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

RYAN 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 he 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?”

“I…nailed them to the roof by accident.” She tried to say it with a straight face, but laughter bubbled up from her throat, and Ryan couldn’t help laughing, too.

“That must be the polka-dot surrender flag over there flapping in the wind,” he said, nodding to the bit of pink fabric ten feet away.

“Yeah.”

“Take my raincoat,” he said, unbuttoning it as he spoke. Before she could protest, he shrugged it off and handed it to her.

She put it on, and sure enough, it was long enough to cover her to midthigh. “Thanks,” she said, still shivering as she eased herself across the roof and turned so that she could go down the ladder.

He placed a steadying hand on her back, but his gaze was fixed on her bare legs, thin and shapely. He got a flash of heat in his groin as he imagined her thighs spreading for him, imagined those legs wrapped around his hips…

Whoa, there. Time to remember his purpose, which was to help her off the roof, and then maybe, if he dared, apologize to her for his asshole behavior in high school.

They made quick work of the ladder, and at the bottom, Ryan picked up a blanket that someone had brought and left on the ground, and wrapped it around Lorelei.

“All’s well,” he said to Kyle. “I’ll help her back to the house while you get the ladder.”

“Sure thing, man.”

Ryan followed Lorelei around the side of the house to the back door. Once she was inside, she turned to face him, took off the blanket, and unceremoniously removed her jacket. He took them when she held the stuff out, and then his mouth went dry as he took in the sight of her stripping off her sweatshirt and grabbing a towel to dry off.