Safe Harbour

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.