“Brad…what would you say if I asked if it’s possible to fall in love in a week?”
Happiness filled all the spaces inside him that only yesterday had been rendered numb. “I’d say that since you’re asking a guy who fell in love three months ago in the span of about one minute, yeah, a week is definitely possible.”
Her gaze searched his. “If the invitation is still open, I’d like to join you and your family for Christmas dinner.”
His heart performed a somersault-like maneuver. “The invitation is still open,” he assured her. “But they’re going to think you’re my girlfriend.”
“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.”
UP ON THE HOUSETOP by Jamie Sobrato
To Mom
Prologue
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.
1
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.