Heating up the Holidays

by Jill Shalvis

  “That’s because I’m on Santa’s nice list.” He swung her up into his arms and headed toward his bedroom. “But what would you say if I told you I’m also on his naughty list?”

  She smiled into his eyes. “I’d say I’m a very, very lucky girl.”

  UP ON THE HOUSETOP by Jamie Sobrato

  To Mom

  Prologue

  A village near Mombasa, Kenya

  T HE FIRE glowed brightly in the darkness, crackling and filling the air with the scent of burning wood. Lorelei could have become mesmerized by it so easily, the same way she might have been entranced by a television screen back in the U.S. at night after a long day of work.

  But tonight, it only warmed her. The storytellers had long since finished spinning their tales, the drummers had retired to their cots and the last vestiges of the evening’s gathering had trickled away.

  Next to her, a gnarled old man who had most unexpectedly become one of her closest friends in the past few years was looking at her as if he could see her soul. She squirmed uncomfortably, because, she feared, he really could.

  “You must go home now,” Kinsei said in his heavily accented English.

  They had been trading her English language instruction for his knowledge of herbal medicine ever since Lorelei had first come to Kenya. It had started as her way of smoothing out the relationship between her, the local Peace Corps doctor, and him, the local medicine man.

  “I’m not sure I’m ready to go back to the U.S.”

  “Not America. I mean, you must go to your home. Where your family is. The place of your coming into this world.”

  A wave of nausea nearly overcame Lorelei, not just at the thought of going back to her hometown, but because Kinsei was eerily, against all her scientific logic, always right. The few times she’d dared to contradict his advice, 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 Ryan Quinn. God, she didn’t even think of him very often anymore, but when she did, she still felt as if she wanted to vomit. All her teenage angst, summed up in one 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

  Ocean Harbor Beach, California

  Six months later…

  D R . L ORELEI G IBSON 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 disastrous end of their senior-year lab partnership.

  When she’d mistaken his kindness for attraction, she’d finally worked up the courage to blatantly flirt with him. And one day while they’d been gathering sulfur water at the local hot springs for their project, she’d kissed him right on the mouth in the middle of a discussion about the effects of sulfur on invertebrates.

  And then, right there in the hot springs, the kiss had turned into an embrace, which had turned into heavy groping, which had turned into them taking off their clothes for a dip in the springs, which had turned into them making love in the pool of steaming water.

  To Lorelei, that one evening had been complete bliss. And the next day at school-utter hell. He’d never looked at her, never talked to her, never offered any further help on their lab project. He’d simply pretended she didn’t exist for the rest of their senior year.

  Lorelei had been heartbroken.

  She pushed away the horrible memories and tried to move on. They weren’t here for a high-school reunion. “So,” she said, pretending she’d been reading important things on his chart. “You blacked out after getting hit on the head?”

  He nodded, but he was still looking at her as though he was trying to remember something. “That’s what I just said.”

  “For a couple of minutes?”

  But she could tell by his expression now that he was remembering the hot springs. “You and I, senior year, we…”

  Oh, God.

  But why was she so scared? She wasn’t that inexperienced girl anymore.

  “We what?” she said flatly.

  “We, um, did that sulfur project together, didn’t we?” he said, obviously uncomfortable with her intense stare.

  She frowned as if she was having trouble recalling. “Did we? Wow, you’ve got a better memory than I do,” she lied.

  He looked at her a little oddly. “Yeah, we did.”

  “I’m sorry to hurry this along, but we’re pretty backed up today. Do you happen to know exactly how long you were blacked out?”

  “Oh, right, sorry. Maybe a couple of minutes?”

  “Okay, good. It looks like you’re fine. If you start feeling dizzy, nauseous, have any trouble with your vision, or generally just feel like something isn’t quite right, please come back in right away.”

  He nodded. “Okay.”

  “Take it easy for a day-no running marathons for at least twenty-four hours.”

  “Am I cleared to go back to work?”

  “Yes, so long as you’re not doing any heavy lifting for a day. You can take over-the-counter pain medication if you’re feeling any discomfort from the bump on your head.”

  She edged toward the door.

  “Okay, thanks. Hey, it was good to see you again. Welcome back to Ocean Harbor Beach.”

  Lorelei smiled as best she could. “It’s good to be back,” she said as she hurried out the door, feeling as if she were fleeing the scene of a crime.

  In the hallway, Maria Valdez, one of the day-shift nurses, was passing by. She stopped in her tracks. “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Lorelei blinked dumbly at the question, not sure how to answer. “Not really,” she said. “I’ll be in the break room for a few minutes.”

  She headed down the hallway, her heart thudding wildly in her chest, feeling for all the world as though she was in high school again.

  2

  “R EMEMBER that girl Lorelei Gibson from high school?”

  Ryan’s coworker, Kyle Witcomb, who’d been sitting in the E.R. waiting for him, blinked uncomprehending. “Um, no. Are you going to live, or what?”

  “Sure, just got a bump on the head is all. I told you guys I didn’t need to come to the E.R.”

  “Yeah, well, you were slurring your words and talking nonsense at the time.”

  “And, now I’m fine, so let’s get out of here,” Ryan said, then headed toward the E.R. entrance.

  No matter how long he’d worked as a firefighter, he never got comfortable with the sight of people sick or in pain. It always made him feel that he should be doing something to help, and if he couldn’t, it drove him crazy.

  Once they were outside in the cool, sunny December day, free of the sights and smells of tragedy, he let out a sigh of relief. His thoughts went immediately back to Lorelei.

  “That girl from school I mentioned-I know you’ll remember her. She was in our biology class, and she had those pet rats-”

  “Rat Girl?” Kyle said, frowning. “That weird science-geek chick who always wore hats to school?”

  Ryan winced at the nickname. He still felt like a jerk for blurting it out to her in the examining room. But he had much bigger things to be ashamed of. After they’d had sex, he’d spent the rest of the year pretending she didn’t exist, unwilling as he’d been to admit he was attracted to her.

  “Yes,” he said, his tone a little testy. “That’s her. She was my doctor today.”

  “No kidding? I’ve never seen her around here.”

  “She said she just moved back into town. I gotta tell you, she doesn’t look so weird anymore. She was pretty damn hot.”

  “No way. I remember one time, she came to school smelling horrible, like she hadn’t bathed in weeks, with blood all over her clothes. When our homeroom teacher demanded to know what had happened, she said she’d found a dead dog on the side of the road and carried it around looking for its owners.”

  Ryan said nothing. His thoughts went back to adolescence, when he hadn’t had the balls to publicly lust after a girl like Lorelei. All the kids in school had known she was brilliant, but that had only made her stand out even more as an oddball. It hadn’t helped that she’d been so much younger than the other kids in their graduating class.

  He hated that he’d been one of the jerks who’d made her feel like an outcast. Sure, he’d been thrilled when they were assigned as lab partners senior year, but only because he knew it guaranteed him an A. The fact that she’d apparently developed a crush on him and thought he’d be interested in being more than lab partners had been lost on his eighteen-year-old self-that is, until she’d thrown herself at him the last night they’d worked together and he’d callously accepted her offer of sex without considering at all what it might mean to her.

  He’d only let himself consider later that her complete awkwardness as they’d fumbled with each other’s bodies, and the pain he’d caused when he entered her, might have meant that she’d been a virgin. Which had only made him retreat even more from facing her, because it meant he was an even bigger jerk than he’d wanted to admit.

  He’d been immature back then, and only officially interested in girls with shiny hair and hot bodies. He’d never even told any of his friends that he’d slept with Lorelei.

  Ryan wished he could make it up to her for the following days and weeks after they�
�d had sex, when he wouldn’t talk to her or even look her in the eye.

  She must have absolutely hated him.

  She had every right to.

  “What’s the matter with you?” Kyle said.

  “Oh, nothing,” Ryan lied. “I was just thinking about how being a doctor’s a lot like being a firefighter-saving lives, working under pressure, making a difference for people-”

  “Dude, you and your bleeding heart might want to go on home now and take a rest. Maybe curl up with your favorite teddy bear and watch a chick flick.”

  Ryan gave Kyle a friendly shove. “Screw you.”

  “The chief said you should go home for the day. I’ll drive you back to your place if you want.”

  “I should go get my car from the station.”

  “You sure you’re clear to drive?”

  “She didn’t say I couldn’t.”

  They both climbed into Kyle’s truck and started off toward the fire station.

  “You going anywhere for the holidays?” Kyle asked.

  “Nope. I’ll be working. My parents are at my aunt’s in Arizona, so there won’t be a family get-together.”

  “Hey, I’d have you join me, but I’ve got vacation time and I’m heading south to visit family.”

  “That’s all right,” Ryan mumbled, distracted as he stared out the window.

  His head still ached from getting bonked, and Christmas was the last thing on his mind right now. He couldn’t stop thinking about Lorelei. Did it make him a shallow jerk that now that she was hot, he felt bad for having been an ass to her?

  Yeah, it pretty much did. He cringed at himself. Except, well, she’d probably always been this hot. It had just taken him growing up and seeing her through mature eyes to understand it.

  It wasn’t just that she was pretty in a more conventional way now. He hadn’t really thought much about her in all these years, but what he did remember about her was all good. She’d been so smart and quirky back then, he hadn’t had the good taste to recognize what a cool person she was. But now he knew better…