Jacquie ’Alessandro - Heating up the Holidays

“Which is better than what you’d get from my family. You’d be interrogated by my mother, sister and Nana like a murder suspect, and be on the receiving end of multiple death stares from my brothers.”

“No problem. I don’t scare easily.”

“So I’ve noticed. Just one of the things I love about you.” She smiled. “One of the many things. And about your family thinking I’m your girlfriend…I’d like to be. If you’ll have me, in spite of the crazy hours I’ll need to put in at Blooming Pails until who-knows-when.”

“If I’ll have you? If I’ll have you?” He picked her up and twirled her around until she squealed. After setting her back on her feet, he grabbed her hand and led her into the kitchen. “If I’ll have you?” he repeated, shaking his head. “Crazy woman.” He opened the drawer where he kept his receipts and sifted through several pieces of paper before finding what he wanted.

“Take a look at this, Miss If-You’ll-Have-Me.”

“What is it?”

“Something I wrote after our first ‘one little dinner.’ I’d mentioned my Christmas list, so the next day, I actually wrote one.” He handed her the paper.

“‘My Grown-up Christmas List,’” she read. Then her eyes widened. “The only thing on this list is my name.”

“Twenty times,” he agreed. “’Cause all I wanted for Christmas was you.”

A smile bloomed across her face. “Be careful what you wish for, Mr. December. Looks like you’re getting it.”

“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.”

A village near Mombasa, Kenya

THE 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.

Ocean Harbor Beach, California

Six months later…

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.