After a twelve-hour shift at the hospital that had turned into a fourteen-hour one, she really, really could have used a good night’s rest. But the noise was only getting louder. She flung her covers off and got up, grabbed her robe and went to check the fire in the wood-burning stove.

Her family beach cottage had seen better days. Her grandmother had passed it on to her mother, but now that her mom was living in a condo in a seniors’ community, she had no interest in the upkeep that went into taking care of the cottage.

And her lack of interest showed in a big way. After sitting empty for the past three years, being battered by the constant wind from the Pacific and occasional arctic storms that blew in off the ocean, the cottage was in terrible disrepair. Lorelei had been thrilled when her mother offered to let her have the place-it had seemed like serendipity, after she’d made the decision to come home-but she’d had no idea how far in over her head she was getting.

With the house-and the emotions involved in coming back to Ocean Harbor Beach. She didn’t have many friends here to come back to. Those few she’d kept from high school had scattered to other parts of the world thanks to careers and marriages. And those who remained-like Ryan Quinn-were ghosts she wasn’t sure she wanted to confront.

Except, Kinsei insisted she had to.

Kinsei was a crazy old man who had three wives, a terrible pipe-smoking habit and wore a loincloth. Why, exactly, did she feel the need to take relationship advice from him?

Because she knew she really did want to move on from the pain of her past. She wanted to let go of her childhood angst and make a life for herself here in her hometown. She didn’t want to run away from her dreams anymore. So here she was, attempting to live out the dream she’d always held dearest, of working happily as a doctor in her hometown, and she was having to confront her dreaded past in order to do it.

And what she needed to confront right now was that her house was falling down.

Now that the first big winter storm of the season was closing in on the coast, Lorelei had a feeling she was going to see just how bad the cottage’s condition truly was.

She kept telling herself that after two years in the Peace Corps, she could accomplish anything, but so far, she’d proven to be pretty inept at home improvement. She’d thought that the resourcefulness she’d learned in Kenya would serve her well in tackling the renovation project, but, it turned out, she was better at adapting to life as a doctor in a third-world culture than she was at stripping floors or repairing leaky roofs.

And speaking of leaky roofs…

That banging sound coming from the ceiling in the living room was situated over a spot where she could see water dripping onto the floor. She walked across the room and peered up at the leak.

“Dammit,” she muttered, her mind producing images of costly structural damage done by long-term exposure to rain.

She needed to do something. She’d hoped the storm would hold off until morning when she’d have more energy to get on the roof and nail down a protective tarp, but she’d been kidding herself. The rain was probably only going to get worse as the night wore on.

She found a bucket under the kitchen sink and placed it where the water was dripping. Then she slipped her feet into a pair of gardening clogs and went outside to look at the roof. Fat raindrops pelted her skin, and an icy wind penetrated her robe and chilled her to the bone instantly. She tugged the fabric tighter around herself and walked to the side of the house.

There she found the source of the noise. As she’d suspected an area of the roof had taken the brunt of the coastal winds for years, so that now some of the shingles were missing, while a piece of the roof itself flapped in the wind like a bad toupee, lifting up and slamming back down with each wind gust.

She had to do something about it. If she waited all night, that whole section of the roof might be gone in the morning.

Flush with a sense of self-reliance, she ran to the gardening shed in the backyard and tugged out the ladder, then dragged it across the yard and laid it on the ground next to the house. After that, she went back inside, took off the housecoat and found a hooded sweatshirt that would serve her better for climbing onto the roof. After two years in Africa, she no longer owned any rain gear, and she made a mental note to buy an all-weather kind of coat soon.

She tugged the sweatshirt on over her pj’s-a pink flannel top and pants covered in big red polka dots-then put on her running shoes, which would be better than the clogs for climbing.

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.