Heating up the Holidays

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 sound 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.