Safe Harbour
Marie Ferrarella
If he stays, she's in danger. But if he leaves… All Mike Ryan can tell her is his name. Revealing any more to this beautiful stranger would put her in danger. And he's not willing to jeopardize Stevi Roman's–or her family's–safety any more than he already has. Why this angel has taken him in, nursed him and trusted him, he can't fathom. But it has been the best few weeks he's ever known. For the first time, Mike can imagine having a real life, a real identity, a real future. Stevi has done more than save him. She's inspired him.And that's why he has to go. The safest thing he could do for all of them is to disappear….
If he stays, she’s in danger. But if he leaves…
All Mike Ryan can tell her is his name. Revealing any more to this beautiful stranger would put her in danger. And he’s not willing to jeopardize Stevi Roman’s—or her family’s—safety any more than he already has. Why this angel has taken him in, nursed him and trusted him, he can’t fathom. But it has been the best few weeks he’s ever known. For the first time, Mike can imagine having a real life, a real identity, a real future. Stevi has done more than save him. She’s inspired him.
And that’s why he has to go. The safest thing he could do for all of them is to disappear….
Stevi’s eyes widened as she drew closer and closer to the form that had been washed ashore.
Her breath had somehow gotten stuck in her throat. There was no longer a question in her mind what she was looking at. The clump of seaweed had somehow managed to turn into the very real form of a man.
A man lying still and facedown in the sand.
She didn’t remember how the last fifteen feet were reduced to less than a foot. Couldn’t remember if she ran toward the prone body or if she approached it cautiously. Given her usual recklessness, she probably ran, Stevi thought.
But suddenly, there she was, standing over the immobile body of a man, wondering if he was dead or just unconscious.
“Mister?”
Dear Reader (#uaba2bc94-5470-53ce-95c9-fd49d0a1193b),
So, we meet again. This time, it’s for Stephanie’s story. Stevi is Richard’s third daughter, the artistic, creative one who, just possibly, has given him the most concern. As Stevi’s formal education comes to a close and she graduates college, she finds herself growing more and more restless. Still undecided where she will wind up going—New York City? Paris? Or…? She takes to channeling some of her energy into early morning runs along the beach. This particular early morning, she finds more than just a seashell in her path. She comes across a man who has washed up on the beach and is half dead, thanks to the wound in his chest.
Thinking only that she has to save this man’s life, Stevi enlists the help of the inn’s gardener, a man with a mysterious past who came to work for her father some fifteen years earlier. Silvio brings the unconscious man back to the inn and patches him up.
As she nurses her stranger back to health, Stevi finds herself more and more enamored with the man who claims to have no memory of the events that brought him to her beach. By the time he’s well enough to leave, she fervently hopes he doesn’t. But he is just as determined to go before his past catches up to him—and hurts the family he has come to care so much about.
I hope you stay to find out how it all turns out. And if you do, as always, I thank you for reading, and from the bottom of my heart, I wish you someone to love who loves you back.
All the best,
Marie Ferrarella
Safe Harbour
Marie Ferrarella
www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)
MARIE FERRARELLA
is a USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award-winning author, and has written more than 240 books for Mills & Boon, some under the name Marie Nicole. As of January 2013, she has been published by Mills & Boon for 30 years. She earned a master’s degree in Shakespearean comedy and, perhaps as a result, her writing is distinguished by humor and natural dialogue. Her goal is to entertain and to make people laugh and feel good. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, www.marieferrarella.com (http://www.marieferrarella.com).
To Victoria Curran for giving me a really great suggestion
Contents
Dear Reader (#ufc946da3-7fb2-50ed-9c64-ba8a71e739ed)
PROLOGUE (#u6be668ad-03c5-5a45-bb66-40ebe771311d)
CHAPTER ONE (#u7b6d7bc8-c839-5283-8c91-a33a5da4010b)
CHAPTER TWO (#u459bf285-f069-5581-96d2-1d79867ad18a)
CHAPTER THREE (#u71301106-a5b1-5f5d-93c9-38062f2935e1)
CHAPTER FOUR (#u5fe6f1f3-3581-51c5-91fc-fa61f00a3352)
CHAPTER FIVE (#uaac73907-83d3-5e27-8d9a-0e2b9e14c7e5)
CHAPTER SIX (#ub5c9af1f-eb02-5e3d-aaea-1090ba95135d)
CHAPTER SEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHT (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER ELEVEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWELVE (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER THIRTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FOURTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER FIFTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SIXTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER NINETEEN (#litres_trial_promo)
CHAPTER TWENTY (#litres_trial_promo)
EPILOGUE (#litres_trial_promo)
PROLOGUE
THE USUAL JUNE-GLOOM weather was happily absent from the scene despite the fact that it was barely eight in the morning. A light breeze was drifting in from the ocean, bringing just a faint touch of moisture to the modest family cemetery.
Richard Roman had made his usual pilgrimage down the hill from Ladera-by-the-Sea, the family bed-and-breakfast inn he owned and ran, with the help of his daughters, to the small family cemetery where, among others, his wife and his best friend, Dan Taylor, were buried.
It was his custom to come here to share his thoughts, his feelings and any news that might be unfolding in the sedate, yet ever-changing world of the one-hundred-and-twenty-year-old inn.
Richard felt as if he were still in touch with his Amy and with Dan, if he came here, to stand between their headstones.
He dearly loved all four of his daughters and regarded Alex’s and Cris’s husbands, Wyatt and Shane, as if they were his own sons, but the two people he had felt closest to were both here, resting beneath the warm earth, waiting for the day when he could come and join them. The family he lived with at the inn had his heart, but Dan and especially Amy had his soul and he was never quite whole except when he was here, at the cemetery with them.
“Stevi graduated yesterday,” he announced, looking down at Amy’s white marble headstone. “I wish you could have been there, you would have been so proud. I would have loved to have held your hand in mine, actually held it, when Stevi marched across that stage to get her diploma.” He chuckled. “I half expected her to do a cartwheel across the stage. She’s been really dying to graduate.” He paused, reflecting sadly on that. “Now she says there’s nothing stopping her from going off and following her dreams.”
Richard sighed. “She’s talking about going to New York, Amy, or somewhere equally exciting.”
He looked down at Dan’s headstone. “You were always going somewhere, following the next story, the next lead. I always figured you were half journalist, half nomad. If it wasn’t for your summers here with Wyatt, I don’t think I would have seen you even half as much as I did.” He laughed, shaking his head. “This is the longest you’ve ever stayed put anywhere.”
He looked off toward the ocean, watching the waves rise and chase one another to the shore. It soothed him a little.
“Maybe I’m hopelessly old-fashioned, but I feel it’s different for a girl, different going off on her own. Sure, I’d also worry if this was my son, but you tend to want to protect a daughter, even if she has a scissor tongue and is pretty resourceful, like Stevi. If either of you two can come up with a way I can get her to stay here, I’d really appreciate it,” he said, spreading his arms helplessly.
“Oh, I almost forgot. Stevi has me all turned around,” he apologized. “Guess what?”
Holding on to his big news for a moment longer, Richard looked from one grave site to the other. “Okay, okay, I won’t torture you with this.” His grin grew twice as wide when he said, “Guess who’s going to be a grandparent?” His own words echoed back to him and he laughed. “I guess I didn’t really phrase that right because all three of us are.” He could barely contain his joy as he said, “Alex and Wyatt are expecting. It’ll be a Christmas baby unless I miscalculated. And if this new little person has half the energy that Alex had at that age, I’d say that Alex and Wyatt are in big trouble.”
He sat down on the rim of the seat that Shane, his other son-in-law, had built into the base of the pine tree overlooking these two graves.
“You have no idea what I wouldn’t give to be able to see you holding our second grandchild, Amy. Or you, for that matter,” he added with a laugh as he glanced over toward Dan’s grave. “I can still remember you with Wyatt. He was so little and you looked like a fish out of water. A big and awkward fish. But to your credit, you didn’t drop him, not once. Still, I think, if you were here and it was your turn to hold this new person on the way into our lives, I’d insist you sit down first—just in case.”
Richard glanced at his wristwatch—the one Amy had given him on their wedding day—and rose. “I’d better be getting back. It’s time to get things rolling. Alex is still running things, but I’m trying to get her to relax a little, make her realize that she has nothing to prove anymore. That’s our Alex, though. Always looking for challenges to vanquish.
“Don’t forget what I asked you two to do,” he said by way of parting. “Find a way—a good way, to get our Stevi to want to stay right here, close to home. We need her and even though she might not realize it, she needs us.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he promised. “You know I can hardly let a day go by without visiting with you two, unless something pressing keeps me away.”
With a smile curving the corners of his mouth, Richard squared his shoulders and headed back up the hill. The inn—and his family—were waiting for him.
It was nice, Richard couldn’t help thinking, to be needed.
CHAPTER ONE
SHE WAS AWARE of the dull ache in her calf muscles as they tensed with each footfall while she ran, for the most part, parallel to the shoreline.
Waves flowed in, then ebbed away, sometimes drenching her up to the ankles. Stephanie Roman hardly noticed. She kept her mind focused on her goal, reaching the sand dune whimsically shaped like a cave for vertically challenged elves.
Stevi, as her family had always called her, was fairly new to this concept of getting regular exercise. She’d undertaken running a few short months ago as a way of channeling her energy.
Once begun, however, she found this form of exercise addictive, a realization that took her completely by surprise. But even as she craved it, running to her was a chore, something she needed to mark off on her to-do checklist before she could continue, unobstructed, with the rest of her day.
She didn’t realize that she was addicted to it until, overwhelmed with work, she tried skipping a run and found herself feeling utterly out of sync with her own body.
Less than a month ago, she had been juggling classes, a part-time job—she helped out at the inn—and her artwork. She created many of the paintings that hung in the rooms in her family’s inn.
A select few of her works of art were on the walls of a local art gallery.
They represented her start.
Now that college and her classes were finally part of her past, with a degree in art to show for it, Stevi’s time was freed up somewhat. Except she was still out here, on the beach, running as fast as she was able to, at six in the morning.
Just her, the water and the seagulls.
One thing down, everything else to go.
Not that there was all that much to get done these days. After handling Alex’s and Cris’s weddings, she’d discovered she had a real knack for event planning. And while business at the inn was continuing at a steady, brisk pace, there were only a handful of dinner parties for her to put together for the guests. Stevi had suddenly found herself with next to nothing to do.
Without events to plan or classes to study for, she was feeling incredibly restless. It was only a week since graduation, but she was already bored to tears and dying for some sort of excitement.
Stevi accelerated her pace, pushing harder.
Oh, she was well aware that she should be grateful that her life was as good, as comfortable, as it was. There were no deep, dark secrets—or shallow, light ones for that matter—no family rifts. She had a wonderful family, she got along well with her father, her sisters and even her brothers-in-law.
Stevi blew out a breath. She supposed it was some kind of sin in the grand scheme of things to feel this dissatisfied when there wasn’t one single bad thing in her life to point a finger at.
But that didn’t change the fact that she desperately craved some excitement, something to inspire her art.
That was why, a year ago, she began considering the possibility of moving to New York City, at least for a while. New York City was everything that Ladera was not. It represented a complete change of pace. After all, New York City was the city that never slept.
New York was the home of the incredible Metropolitan Museum of Art. She felt herself growing excited just thinking of the Met.
New York represented the answer to her prayers.
The only thing stopping her from uprooting this second—as impetuous as that sounded, and she was nothing if not admittedly impetuous—was guilt. Stevi knew, even though he hadn’t said a word to her, that her father didn’t want her to move away, much less move to New York.
Her dad was a warm, loving man. He’d dealt with his share of sorrow and illnesses, but somehow he’d always managed to find a way to get up again after life had given him a devastating punch to the gut. How could she turn her back on a man like that? Her father was a man who thrived on having his family not just close by, but around him.
And so far, they all were.
Granted Alex and Wyatt had a house in Los Angeles, but that was mostly for Wyatt’s convenience so he had somewhere to stay when he was in the middle of selling one of his movie scripts. The rest of the time, Wyatt and Alex lived here at the inn.
By choice.
Wyatt had once told her that his fondest memories of his childhood—as well as of his father—were all created here at the inn, where he and Uncle Dan, as she and her sisters all thought of Wyatt’s father, spent their summers. And even Cris, who could have lived in a mini-mansion because of Shane’s construction skills, stayed at the inn, in the wing Shane had built after he finished the expansion that had brought him here in the first place.
Now Alex and Wyatt were going to have a baby and Cris’s five-year-old son, Ricky, was always with his grandfather, so it wasn’t as if she’d be abandoning her dad to a life of solitude if she left.
With her younger sister, Andy, rounding out their numbers, there were plenty of family on hand.
Despite that, the thought of leaving the inn made her feel really guilty.
Yet staying here might just drive her stir-crazy.
People came to Ladera-by-the-Sea and willingly paid top dollar to bask in its tranquility, in its soothing peacefulness—in all the things that were driving her away.
Maybe, Stevi tried to console herself, if she got away for a while, gave New York City an honest try, she might just get it out of her system. Maybe she’d discover that that sort of life really wasn’t for her and that what she had right here in her own backyard was what mattered.
But she knew that if she didn’t get the opportunity to contrast and compare the two ways of life, she was never really going to appreciate what she had.
Okay, Stevi decided, feeling determined. She had her course of action planned out.
She was going to tell her father that she was going to New York City on an extended vacation, to see the sights and take in the museums and the art galleries. Knowing her father, she was fairly certain he would object if she told him she was undertaking this New York adventure on her own, so she wouldn’t mention that part.
Right, and he wouldn’t ask who you were going with.
Stevi ran even faster. Her calves protested, threatening to cramp.
Maybe she’d ask one of her friends to come with her. Oh, not for as long as she planned on staying, but just long enough for her to find some temporary place to land. Maybe an apartment being sublet.
Too bad Wyatt no longer lived there, she thought. As a boy, after his parents had gotten divorced, his mother had taken Wyatt to live there.
But then, of course, if he’d never moved out here, he never would have become a screenplay writer, never would have married her sister.
Everything turned out for the best in the end. And it would again.
At least she fervently hoped so.
Her heart rate up, her calves aching, she glanced at her watch to see how long she had been at it.
Stevi frowned as she made out the numbers, then looked up and ahead.
Rather than being on her way back by now, she had just managed to reach the squat sand dune.
That meant she was only halfway finished with her run.
Stevi sighed. There was all that distance to run back. Or walk back if she was too tired, she thought, entertaining the possibility for exactly twenty seconds.
She was in far better shape than that, she reasoned, egging herself on to pick up her pace once again.
“C’mon, Stevi, you can do this. Show your stuff. Run like you mean it, not like some little old lady who can’t put one foot in front of the other.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she thought she saw something in the distance, something bobbing up and down in the water.
Most likely, she reasoned as she continued running toward it, it was either a dead fish or, as it was nine times out of ten, a large clump of seaweed.
She and her sisters often came down to the beach to clear the seaweed away. Half the time, it smelled like rotten eggs.
She changed direction slightly, running to where she thought she had spotted the seaweed.
Her eyes widened as she drew closer to the debris that had been washed ashore. Her breath got stuck in her throat.
There was no longer a question in her mind what she was looking at. The clump of seaweed had somehow managed to turn into the very real form of a man.
A man lying very still and facedown in the sand.
She didn’t remember how the last fifteen feet were reduced to less than a foot. Couldn’t remember if she ran toward the prone body or if she approached it cautiously. Given her usual recklessness, she probably ran.
But suddenly, there she was, standing over the immobile body of a man, wondering if he was dead or just unconscious.
“Mister?” she addressed softly.
There was no indication that he had heard her.
“Mister?” she said a little louder this time.
Still no reaction.
She put her hand on his shoulder and gently shook him. Again, no response.
Was he dead?
So far, in her world, death was something that occurred offstage, like her mother’s passing and Uncle Dan’s recent demise.
Her breath felt as if it had become solid and was backing up in her throat.
Drawing her courage to her like a shield, Stevi took hold of his shoulder again, rolling him to turn him faceup.
It wasn’t easy.
He was far from a small man. She wasn’t good at judging things like height, but he had to be well over six feet. And young. Those were sculpted muscles she was pulling on, hard even though they weren’t tensed.
When she finally got him on his back so that she could get a better look at him, Stevi’s breath caught in her throat.
She had to be looking down into the handsomest face she had ever seen, bar none. And—she was no expert when it came to this—she was fairly sure that was a bullet wound in his chest close to his shoulder.
Now that he was on his back, she saw that he was bleeding.
Tearing the bottom of her oversize T-shirt, she bunched it up into a huge wad and pressed it against the wound. She needed it to stay in place, but it wasn’t as though she came equipped with bandages or tape—or rope.
But she had a headband, she thought. Pulling it off, she looped it up his arm to his chest and then tied it as best she could.
Leaning in closer, Stevi tried to find some signs of life, some indication that he was still taking in air and that his heart was beating.
Just when she was inches away from his face, her attention focused on his chest, the man’s eyes suddenly flew open.
Stevi stifled a gasp.
“No police,” he said in a low, raspy voice, grasping her wrist.
The next second, his hold loosened, his fingers lax against her wrist.
He was unconscious again.
CHAPTER TWO
STEVI STARED DOWN at the man’s face. Scores of questions crossed her mind. Questions he couldn’t answer because he was unconscious.
Crouching over him, Stevi gingerly placed one hand directly before his nostrils and one on his chest, trying to detect some signs of life. While she didn’t feel his heart beating, she did detect just the slightest bit of breath coming from his nose.
She sighed with relief. He was still breathing. But who knew for how long? The makeshift bandage she’d created was discolored from all the blood it was soaking up. She needed to get him up to the inn and from there, to a hospital.
But none of this was going to happen if she didn’t get someone to help her. However, what was she going to say? She didn’t know the first thing about this man who had washed up on her beach. Why had someone shot him? Was he some kind of a criminal?
Well, whoever he was, sinner or saint, she couldn’t just let him bleed to death.
Her father would know what to do. Rising to her feet, Stevi frowned. Or maybe, since he was stronger, she should get Shane. It was still early and her brother-in-law wouldn’t have gone to work yet. He was renovating a house not far from the inn, which meant that he wouldn’t be leaving until around seven. People didn’t like to hear construction before seven.
The person she really wished she could go to was Wyatt. She’d grown up with him; he was like a big brother to her. Wyatt always knew what to do. But her brother-in-law was in L.A. rewriting one of his scripts.
That wound needed to be treated now.
Despite what the man had said, the right thing to do was to call the police.... Staring down, she hesitated. Something in her gut—and for the life of her, she wouldn’t have been able to say what—told her not to call them. At least, not yet. Not until this man had an opportunity to tell her what had happened.
Until he could speak for himself, she was going to be his voice. And his protector.
She just hoped she wouldn’t regret it.
She looked up the hill toward the inn. Was it her imagination, or did it suddenly look to be even farther away than she’d thought?
The winding road that led from the side of the inn down to the beach was just wide enough to accommodate a truck.
Silvio, the inn’s gardener, had one.
If she could pull off a last-minute double wedding for her two sisters, she could do anything.
Stevi took off for the inn.
There was an unconscious, bleeding man on the beach depending on her.
* * *
“TELL ME AGAIN—and this time I would like to hear the whole reason—why do you want my truck?” Silvio Armado Juarez asked his boss’s third daughter.
He thought of the girls as his own. He’d found his way to the inn some eighteen years ago, after having been forced to leave Argentina behind. His wife had already taken their three-year-old son and disappeared, and he’d barely managed to scrape enough money together to make it to the United States. He’d already spent most of what was left of his meager savings trying to find them, but never had. And then his time had run out and he’d had to leave. Fast.
The night he’d stumbled into Ladera-by-the-Sea, he certainly wasn’t looking for salvation. But in Richard Roman, Silvio wound up finding that and so much more.
Stevi shifted beneath the man’s watchful, dark eyes. “I, um, found something on the beach and it’s too big for me to carry up.”
“You found what on the beach?” It was clear that he wasn’t about to budge, or hand over the keys to the truck, until he was satisfied with her answer.
Lying had never been her strong suit. “It’s big and clumsy,” she explained with a small, careless shrug, praying for the interrogation to be over.
“Everything has a name, Miss Stevi, even big and clumsy things. And if it is that big, then I should put it in the truck for you. Come,” he said, putting down the rake, “I will drive us down.”
She had no idea how Silvio would react to the man who had washed ashore. She couldn’t really even say why she was so determined to keep this whole incident as quiet as possible. Maybe because she’d been the first one on the scene and she felt that this man’s fate could very well be in her hands. She didn’t want to surrender that responsibility to her father or older sisters or anyone else for that matter.
“No,” she insisted forcefully, “really, I can handle this by myself. I just need your truck.”
Silvio looked at her for a long moment. Alexandra was the one who controlled things. Cristina was the one who mothered everyone. Stephanie, this blond-haired young woman with the sparkling blue eyes, was the risk taker, the one who would dive into the ocean without testing the waters first.
“What is it that you are up to, Miss Stevi?” he asked.
“Nothing,” she answered far too quickly in his opinion. “I just found something. It might even be gone by now.”
For all she knew, the stranger might have come to again and this time, he might have managed to get up and gone—where? There was nowhere for a person in his half-drowned—not to mention shot—condition to go but up here to the inn and in her opinion, the man looked as though he was in no shape to climb the hill.
“Then let us go look together to see if it is gone. If it is not, then we will bring this something you found up to the inn. Agreed?”
The smile Stevi had pasted on her lips took a little more effort to maintain as she realized there was no way around this.
Silvio was coming with her.
She should have known this would happen. Over the years, out of gratitude and allegiance to her father, Silvio had appointed himself their guardian angel-in-chief. Guardian angels, apparently, had tremendous sticking power.
“All right, sure, I could use the extra help,” she said.
She followed Silvio to his vehicle, a truck he now owned after paying off his debt to her father over the years. The proud man had insisted on that.
She and Silvio got in the cab. When Silvio placed his hands on the steering wheel, he glanced over toward her, waiting for her to finish buckling up. When she did, he nodded in satisfaction and started up the truck.
As it rumbled to life, Stevi knew she had precious little time. “Um, Silvio, I’m going to need you to do something for me,” Stevi began hesitantly.
“I am listening,” he responded, guiding the truck slowly down the winding path.
She pressed her lips together, searching for the right way to phrase this. There really wasn’t one. She just had to hope he would grant her this request.
“I would like to keep this a secret between the two of us.”
“Keep what a secret between us?” Silvio raised one salt-and-pepper eyebrow.
“It would be just for a little while, until I can get all the facts together,” she said, her voice rising as she spoke faster.
“You are not answering my question,” Silvio said.
Stevi had never heard him raise his voice. Even so, she and her sisters always knew when the man was less than pleased.
“I need you to agree before I answer you,” Stevi blurted out.
While Silvio had come to love all four of the girls as if they were his daughters, that didn’t mean he would allow any of them to lead him blindly. Love, to him, meant giving the other person the benefit of your experience and your honor.
“I cannot agree to something until I know what it is I am agreeing to—and why I am doing something,” he said as he kept a watchful eye on the road before him, taking it as slowly as he could. If he went too fast, there was a very real possibility the truck could flip over.
She was running out of time. “Please, Silvio.”
“I am not thinking of myself right now,” he told Stevi in a very serious voice. “It is you I am worried about.”
Ever the guardian angel, she thought. She should have realized that she would be his first concern. She should have set his mind at ease first thing.
“You don’t have to be. It’s just that you know how excitable my father is and I don’t want him needlessly agitated or upset unless there’s something to be upset about.”
Silvio slowed down even more. There was something up ahead. Less than a beat later, he could make out what it was.
So that was why she was trying to get him to promise his silence.
“Like a strange man lying on the beach?” he asked, sparing her a glance.
“Yes, maybe like that,” she admitted, then blinked, taken completely by surprise by his question. “How did you—”
She turned to look through the truck’s windshield. The stranger was lying on the beach, exactly the way she’d left him.
“He’s still there,” she cried.
“Is that your big and clumsy something?”
“Yes.” From what she could see, the wounded man hadn’t moved a muscle. Did he have any injuries she’d missed? she wondered nervously.
“Who is he?”
This wasn’t a time for games, so she told him the truth. “I don’t know.”
Silvio drew in his breath sharply. “This could be a dangerous man.”
He was right, and yet, something inside of her said no. Stevi shook her head. “I don’t think so. Please, Silvio, trust me on this.”
“It is not you I need to trust,” he told her.
Silvio cut his engine when he was less than two feet away from the prone figure. He got out quickly, but not as quickly as she did, as she hurried over to the unconscious man and knelt next to him.
“This man is big,” Silvio said. “He is also wounded.”
“I know, that’s why we need to get him back to the inn before he bleeds out. Maybe if the two of us—”
Silvio waved her words away before she could complete her thought. “You will just get in my way. Open the back of the truck.”
As she hurried to do as she was told, Silvio squatted, picked the stranger up and then carried him fireman style.
The only indication Silvio gave that he was struggling beneath the weight was his deep breathing.
“This is against my better judgment,” he told Stevi once he had placed his load into the flatbed of his truck.
“I know,” Stevi responded and then, impulsively, she kissed Silvio on the cheek.
Silvio looked at her, surprised. “That does not make it all right.” Even so, a hint of a smile curved the corners of his mouth.
Stevi nodded. “I know that, too,” she replied. “I just wanted to say thank you.”
“We need to get back before this man bleeds all over my truck,” he said gruffly.
“Absolutely,” she agreed with a sigh of relief. She’d made it past the first hurdle.
CHAPTER THREE
AFTER THEIR JOINT wedding in December, and Alex and Cris had moved with their respective husbands into separate wings within the expanded inn, Stevi’s room still remained in the main part of the inn, or the “old inn,” as her father liked to refer to it. The fastest route to her room, naturally, was through the front entrance.
However, that route would take her, Silvio and the man she’d found on the beach past the reception desk, where Alex could be found most of the day. It would also take them past the kitchen, Cris’s second home since she was the inn’s resident chef. Stevi opted for another, more roundabout path to get into the inn and, ultimately, to her room.
There were actually several entry points into the bed-and-breakfast besides the front entrance. There were double French doors at the rear of the inn, frequently used because they led to the wraparound veranda. There were also a couple of single doors located on either side of the inn.
Stevi picked the side door closest to her room.
After parking his truck as closely as he could, Silvio got out of the cab and went straight to the back. The stranger was still unconscious.
“He is losing blood again,” Silvio noted, shaking his head. He glanced toward her. “This man should be taken to a hospital.”
Silvio wasn’t saying anything she wasn’t already thinking. “But if we take him to the hospital in this condition, the E.R. physician is going to have to report the wound to the police. Hospital personnel are supposed to report every gunshot wound they treat.”
Silvio released the back panel. “It is a good law.”
“But we don’t know what happened to him. What if he was trying to save someone and got shot for his trouble?” she asked with feeling. “That makes him a Good Samaritan and since he can’t speak for himself, the police are going to assume he’s a criminal and handcuff him to the hospital bed until they can get information out of him. You wouldn’t want a hero to be treated like a common criminal, would you?”
Silvio remained unconvinced. “You do not know he is a hero.”
Stevi was quick to take the other side. “You don’t know that he’s not.”
Silvio sighed wearily. “You are making my head hurt, Miss Stevi. Does your father ever complain about arguing with you?”
She grinned. “All the time. C’mon, we have to get him into my room before anyone sees him and starts asking questions I can’t answer yet.”
The gardener looked at her dubiously even as he picked up the unconscious man and once again positioned him over his shoulder.
“As in why are you doing this?” he asked, grunting slightly under the full weight of the unconscious man.
“Something like that,” she answered.
Silvio murmured a few words under his breath in Spanish as Stevi led the way. Entering the inn through the side door, they took the less-traveled, roundabout and longer route to her room.
Stevi felt as if she held her breath the entire way. When they finally reached her room without running into anyone from her family, or any of the inn’s guests, she felt almost giddy.
She immediately shut the door behind Silvio and finally let go of the breath she’d been holding.
“Made it,” she declared triumphantly in a whisper.
“Yes,” Silvio agreed, laying his burden on her bed as best he could. “But what is it that you have made?”
The way Silvio posed it made it sound like a philosophical question. She shrugged. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?” she said, half to herself. She frowned as she took a closer look at the bedraggled stranger’s chest. “We’re going to have to do something about that wound.” She tried to remember what she had learned in a basic first-aid class she’d impulsively taken because a guy she’d had a crush on had taken it. Nothing had come of the would-be relationship and right now she couldn’t recall anything useful from the class, either.
“Bring me some gauze, some rubbing alcohol and a needle and thread,” Silvio instructed in a no-nonsense voice.
That sounded like something a person with medical training would request. She had never known Silvio as anything other than a gardener.
“Silvio?” She looked at him, puzzled.
“He is bleeding again. That wound must be cleaned and closed up.” There was no emotion in his voice, just a pure statement of fact.
Could you close up a wound if there was a bullet lodged in the body? “But the bullet—”
“Has gone straight through and it looks as if it missed everything important,” he answered. “I saw that when I picked him up. That is also why he is bleeding so much. There is nothing to get in the way of the blood leaving his body. Hurry.”
Getting rubbing alcohol and gauze was not a problem. Each of the inn’s bathrooms, including her own, came equipped with those items.
The needle and thread were trickier, until she remembered that Dorothy, the head housekeeper, took it upon herself to mend the simple tears of the guests’ clothing.
Having had the occasion to look into Dorothy’s rather large sewing basket when the housekeeper had brought it out once, she knew the woman had a wide variety of threads and a full selection of sewing needles to choose from.
She also knew that Dorothy didn’t bother locking her door. It reflected on the kind of atmosphere that the inn prided itself on. Here everyone was treated like a trusted family member.
Knocking first to make sure she wouldn’t be walking in on Dorothy, Stevi gave the housekeeper to the count of twenty before opening the door. That’s when Stevi remembered that the housekeeper had gone for a much-needed rest to visit with friends in Ohio. Stevi slipped in, then quickly closed the door behind her.
Dorothy’s small room would have made a nun’s quarters look almost frivolous. The only visible item that was in the least bit personal was a framed photograph that had been taken a couple of Christmases ago in the reception area by one of the guests. Dorothy and the entire Roman family, including Cris’s son, Ricky, were standing in front of a ten-foot Christmas tree.
The sewing box she was looking for was next to the only upholstered chair in the room. Both faced the window for better light, she guessed.
Opening the sewing box quickly, Stevi picked up a spool of white thread and a needle that looked to be of average thickness and length. Pausing, she wondered if Silvio would rather use a thinner needle. Or a thicker one? Unable to decide, she took three and hoped she wasn’t missing something obvious.
She quickly closed the sewing box, leaving it where she found it.
She opened the door just a crack to make sure no one was passing by. Most people were either still in their rooms or had gone to the dining area for breakfast, which meant she was relatively safe, she reasoned, as she slipped out of Dorothy’s room and hurried back to her own.
“Got it,” she declared, leaning against the door she’d just closed, looking for all the world like a fugitive who had outrun her pursuer.
“Did you have to drive into town to get it?” Silvio asked. His eyes remained on the unconscious patient as he held out his hand to her.
“It wasn’t easy to find,” she answered defensively. Coming forward, she placed the spool of thread in his hand. When he looked at her quizzically, she produced the three needles. He took the midsize one.
Silvio had already used the alcohol and gauze to wash the area around the wound and to try to stem the flow of blood.
As she watched, he measured out a length of thread, snapped it away from the spool and threaded the needle after first dousing it with alcohol.
Then, with a sure hand, he methodically sewed up the man’s wound. With each stitch he took, he spared a glance toward the unconscious man’s face, waiting for some sort of reaction or sign that he was waking up. But the man continued to be unconscious.
Mercifully, Stevi thought, the stranger wasn’t awake to feel the needle.
Finished with his handiwork, Silvio bit the end of his thread.
The stitches were small, neat and parallel. Gardeners, she was certain, didn’t know how to sew like that. Most people didn’t sew like that.
She looked at the man she had known almost from the very beginning of her life. What he had just demonstrated took training.
“Silvio?” she said uncertainly.
“Yes?” he responded, a guarded note in his voice.
“Where did you learn to sew like that?”
He shrugged. “I had a mother who was too busy to take care of the seven children she had given birth to, so I did what I could to help out.”
Stevi frowned. The stitches were more professional than those of a child who was desperate.
“And you sewed their clothes?” she asked, trying to coax more out of him.
“Sometimes,” he said with another shrug. “I also might have learned how to do that while I worked at the hospital.”
She really hadn’t known what sort of work Silvio had done in a hospital in his past. She’d made a few assumptions, she now realized. This was not the skill set of an orderly or a janitor.
Just who was this man her father had taken in all those years ago?
“Silvio?” she pressed.
“Yes?” His back was to her as he tried to make his patient as comfortable as possible.
Placing his fingers against the man’s pulse, he silently counted the beats, then quadrupled them. The heart rate was getting stronger, he thought with satisfaction. He hoped that this—caring for the stranger—didn’t turn out to be a mistake on his part.
He empathized with this stranger. In a manner of speaking, all those years ago he had been the one who had washed up on the shore. His shore had happened to be Richard Roman.
“What did you do at the hospital?”
Her question made Silvio lift his head as he stopped what he was doing. For a second, he stared straight ahead without turning to face her.
He decided a partial answer might be enough, so he told her quietly over his shoulder, “I was a physician’s aide.”
For a moment, she forgot all about the man lying in her bed and looked instead at the man she considered part of her family.
“Then what are you doing here?” He had a vocation, an ability to help people heal. Why would he be satisfied gardening?
Silvio turned around, his face the picture of earnestness. “Tending to your mother’s garden because your father asked me to.”
Stevi still had trouble accepting and processing the information. “Don’t you miss being a physician’s aide?”
There was a calmness in his voice as he answered her question. “If I missed it, Miss Stevi, I would be there. Instead, I am here, helping your father. Helping you,” he added, looking from her to the man he’d helped bring into her room.
It took all kinds to make a world, she reminded herself. And she didn’t want Silvio to think that she was questioning his judgment.
“I guess things work themselves out for the best.”
As to that, Silvio wasn’t 100 percent convinced, at least, not in this particular case. “That still remains to be seen, Miss Stevi.”
The patient appeared to be breathing more easily now, she thought. And it might have been her imagination, but she thought his color was a little better. A little less pale at any rate.
“How long do you think he’ll be unconscious?” she asked.
“That is difficult to say,” Silvio said. “The man has lost a lot of blood, but that appears to be the only wound. Since you do not want to take him to a hospital—”
“I don’t,” she said with feeling. “At least not until he can speak for himself.”
The expression on Silvio’s face was stern. “Hopefully, it will not be too late by then.”
“It won’t be,” she answered.
“How can you be so sure?” It wasn’t a challenge so much as a desire to know why she was so confident she was right.
“I just am,” she answered.
Silvio sighed. He was going to have to step up his efforts to watch over this family. “Then we will just have to wait and see,” he said calmly, like a man who was going to sit back and wait for things to unfold.
He rose from the side of the bed. From his perspective, there was nothing else he could do until the man woke up. But there was just one more thing he needed to know.
“When will you tell your father about this?” he pressed.
She nodded toward the stranger. “Not until he wakes up and can tell me what happened to him.”
She saw the doubt on Silvio’s face. She knew he was worried about her and she appreciated that the man cared enough to concern himself this way about her—about her whole family, really. But from her point of view, she was being rational in her decision.
“I need to have something more to tell my father than ‘Look what I found on the beach today, Dad. It washed up on the shore right at my feet. Can I keep it?’ I want to be able to explain how he came to be here and why he has that bullet wound in his chest. Or Dad will think I’m crazy.”
Silvio’s eyes locked onto hers. “I could see your father’s point.”
“I know, I know,” Stevi agreed.
She closed her eyes as she searched her mind for something she could say that would ease Silvio’s doubts.
“On some level, so can I,” she finally admitted. “And I really can’t explain why, but something tells me that bringing him here, having you take care of him, instead of carting him off to the nearest hospital and handing him off to be someone else’s problem, is the right thing to do.”
He appeared unconvinced. “Right for who, Miss Stevi? Him? Or you?”
Again, she didn’t have anything logical to offer as an explanation. A gut feeling didn’t really translate all that well into logic.
“Maybe both. Him, definitely.”
“And if he is a criminal?” Silvio pressed.
But he’s not. I just know it. She flashed the gardener a smile. “Then you and Shane and Wyatt will protect me.”
“And who will protect me from your father when he finds out that I let you do this?”
Stevi’s grin grew wider, brighter, as she answered, “Why, me, of course.”
Silvio shook his head. There was no amusement in his eyes.
“You will forgive me, Miss Stevi,” he told her solemnly, “but I do not find your assurance to be comforting. I do not like lying to the man who took me in without question.”
“Did you ever think that my father might want to do the same thing for this man?” she challenged.
Try as she might, she couldn’t read Silvio’s expression or guess what he was thinking.
“If you feel that way, then why are you hiding him in your room?” Silvio posed. “Why do we not go to your father right now and tell him?”
Silvio responded only to the truth, so she gave him an honest answer. “Because he asked me to help him and right now, this is part of it.”
Silvio looked at her in surprise. “He talked to you?”
She nodded.
Silvio frowned and sighed mightily. “I do not know where to begin. Do you know what kind of a chance you took?” he asked. “When you saw him lying on the beach like that, you should have come to get me right away. This man could have hurt you.”
“He was half-drowned and he had a bullet wound in his chest. This man couldn’t have hurt a sand flea,” she protested, waving a hand.
“He could have been pretending to be unconscious so that he could overpower you,” Silvio pointed out.
She laughed.
“The beach was deserted. How could he have even known I was coming?” She looked at him and knew her words were falling on deaf ears. “You’re going to go on worrying about this, aren’t you?”
He didn’t answer her directly. “We will have this conversation again after you tell your father.”
She nodded her agreement. “Okay, it’s a deal.” Silvio crossed back to the door. She saw the hesitation in his eyes as he looked back over his shoulder at the man on her bed.
“I do not like leaving you with him.”
“He’s wounded,” she reminded him. “Not to mention unconscious.”
Silvio still didn’t budge. “What will you do?” he asked.
She wasn’t sure what he was really asking, so she told him exactly what she intended to do next. “Take a shower, change, get some breakfast. The usual.”
The frown on his square, tanned face deepened. “You are going to undress?”
She answered his question as seriously as she could. “I find taking a shower with my clothes on doesn’t get me as clean as I’d like.”
He didn’t crack a smile. “Lock the bathroom door.”
CHAPTER FOUR
SMILING TO HERSELF, she flipped the lock on her bedroom door as a precautionary measure. Not because she didn’t want Silvio to walk in—he was the only one she actually didn’t mind coming in at this point. However, if anyone else walked in and saw the stranger in bed while she was in the shower, she would have to do a great deal of explaining really quickly.
“Silvio doesn’t trust you,” she said to the stranger lying on top of her comforter—she was probably going to have to get a new one, she realized. Blood didn’t always wash out. “Are you trustworthy?” she asked as she stood studying his face. It was a handsome face, but did it belong to a man who was ultimately trustworthy? A man who told the truth at all times, not just when it was convenient? “Am I being a fool to think I’m safe with you? How did you get on our beach?” she wondered out loud. “And who shot you and why? Or was this just an unfortunate accident?
“Boy, I can’t wait until you regain consciousness. I’ve got so many questions for you. Questions you’re going to have to answer truthfully or I’m going to be so disappointed in you,” she said. “I’m climbing out on this limb and it’s not very comfortable out here to say the least.”
She straightened.
“I’d better get into that shower or I’m never going to leave this room.” With that, she grabbed the clothes she intended to wear that day—a pair of denim shorts and a blue tank top—and hurried into the bathroom. She remembered to lock that door before she stepped into the shower.
* * *
THE WOMAN’S VOICE came to him from a great, long distance. It sounded melodic. It also sounded fast. So fast he could only vaguely make out what she was saying.
Something about trust and not lying, he thought. Or maybe he was wrong. Maybe it was about something else.
It didn’t matter.
He was probably dreaming. He’d been winking in and out for a while now.
Splintered memories began coming to him in fragmented bits and pieces. The last thing he remembered was pain exploding in his chest and someone throwing him overboard—or had he jumped?—while someone else was cursing that he should have been tied up first, just in case.
He remembered trying to swim, trying to find where the shore was. Remembered telling himself not to panic, that if he panicked, then he was lost.
Dead.
Was he dead?
He’d never believed all that much, not like his mother, but now he would have liked to believe that there was something after life was finally over. Some kind of continuation.
Man but he was tired.
So tired.
He needed to rest, needed to get away from this burning in his shoulder.
Rest.
Was that it? Was this eternal rest, forever and peaceful?
He was too tired to think. He’d think about that later, when he wasn’t too tired anymore....
Provided there was a later....
* * *
STEVI HURRIED OUT of the bathroom freshly dressed, her hair still wet. Her footprints marking her passage from the bathroom into her bedroom were slightly damp as well, leaving an impression first on the floor and then on the rug.
She took no notice. Her attention was on the man in bed.
“Still not with us, huh?” she observed. Was there someone searching for him this very moment, or was he a loner, the answer to her prayer for some excitement?
Right, special delivery.
Taking a hairbrush from her bureau, she brushed her hair back, out of the way. When it dried, it would be curlier than usual, but she really didn’t care about that right now. She had a job to do.
“Well, maybe you need all that extra sleep to get over what you’ve been through. We’ll talk about that later, too. Right now, I’m going to get some breakfast. Don’t worry,” she quickly interjected as if he had actually rendered an opinion. “I’ll bring some back for you.” She cocked her head, like someone trying to make out a low voice. “Which would you like, pancakes or eggs?” She nodded, coming to her own conclusion. “Okay, I’ll bring you both, no sense in starving you, right? I won’t be long,” she promised.
With that, Stevi left her room and eased her door closed, then locked it so that no one would enter while she was gone. When she turned to hurry down the hallway, she walked smack into her younger sister.
Andy glanced at the closed door. “Who are you talking to?” she asked without preamble.
Startled, Stevi slipped her arm through Andy’s and headed for the dining room as if this had already been prearranged. “Excuse me?”
“I said who are you talking to?” Andy repeated, just as she found it a wee bit strange that Stevi was almost pulling her toward the dining room. “I could hear you through the door when I walked by just now.”
“Myself, I was talking to myself,” Stevi told her cheerfully.
“Really?” Andy looked at her. “Because you were talking in full sentences and it sounded as if you were asking what you wanted for breakfast.”
“I was,” Stevi replied without hesitation. “I can’t decide between pancakes and scrambled eggs this morning. I always talk to myself,” she added, as if it was the most natural thing.
Andy frowned. “Since when?” She wanted to know.
“Since forever,” Stevi answered in the same cheerful voice. “Nobody else listens to me so I might as well talk to myself, right? You probably do it, too. You just haven’t realized it.”
“No, I don’t and if I did, I would have realized it,” Andy protested. Stevi opened her mouth again, but Andy held up her hand to stop the flow of words. “So what did you decide?”
“About what?” Stevi asked cautiously. Was Andy playing her? Had Andy caught a glimpse of the sleeping mystery man?
“Eggs or pancakes?” Andy prompted. “You know, your big breakfast debate.”
“Oh, that,” she said, sighing with relief. “Both, actually.”
“Both?” Andy echoed as they walked into the dining area. “Stevi, you hardly ever finish a meal. Just how do you think you’re going to manage to put away two?”
“Don’t worry about it—I feel hungry,” she said, avoiding looking at her. “This is the new me, no longer obsessed with getting the best grades, worrying if I’d gained half a pound. You have no idea what a relief it is not to have to study anymore.” That, at least, was true. She’d lived with that pressure for a long time and it was finally over. It could also explain why she felt somewhat at loose ends. Happy, but restless. “I feel like a new woman. A free woman.”
“So what’s the free woman going to be doing with all her free time? Besides jogging on the beach at ungodly hours, I mean,” Alex said, coming up behind the two of them.
“I’m still trying to figure that out,” Stevi answered.
“Well, here’s something for you to think about while you’re doing that figuring. You really are a good event planner.” Alex picked a table for the three of them and sat down. Andy slid in on her right, but Stevi remained standing. “The inn could use that talent of yours, you know.”
She never had any doubts that the inn would always be her fallback plan, somewhere she could turn to if things fell apart. But she didn’t want to settle; she wanted something to be passionate about, like Cris with her cooking, or Alex with running the inn.
“And Dad would be tickled pink if you decided to stay on at the inn,” Alex added.
“Dad doesn’t look good in pink,” Stevi deadpanned.
Although she knew her father wanted all of them to have ambitions, to follow their dreams, she also knew that her father was hopeful that all their dreams could be fulfilled within a ten-mile radius—if not closer.
“You know what I mean.” Then, before Stevi had a chance to say anything in response, Alex warned, “Don’t argue with a pregnant woman. It’s not safe.”
Still standing over her sister, Stevi grinned. “For whom? Me or the pregnant woman?”
“Why, you, of course,” Alex retorted. “Why aren’t you sitting down, Stevi? It’s hurting my neck, having to look up to talk to you.”
Stevi made no effort to take a seat. Instead, her smile grew. “Now you know how we feel around you all the time.” Alex had always been taller than the rest of them. “Why don’t you two tell me what you want for breakfast and I’ll go in and give your orders to Cris.”
Andy looked at her in surprise. “You’re playing waitress now?”
Stevi turned in her direction. “I’m playing the good sister,” she said, correcting her younger sibling. “Take advantage while you can.”
“Does that mean you’re going to be leaving for New York, after all?”
Although 85 percent certain that a stay in New York was in her near future, she wasn’t committed to it yet—at least, not the admitting part of the process yet. She had a few things to work out, not the least of which was coming up with an acceptable way to tell her father.
“No, that means I’m liable to decide not to be the good sister and let you two fend for yourselves. Until then, orders, please?” she pressed, looking from Alex to Andy.
Because Alex was still undecided, Stevi took Andy’s order first. Bacon, toast and coffee.
“I’m ready now,” Alex said a second later. Unlike Andy, Alex’s order went on for two minutes and included practically everything on the breakfast menu.
Amused, Stevi grinned at her older sister. “You do realize you’re just eating for two, not an entire regiment, right?”
Alex frowned. Her hormones all over the map these days, Alex didn’t appreciate criticism of her eating habits. “I’m eating for two but throwing up for one so I need to order for three,” she said.
Stevi heard the edge in her sister’s voice. Alex hadn’t exactly ever been the easiest person to get along with, not anywhere nearly as easygoing as Cris. But this was more irate than normal.
“You planning on being like this the entire pregnancy?” She wanted to know.
“Yes,” Alex said with finality. “And beyond, as well. I find I like ordering people around.”
“You always did,” Stevi replied with a dramatic sigh. She glanced at the notes she’d just made on the palm of her hand. “Let me see if there’s enough food in the kitchen for this.” She quickly ducked through the swinging door into the kitchen before Alex had a chance to fire back.
CHAPTER FIVE
“ALEX WILL TAKE one refrigerator, to go,” Stevi announced as she walked into the kitchen. Her sister had her back to her and was busy preparing an order on the industrial stove. “Seriously, Alex thinks she’s eating for a small village and wants, like, one of practically everything on the breakfast menu. And Andy will have her usual two slices of warm bread, a cup of albino, supersweet coffee and three slices of burnt bacon.”
“And you?” Cris asked, glancing up from the omelet she was preparing for one of the guests.
“The run made me kind of hungry this morning. Could you fix me an order of pancakes and some scrambled eggs with ham?” she asked.
Ordinarily, she ate a light breakfast, sometimes even leaving half on her plate. She slanted a glance toward Cris, hoping her request wouldn’t set off any alarms.
The change didn’t go unnoticed. “Wow, that is a lot for you,” Cris commented.
Stevi shrugged. “Yes, I know. Must be all that great sea air.”
“The air’s been there all along, Stevi,” Cris pointed out.
“I’ve got it, boss,” Jorge, Cris’s chief assistant, called out. He nodded toward Stevi.
“Thanks.” Cris flashed him a grateful, weary smile.
“No problem,” Jorge responded. “You just take it easy, boss. You’re working too hard, as usual.”
So preoccupied with getting back to her bedroom as quickly as possible, Stevi hadn’t really been paying attention to much else. But Jorge’s comment about Cris working too hard made her take a closer look at Cris. It occurred to her that her older sister was looking rather pale.
She automatically reached out to put her hand against Cris’s forehead. Cris pulled her head back.
“What are you doing?”
“Just wanted to see if you had a fever,” Stevi explained, dropping her hand. “You look a little peaked.”
“No fever,” Cris answered dismissively.
It wasn’t like Cris to be so curt. Something was up, Stevi thought. “You coming down with something?”
Cris laughed softly. “No, I’m fine.”
Now her curiosity was fully aroused. “Don’t lie to the woman who pulled a rabbit out of the hat and piggybacked a real wedding for you on to Alex’s when you realized how much you’d missed, practically eloping on the run. You owe me.”
She was practically daring Cris to argue the point. No one ever won an argument with her, unless, occasionally, it was Alex.
“I’m not lying,” Cris protested. “I’m not coming down with anything, not in the traditional sense.”
Stevi’s curiosity went up another notch. “Okay, how about in the nontraditional sense?” Stevi pressed. Interrupting herself for a second, she looked toward Jorge and made a request. “Could you make that to go, please, Jorge?”
Jorge nodded.
“You’re taking breakfast to go?” Cris asked. “What’s the matter, you suddenly don’t like my dining room?”
“It’s not that,” she protested, noting that somehow, Cris’s domain had spread from the kitchen to the dining area, as well. “I’ve got a few things to do in my room, wise guy, so I thought I’d eat and work at the same time. And don’t think you’re changing the subject that easily.”
“There is no subject to change,” Cris said, turning back to flip the omelet.
Stevi shifted so that she was able to at least see Cris’s profile. “We have a slight difference of opinion there.”
“I’m fine,” Cris insisted once again. “Just a little woozy, maybe.”
If Cris admitted to being dizzy, then there was more she wasn’t saying.
“Cris, Jorge can take over. Heck, even I can do some cooking in an emergency—”
“The emergency would be after you started cooking,” Cris interjected.
Stevi ignored the comment. “There’s no shame if you take a sick day once in a while. Nobody expects you to be invincible. If you caught a bug, then—”
“It’s not a bug,” Cris protested, losing her patience. “It’s a baby.”
Stevi’s jaw dropped open. “Whoa. Back up. You caught a baby?”
Cris sighed. “It wasn’t supposed to come out like this.... But it was bound to come out sometime. Yes, in a manner of speaking, I guess.”
Stevi’s eyes widened even more. “Then you’re—”
Closing her eyes, Cris nodded. “Yes, I am,” she said.
Jorge was grinning ear to ear. “Congratulations, boss.”
Cris inclined her head, uttering a modest, “Thank you.”
The surge of pure joy was a beat late, but when it came, it all but exploded within her. “Cris, why didn’t you say anything?” Stevi threw her arms around her sister, hugging her hard. “That’s wonderful! Why are you keeping it such a secret?” Granted Cris was one of the more quiet of the Roman daughters, but when she discovered she was pregnant with Ricky, everyone in the family knew within about twenty-four hours.
“I didn’t want to steal any of Alex’s thunder,” she confided. “I’ve already had one baby. This is Alex’s first.”
That was not a valid reason as far as Stevi was concerned. “Alex can deal with sharing the spotlight, she’s not a narcissist. And it’s not like you could’ve kept this a secret forever, you know. Eventually, we would have figured it out. So, does anyone else know?”
Cris inclined her head. “Shane.”
“Well, of course! What about Ricky?”
“I would have loved to have included him in this, but if he knew, then the immediate world would have known, as well.”
Stevi laughed in agreement.
“There’s no such thing as keeping a secret as far as my boy is concerned—especially if it was labeled a secret. The information would have burst out of him the very first opportunity he had. Prefaced with ‘Mommy doesn’t want anyone to know, but—’”
“Well, always a good thing to let the father know anyway,” Stevi said, patting Cris’s hand.
“Your breakfast, Miss Stevi,” Jorge said, placing a large brown bag on the steel counter next to her.
“Thank you.” She flashed the assistant a quick smile.
“Please don’t tell everyone,” Cris begged her.
“Of course not! I think that kind of information should come from you.” She rolled her eyes. “But make sure you call Dad in and tell him first. He’ll appreciate being told before the others.”
Cris smiled as she placed her hand on her still very flat stomach. “I guess you’re right—for a change.”
That was the nature of their relationship. Nothing serious could be left alone for long. There was always a bite of sarcasm, a zinger attached somewhere. The Roman sisters were determined not to get mushy on one another.
“Can you get Dad for me, Stevi?” Cris requested. “Ask him to come to the dining area?”
Any other time...but she was acutely aware of the time and she had left her mystery man alone in her room for far too long. What if he had awakened while she was gone? What if he had wandered off? She couldn’t have that. Not until she got their stories straight. Otherwise, she would be on the receiving end of a lifetime of lectures from not just her father, but everyone else in the family, as well.
“I’d really love to, Cris, but there’s something important I have to get to.” She looked at Jorge. “Jorge, can you get my father down here, please? There,” she told Cris. “All done. Gotta fly.” She grabbed the large brown bag Jorge had brought her and left the kitchen through the back delivery entrance.
She left a bemused Cris staring after her in her wake.
Stevi circumvented the veranda at the back of the inn and made her way to the same side entrance she and Silvio had used earlier. Again, this was the long way around but if she’d gone out through the dining area, Alex and Andy would have grilled her.
The way she saw it, it was better to avoid questions altogether until she had some viable answers.
As she skirted the grounds, her thoughts went back to what she’d just discovered. Cris was going to have another baby. That made two babies being born in the not-too-distant future. Life was moving right along for Alex and Cris, she thought with a touch of envy. They each had a great husband and now they were busy creating their own families.
And where did that leave her?
Confused and restless, that’s where, she thought.
Not just that, but with an unidentified man lying in her bed, unconscious to boot.
Life had certainly gone from dull to extremely tangled in a few short hours, Stevi thought as she reached her door.
It was still closed, she noted. Either the stranger was still inside—or he had made an orderly escape, closing the door behind him after he departed.
Holding her breath, Stevi tested it: still locked. Turning the key, she eased the door open.
Her mystery man was just where she had left him, sleeping in bed. Coming a step closer, she never took her eyes off the man. Just as on the beach, he didn’t look as if he’d even moved a muscle since she had left.
She set the bag of food down on the writing desk in the corner, then quietly crept over to the bed.
She studied the man for a long moment. “Are you getting better, or worse?” she wondered out loud. “Am I helping you by keeping you hidden here, or am I destroying any chance you might have to get well? I wish I had a little guidance here,” she admitted. “There’s nothing on the internet to cover this situation. Can’t type in ‘What to do with an unknown, unconscious man encountered on the beach’ and have Ask.com come up with an answer.”
She had hoped that he might be up by now and able to eat, at least a little. He needed to build up his strength after all that blood he lost. When she’d picked up the two orders, she’d wanted to give him first choice of breakfast.
But since it appeared he was going to be out for a while, she decided to eat one and leave the other covered plate for him.
Choosing the eggs and ham, she brought the plate to his bed and sat in the chair she’d pulled over earlier. She took a bite absently and her taste buds almost sprang to life. She’d forgotten that it was impossible to eat anything that Cris prepared absently. It was a gift, she decided.
“You’re missing a really good breakfast,” she told her sleeping mystery man. “But, knowing Cris, she’d be happy to whip up another order if you like scrambled eggs.” Her words came back to her and Stevi laughed shortly. “Here I am, second-guessing what you like to eat and I don’t even know your name, or who you are, or what you’re actually doing here on our beach.”
There had been no wallet, no driver’s license, no ID of any kind on his person. Silvio had gone through his pockets the moment he had the man on the bed. It had made Silvio more suspicious.
“So who are you?” Stevi asked. “What do I call you? Are you with some drug cartel and you got caught in the middle of something really bad? Bad enough to bring out guns?
“Or are you some wealthy playboy whose cabin cruiser got boarded by pirates? Right...there aren’t any pirates trolling the coast of Southern California,” she reminded herself. “You know, I’m really running out of guesses here. You’d better come to soon and help me out or Silvio will insist that we call the hospital and they’ll take one look at you and call the police...and I have this gut feeling that won’t be a good thing to do. Am I right?”
He went on sleeping.
Finished with breakfast—which she had wolfed down in between questions—she set the plate aside on her writing desk. Leaning forward, she pushed aside a lock of medium brown hair that had fallen over his eyes.
“Who are you?” Stevi whispered. “Are you ever going to wake up and tell me?”
She supposed the real question here should be, was he ever going to wake up, period? What if he had slipped into an actual coma? She didn’t know much about things like that but she’d heard that those kinds of conditions could go on indefinitely.
Maybe forever.
Then what?
Then she’d tell her father everything and ask for his help. Get professional medical care.
She knew that even though Richard Roman might get annoyed with her for having done something that she was certain he would label “dangerous and foolish,” he wouldn’t waste time with recriminations. He’d just handle it, the way he handled everything else that came his way.
To her, her father was one of the dependable forces of nature. A great comfort to her.
But for the time being, Stevi needed to prove herself—not in anyone else’s eyes but her own.
She looked up to her two older sisters, Alex and Cris. Their lives were basically set, their paths more or less chosen and mapped out, while hers felt as if it was scattered all over the place and right smack in the middle of it was this slanted incline, perfect for skateboarding. And right now, she was going down it, ninety-seven miles an hour.
Could she execute the move, or was she going to crash and burn?
She had no idea.
“You’re going to have to hurry up, you know,” she told him. “I can only hold everyone off for so long. Right now, I can tell them that I’m working on a painting and that I don’t want to be disturbed. They’ll buy that. The family’s usually pretty good about that sort of thing,” she confided. “They give me my space, which in this case is actually your space. But sometime or other, they’re going to want to see a painting, so pull your act together and come around. In the next twenty-four hours, please.” Then she added, “Even faster would be nice.”
Boy, that had to have sounded weird to him if he could hear her.
“I don’t mean to rush you but hiding you in my room and not telling Dad or any of them about this is making things difficult for me. I’m not much on keeping secrets, if you must know, so the sooner you can open those eyes of yours, the better it’ll be for both of us.”
Picking up the coffee Jorge had slipped in the bag, she took off the lid. She sat sipping and staring thoughtfully at the unconscious man.
Her brain was going in three directions at once, all at top speed, coming up with different theories, each more fantastic than the last.
“Maybe you’re a spy. Or a secret agent.” Her words echoed back in her head and she stared at him even more intently, as if that would give her some sort of an answer. “Omigod, could I be sent to prison for harboring you? Worse, could my family get into trouble for this?” The thought of getting her family into trouble over something she was doing horrified her. “Maybe I’d better call the police,” she said, automatically reaching for the phone that was on the nightstand by her bed.
But then she stopped midreach. That same gut told her the details about this situation would eventually be brought to light and that she wouldn’t be found guilty of doing anything except saving a man from bleeding to death.
Maybe a man who mattered in the corporate world. Or the political arena. Someone important.
“Are you someone important?” she whispered, staring at him. He didn’t look familiar to her, but then, that didn’t mean anything. She wasn’t exactly up on news other than the headlines.
Stevi sighed, frustrated and helpless. She was the type who read the end of a mystery thriller before she invested herself in reading it at all. This situation was already dragging on too long for her liking.
You wanted an adventure, something to happen out of the ordinary, something exciting. Remember?
She pressed her lips together. Careful what you wish for, right?
He didn’t stir.
“Just hurry up and come to, okay?” And then she laughed to herself. “I’ve heard about the strong, silent type, but this is really raising the bar pretty high.”
She grinned then drained the remainder of her coffee and set the cup down again. “I bet they called you gabby at school.”
The man made no answer.
* * *
HE WAS HEARING it again, hearing that voice, that soft female voice whispering through his mind, teasing his subconscious as he tried to place it, tried to remember if he’d ever heard it before.
The words she was saying were becoming more distinct, more audible. He could almost make them out.
Almost.
But they still seemed garbled.
Try as he might, he couldn’t fight his way to the surface either, up above this oppressive hazy cloud that enshrouded him and was keeping him down.
CHAPTER SIX
THERE WAS A LIGHT, just a glimmer of it, really, winking in and out along the water far above his head. At first, it seemed to be more than an infinity away.
Unreachable.
But he knew that if he could just hold on long enough to break through the surface, then he could get some air for his all but bursting lungs.
He’d be all right then. He’d be all right.
It was miles and miles away, but he couldn’t give up. Couldn’t. He had to reach it. Giving up was for losers and he wasn’t a loser.
Given a losing hand at birth, he’d still found a way not to lose.
Hadn’t he proven that already? Beating the odds, surviving the bad neighborhoods, the indifferent families who gave him a bed to sleep in but were only in it for the money?
He was nobody’s kid.
Just a kid.
But he didn’t let it break him, didn’t let it drag him down. He’d hung on, struggled, made something of himself. Made a difference.
Where was it? Where was the surface? It had to be here somewhere.
With his very last ounce of strength, he finally broke through, finally made it to the top of the water.
Air, sweet, wonderful air.
He gulped it in, trying to get enough. Trying to make up for the numbing lack of it.
His temples were pounding, his body aching something fierce. And there was this all-engulfing pain—more like a fire—that had taken over his left side.
Orientation followed.
He remembered.
Remembered what had happened, remembered why he’d almost succumbed to the watery grave.
Spinning around, he searched for the cabin cruiser. Instead of right beside him, it was now some distance away.
Heading away from him.
No matter, getting back on it wasn’t exactly a viable option. He was outnumbered, outgunned. The only way it would work for him—for his survival—was if he managed to get the drop on all of them and in his present condition, that wasn’t a possibility.
He had one chance, only one. He had to swim for shore.
But which way was it?
Slowly turning, moving in a circle, he searched for the vaguest signs of land. There had to be something.
Something.
He thought he heard seagulls and searched for them even though he knew they could just as easily be heading for the open water as they could for land. He searched anyway.
There was nothing else to cling to.
And then he saw them. Saw two seagulls descending in the distance.
Disappearing in the distance.
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