disaster had struck.
“You have been feeling restless, have you not?”
She nodded slowly.
“And you have unsettled business in the place where you became a woman.”
Oh, dear. Her mouth went dry. She looked at the fire, and then quickly back at Kinsei again, because he knew that when she couldn’t look at him, he’d struck the most tender of nerves.
“The place has made you so unhappy in the past, that you go all the way to the other side of Mother Earth to escape it, but you cannot escape what dwells in your heart.”
“Is this your way of getting rid of the annoying white doctor?”
Kinsei laughed hard. He always said there was no other way to laugh.
“No, no, my dear. You are ready to go. This is why I say so.”
“I’m afraid.”
“You have so much pain in your heart, you need to conquer it.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Think of someone who hurt you the most. Who is it?”
Without thinking, Lorelei blurted the name
Her first love, her first lover, her first heartbreak.
“You must go back to him and find a way to have power over your pain.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If he killed your family’s goat, then you take the goat of his family. You see? It is the way to achieve balance, and happiness comes after balance.”
“So if he broke my heart, I have to break his?”
“I never thought you such a violent woman.”
Lorelei laughed now, realizing how her meaning had gotten lost in translation. “No, in English, to break someone’s heart means to hurt the person you love very badly.”
“Ah, I see. You must not be vengeful. But this man who set fire to your heart, you must take back from him the power he took from you. He took your virginity, you take it back.”
She had stopped wondering how he knew details of her life that she hadn’t told anyone. He just did.
“How, exactly, might I do that?”
“You must have sexual passion with him, and then walk away. In this act, you will be taking back your sexual power.”
Lorelei’s insides rebelled at the idea.
“And don’t let your silly Western ideas get in the way of this wisdom. It is the correct thing to do.”
There wasn’t a relationship therapist on earth who would have agreed with Kinsei, but he had never steered Lorelei wrong. She bit her lip and let the fire mesmerize her now.
Take back her sexual power? Go home again? Leave this place she’d come to love?
She’d have to sleep on it.
1
DR. LORELEI GIBSON didn’t recognize the hot guy sitting on her examining table at first. She was preoccupied and exhausted. The pace of the Ocean Harbor Beach Hospital E.R. was still a drastic change from her last job, and she’d already been on her shift for eleven hours when she walked into room 8 and looked at the clipboard.
“Hello, Mr…Quincy. Let’s see what’s going on here.”
“It’s Quinn, not Quincy, and I just got hit in the head by some falling floorboards-that’s all,” he said in the usual manner of manly men who didn’t like to admit they were hurt.
Quinn, not Quincy, she noted on the chart, scratching out the mistake someone in admitting had made. Quinn- not-Quincy wore a pair of firefighter’s pants and boots and a white T-shirt. When her gaze lingered for a few moments on his face though, she choked back a little gasp of surprise.
Ryan Quinn.
She thought of Kenya, and Kinsei and his advice to her before she’d left Africa. She’d tried to dismiss his words, but she couldn’t. Not completely. He was part of the reason she was here in Ocean Harbor Beach, trying to make peace with her past.
And now here he was, this piece of her past, sitting on her examining table, as if Kinsei himself had delivered him up for her.
He looked a little different than he had fifteen years ago, when they’d been in high school together-older, more mature, more weathered by life, but still gorgeous, even more so than in his younger years.
This was the problem with coming back to her hometown after so many years away-it was like walking through a graveyard, with ghosts hopping up to scare her at every turn. Although they were ghosts she’d come to face, their appearance didn’t scare her any less.
She didn’t have many-any?-pleasant memories from her adolescent years. She’d been an awkward, nerdy, socially inept, chronically weird kid, too brainy for her own good and too young, from having been moved ahead two grades, to grasp the intricacies of adolescent social life.
And she’d had a raging, painful, endless crush on Ryan Quinn.
In spite of the significant role he played in her memories, she knew it was entirely possible he wouldn’t remember her at all. They’d slept together exactly once and while for her it had been a momentous event-her first time-for him, it had just been a meaningless teenage conquest, probably one among many.
She swallowed the bile rising up in her throat and forced herself to focus on the present.
“Looks like your CT scan came out with no abnormalities,” she said as she finished reading over his chart.
Lorelei approached him, set aside the clipboard, and took out her light. She shone it in his eyes and watched his pupils contract normally, then instructed him to follow the light with his gaze as she moved it left, right, up and down.
“Have you felt dizzy at all? Nauseous?”
“Nope. I blacked out right after getting hit in the head, but only for a few minutes.”
She noted her observations on the chart.
“You look familiar,” he said, frowning at her name tag, and her throat constricted. “Lorelei Gibson…Did we go to school together maybe?”
She was sixteen again for a moment, wondering why the love of her young life was pretending she didn’t exist the day after they’d made love. But she pushed aside the feelings of angst and inadequacy and reminded herself that she was now a grown woman who’d traveled around the world, served in the Peace Corps and finished medical school at the top of her class. Those old rules about who was cool and who wasn’t didn’t apply anymore, and those old rejections should not matter at all.
“Perhaps,” she said, sounding more casual than she felt. “I did grow up here, but I left after high school.”
Recognition dawned on his face, and she felt herself shrinking inwardly. “Rat Girl!”
Lorelei winced at the cruel nickname she’d been branded with in freshman year after volunteering to loan her two pet rats to their biology class to act as class pets for the year. Her intelligence, and her uncool interest in all things creepy and crawly, had made her stand out from her peers right away, and they’d awarded her a lovely moniker to match her pets.
When he caught her expression, he realized his mistake. “Oh, God, I’m sorry. You must have hated being called that…Lorelei. We were lab partners one year, right?”
If she hadn’t been blushing before, she definitely was now. Because soon, he was going to remember the
