voice.

  Then they were both on the bed, naked, kissing and caressing in such a frenzy that Lorelei couldn’t tell where she stopped and Ryan began. She was sixteen again, acting out her wildest adolescent fantasies. In fact, when she looked down at herself, she saw that she wasn’t entirely naked. She was wearing nothing but a pair of pink striped knee socks she hadn’t worn since high school.

  Weird.

  But then, the sensation of Ryan’s mouth on her neck erased all thoughts, and she could feel a relentless need building within her, a sweet, delicious ache that demanded he be inside her.

  She grasped his hips and pulled him hard against her, spreading her legs wide and as he found her wet, hot center with his erection. She moaned, arched her back, and begged him, “Please, I need you now.”

  And then he was there, right where she needed him. Inside her, filling her up, creating an even more delicious ache that was building fast, fast, so fast.

  He moved inside her, and then her inner muscles were contracting around him, and she was gasping, crying out, as her body was overcome by climax.

  But then he started moving inside her so fast and hard, it was making the house shake. The headboard banged against the wall so loudly, she was sure the neighbors a house away could hear.

  Or maybe it was a hammer. Or a car driving into the side of the house…

  Lorelei’s eyes shot open. She stared into the darkness of her bedroom, her brain catching up with reality.

  Her body was tingling, as if she’d just had an orgasm. Her heart was pounding.

  She had just had an orgasm.

  But…

  She was here alone. She’d been dreaming. There’d been no fire. There’d been no Ryan Quinn bursting into her room with his fire hose to rescue her.

  His fire hose?

  Could her brain’s pathetic symbolism get any more obvious?

  She groaned and sat up in bed, bewildered by the banging sound on the roof that had invaded her dream. Her highly erotic dream…that had just given her an orgasm.

  Jeez. She needed to get laid.

  This wasn’t the first time she’d woken up with the certainty that she’d just come in her sleep-it had happened a few times before, always after a long stretch during which she was getting zero action in bed.

  She sighed and squinted at the ceiling, her brain trying to process what the noise was.

  She wasn’t in Kenya anymore. She was in her old family home, in bed, in Ocean Harbor Beach, California, and…

  The roof of the house was about to fly off. Or at least, that’s what it sounded like. Then she remembered that the weather forecast had called for rain with wind gusts of up to seventy-five miles per hour tonight, and, judging by the noise outside, the weatherman had been pretty accurate. Lorelei had a feeling she wasn’t going to get much more sleep unless she did something about the loud banging sound coming from the roof.

  After a twelve-hour shift at the hospital that had turned into a fourteen-hour one, she really, really could have used a good night’s rest. But the noise was only getting louder. She flung her covers off and got up, grabbed her robe and went to check the fire in the wood-burning stove.

  Her family beach cottage had seen better days. Her grandmother had passed it on to her mother, but now that her mom was living in a condo in a seniors’ community, she had no interest in the upkeep that went into taking care of the cottage.

  And her lack of interest showed in a big way. After sitting empty for the past three years, being battered by the constant wind from the Pacific and occasional arctic storms that blew in off the ocean, the cottage was in terrible disrepair. Lorelei had been thrilled when her mother offered to let her have the place-it had seemed like serendipity, after she’d made the decision to come home-but she’d had no idea how far in over her head she was getting.

  With the house-and the emotions involved in coming back to Ocean Harbor Beach. She didn’t have many friends here to come back to. Those few she’d kept from high school had scattered to other parts of the world thanks to careers and marriages. And those who remained-like Ryan Quinn-were ghosts she wasn’t sure she wanted to confront.

  Except, Kinsei insisted she had to.

  Kinsei was a crazy old man who had three wives, a terrible pipe-smoking habit and wore a loincloth. Why, exactly, did she feel the need to take relationship advice from him?

  Because she knew she really did want to move on from the pain of her past. She wanted to let go of her childhood angst and make a life for herself here in her hometown. She didn’t want to run away from her dreams anymore. So here she was, attempting to live out the dream she’d always held dearest, of working happily as a doctor in her hometown, and she was having to confront her dreaded past in order to do it.

  And what she needed to confront right now was that her house was falling down.

  Now that the first big winter storm of the season was closing in on the coast, Lorelei had a feeling she was going to see just how bad the cottage’s condition truly was.

  She kept telling herself that after two years in the Peace Corps, she could accomplish anything, but so far, she’d proven to be pretty inept at home improvement. She’d thought that the resourcefulness she’d learned in Kenya would serve her well in tackling the renovation project, but, it turned out, she was better at adapting to life as a doctor in a third-world culture than she was at stripping floors or repairing leaky roofs.

  And speaking of leaky roofs…

  That banging soun
d coming from the ceiling in the living room was situated over a spot where she could see water dripping onto the floor. She walked across the room and peered up at the leak.

  “Dammit,” she muttered, her mind producing images of costly structural damage done by long-term exposure to rain.

  She needed to do something. She’d hoped the storm would hold off until morning when she’d have more energy to get on the roof and nail down a protective tarp, but she’d been kidding herself. The rain was probably only going to get worse as the night wore on.

  She found a bucket under the kitchen sink and placed it where the water was dripping. Then she slipped her feet into a pair of gardening clogs and went outside to look at the roof. Fat raindrops pelted her skin, and an icy wind penetrated her robe and chilled her to the bone instantly. She tugged the fabric tighter around herself and walked to the side of the house.

  There she found the source of the noise. As she’d suspected an area of the roof had taken the brunt of the coastal winds for years, so that now some of the shingles were missing, while a piece of the roof itself flapped in the wind like a bad toupee, lifting up and slamming back down with each wind gust.

  She had to do something about it. If she waited all night, that whole section of the roof might be gone in the morning.

  Flush with a sense of self-reliance, she ran to the gardening shed in the backyard and tugged out the ladder, then dragged it across the yard and laid it on the ground next to the house. After that, she went back inside, took off the housecoat and found a hooded sweatshirt that would serve her better for climbing onto the roof. After two years in Africa, she no longer owned any rain gear, and she made a mental note to buy an all-weather kind of coat soon.

  She tugged the sweatshirt on over her pj’s-a pink flannel top and pants covered in big red polka dots-then put on her running shoes, which would be better than the clogs for climbing.

  She had a large blue tarp next to the door, the very same one she’d been telling herself for the past week that she needed to nail over the problem spot in the roof until serious repairs could be done, and next to it, a nail gun she was a little bit afraid of but that had so far proven less injurious to her than the old hammer-and-nails method.

  Okay, what else would she need up there?

  A loud crashing sound came from the roof again, and she winced.

  Her cell phone…in case she needed to call anyone for help.

  Not that she’d need help. But there was a storm outside, and, well, she’d never been up on the roof of a house before. She wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It was going to be a piece of cake, she told herself. No problem at all. She’d just get up there, nail down the tarp and get back down. It would take ten minutes max.

  She could do it.

  Yep, no problem at all.

  She grabbed her cell phone off the table by the door and put it inside the pocket in the front of her sweatshirt, wrapped the nail gun up in the tarp, then tucked the bundle under one arm. Finally, she marched outside into the rain, feeling as resourceful and self-reliant as a pioneer woman.

  Once she had fought the wind to get the ladder balanced against the side of the house, she was feeling slightly less confident, but when her weight was on the ladder, there’d be no problem at all…she hoped.

  For once in her life she found herself wishing she had a nice strong man in her life to hold the ladder-or maybe even go up on the roof while she held the ladder-but she banished that thought before it could take root.

  Men, even the biggest, strongest ones, were intimidated by her. They usually didn’t want their women to be smarter and more successful than them. And those who weren’t intimidated usually just couldn’t understand her at all. She marched to the beat of her own drummer, and while as a kid that had been the source of most of her misery, as an adult, it gave her joy to be herself. Unlike in her adolescent years, now she didn’t give a damn if men were turned off by her funky fashion sense, her outspokenness or her sometimes-odd interests.

  Except, well…maybe she should give a damn, considering how hard up she was, to be having orgasm-inducing dreams all by herself in bed.

  Not wanting to dwell on thoughts of the man who’d inspired the dreams, Lorelei stared up at the top of the ladder, rain pelting her face, and tested its footing by placing her weight on the first rung. She shivered at the icy wind that penetrated her pj bottoms. The bundled tarp tucked under one arm, she quickly climbed the ladder before she could lose her nerve.

  At the top, she carefully placed the tarp on the roof, then eased herself up beside it.

  Okay, now what? She’d never been on a rooftop before, let alone in a storm. By now she was half soaked by the driving rain, and the wind felt strong up here. She carefully started unrolling the tarp as best she could over the problem spot.

  As soon as she had one corner of it free, she took out the nail gun and drove several nails into the corner. Then she rolled the tarp out farther, using her knees to keep it down in the wind, and crawled across it to nail the next corner down. This one needed to hang over the edge of the roof, and getting so close to the edge made her a little queasy. But she managed it.

  Feeling more confident, she made quick work of the third corner, then crawled across toward the fourth corner. A wind gust blew the tarp up into her face before she made it there, a gust so hard she had to duck down and press herself to the roof to keep her balance. She muttered a string of curses and edged herself toward the corner of the tarp again, quickly nailing it down with three nails as she used her knees to hold the corner in place.

  Finished, thank God. But when she tried to crawl back toward the ladder she couldn’t move. Her leg was stuck. She looked down at the spot her leg refused to move from and saw that she’d managed to nail one leg of her pj bottoms to the roof along with the tarp.

  Of all the stupid things she’d ever done…

  She muttered a string of curses.

  Think. What to do? She tugged at her pant leg again, figuring if nothing else she could rip them off, but the roof was slanted, and if she tugged hard she was likely to fall right off.

  Okay, so, she’d just have to slip the pj bottoms off and leave them up here. The world wouldn’t end if she crawled back down the ladder in her underwear. Shivering and soaked, and trapped in a kneeling position by her inept nail-gun work, she dropped the gun, untied her shoes and kicked them off, then shimmied out of the pj bottoms.

  There, that wasn’t so hard. In the morning her pj’s would be stuck up here for all to see like a surrender flag made by Victoria’s Secret, but that was better than her being stuck up here with them.

  When she was done, she hurriedly put her shoes back on and crawled to the edge of the roof where the ladder was…No, make that, where the ladder had been. The same wind gust that had nearly blown her off the roof, had apparently blown the ladder over, and it now lay in the grass, utterly useless to her.

  Another string of curses escaped her lips.

  Now what?

  She didn’t know anyone well enough in town anymore to call them after midnight to come help her out of this ridiculous bind. Growing colder and wetter by the second, she began to see what she was going to have to do.

  Call 9-1-1.

  As soon as she thought it, she also realized that would mean the fire department would probably come. And, that meant there was a small but real chance it would be Ryan Quinn who’d have to come up here and rescue her in her underwear.

  4

  R YAN STEPPED off the truck and braced himself against the driving rain and wind that lashed him. As he strode across the lawn lit by the engine’s flashing red lights, he turned on the flashlight in his hand and shone it ahead so that he could see where he stepped. Behind him, the removable ladder was being brought down from the truck by his buddy Kyle.

  It had been a week since Ryan had seen Lorelei in the E.R., but he hadn’t stopped thinking about her. She popped into his thoughts at odd times of day and night, like right now, as h
e strode across the yard of a house where it had been reported a woman was stuck on the roof.

  Stuck on the roof? This stormy night, of all nights? Well, it wouldn’t be the oddest thing he’d ever seen on duty.

  This place, he recalled, was where Lorelei had lived when they were teenagers. He’d come here a handful of times to work on their science project, but he wondered who owned the place now. He didn’t come to this neighborhood often. His own house was little more than a surf shack, a place down the coast he’d been renting for a few years near the best surf break in the area.

  Whoever lived here hadn’t taken very good care of it. Last time he’d seen a place in such bad shape, he’d found a meth lab inside. He braced himself for having to deal with some meth head on a rampage, stuck on the roof after trying to fix the TV antenna or something equally dumb.

  On the other side of the house, he found a ladder lying across the grass, which probably explained the person trapped on the roof.

  Kyle positioned the ladder for Ryan and braced it, then Ryan began to climb up. A minute later, he was peering over the edge of the slanted roof.

  The first thing he saw was a pair of bare legs, bent in a squatting position. His gaze followed the legs upward to the rest of the woman, whose face was familiar to him.

  Lorelei.

  Sweet heaven.

  Lorelei, looking wet and cold, but not hurt. He tried not to grin. She had an expression on her face somewhere between anger and self-deprecation, as if she knew how ridiculous she looked but couldn’t quite bring herself to laugh about it.

  “Lorelei,” he said. “Hi. Are you hurt at all?”

  “No, just wet.”

  “Let’s get you down from here. Just take my hand,” he said, reaching out.

  She looked at his outstretched hand, then back up at him. “I don’t have any pants,” she said, her teeth chattering between the words.

  “Dare I ask why?”