Safe Harbor (13 page)

He didn’t want her focusing on this too closely, just as he didn’t want to place her—or her family—in any sort of danger. And associating with him might very well do that if the wrong person saw him with the Romans.

“No,” he told her as casually as possible, “but you know that old saying about guests and fish, after a certain amount of time, they start to smell.”

“The only thing you have in common with a fish is that at one point, you were both in the water. Stay long enough for the party,” she coaxed, even though doing so went against everything she had told herself previously. “There’s no reason for you to leave before then. Cris goes all out preparing the food, and this year’s fireworks promise to be the best yet. After it’s all over, you can go,” she told him, then added what she hoped was the winning argument. “Dad would be very disappointed if you left before the celebration.”

He liked the man, but couldn’t see that his presence mattered to the inn owner one way or another. “What difference could it make to him?”

There was something in his tone that made her look at him in disbelief. Didn’t he understand? “My dad’s taken a liking to you, Mike.”

“Your father likes everyone,” he pointed out. She’d just said so herself.

“Yes, but there are different degrees of that,” she insisted. She sensed his sudden restlessness. It was almost as if they were back to square one, the way he had been that first day he came to and tried to leave her room on his own power. He was running from something. She had no idea what, only that whatever it was, if he stayed here, he’d be all right. “Dad feels as if he’s given you a safe harbor here at Ladera.”

The funny thing was, he had, Mike thought. This past month that he had spent here had been the least troubled, the most tranquil and the happiest days that he could remember spending in any one place.

Ever.

Which was why he knew he had to leave soon. If her father had invited members of the local police department to drop by, then the safest thing he could do for all of them was to disappear before the party. Because there was an outside chance that he might be seen by or encounter one of the people who had been on that cabin cruiser that night he’d had to suddenly dive into the water—or be fatally cut down on deck.

But he couldn’t say that to Stevi.

For one thing, it would only be his word against the word of someone her father most likely trusted and in all probability might have even grown up with. He had discovered the other day that Richard Roman was a native to the area.

For another, at least one or two of the members of the police department obviously had found a way to peacefully coexist with the drug trade by turning a blind eye to it, or keeping it hidden from the local citizens. It had to be something along those lines because, although he didn’t trust very readily, he trusted Richard not to be the type to either be involved in the drug trade or to condone anyone else being involved in it.

Although it wasn’t his usual method of operation, this time he wanted to withdraw from the scene before his presence here brought consequences with it—and brought down a delicately constructed balance maintained by good and evil in the town of Ladera.

But if he argued about remaining with Stevi, it might raise her suspicions about his own motives. The best thing to do, he decided, was to pretend that he’d changed his mind.

“Okay,” he said, climbing down the ladder again. “You talked me into it.”

“You’ll stay for the celebration?” Stevi asked uncertainly. He’d changed his mind awfully quickly, she thought.

“I’ll stay,” he replied, because lying was easier than arguing.

He hadn’t expected Stevi to throw her arms around him in response to his words. Hadn’t expected that rush of sudden emotion that her impulsive movement released within him.

Hadn’t expected to have his own arms tighten around her in what was a purely automatic response. As for her brushing her lips against his, that had come up out of left field and instantly drew another automatic response from him, one that had him kissing her back.

The kiss began by mimicking hers and then went off on a tangent of its own, one that imprinted itself on not just his soul, but, he later discovered, on hers.

And it came very close to almost sealing his fate, as well.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

H
E
WAS
LOSING
his edge.

All these years, both the time that he’d spent in the various foster homes he was sent to and then the time he had spent in the field, working undercover, he had honed his senses until he was keenly aware of his surroundings. Not just for a number of hours or once in a while, not even most of the time, but
all
the time.

He was alert during his waking hours and even in his sleep because he had trained himself to sleep lightly with the proverbial one eye open.

When he’d been in foster homes, it was done out of a sense of self-preservation. He’d learned early in the game that there was no one to look out for him but him. What few possessions he had could be easily taken from him if he so much as blinked.

So he didn’t blink. He remained vigilant, sacrificing bits and pieces of his humanity as he did so.

Then, when he was out on his own, the field he chose, literally making himself into a chameleon, required the same intense vigilance he’d executed while growing up. It became even more so because this time, if he lowered his guard, it wasn’t just his possessions that he stood to lose, but his very life.

Mike had approached staying here, at the inn as a “guest” of the Roman family, the same way: with keen, watchful vigilance. But Stevi and her family had managed to get to him the way criminals never had.

They’d played dirty, he thought wryly. They’d gotten to him by using kindness, by trusting him. Gotten to him in such a way that those razor-sharp senses of his had actually failed him.

They’d all but gone dormant.

He’d never been so keenly aware of that than this morning, when he failed to hear Silvio walk up behind him until the gardener spoke.

“They are good people, the Romans,” the low, gravelly voice testified.

Mike swung around, his hands raised to strike. At the last moment he realized that the person standing behind him was Silvio, who, a second away from being struck across the throat, appeared amazingly calm.

The gardener’s expression was somber, his eyes, unreadable.

“Sorry,” Mike apologized, trying to bury the seriousness of his reaction with an embarrassed shrug. “I didn’t hear you come up behind me.”

Silvio nodded. Considering that he was very close to his sixth decade, he had an incredible head of dark hair. “And for a man who lives mainly by his reflexes, you find that troubling.”

Mike could feel the other man’s eyes all but probing his mind. “I guess I’m a little jumpy,” he said by way of an excuse.

Silvio’s expression said he knew better. “A man like you does not get jumpy.”

There were no two ways about it, Mike thought. Silvio was on a different wavelength than the Romans. The man had obviously come from a different background than the family.

He squared his shoulders as he tried to dismiss the gardener’s preconceived notions about him.

“You have no idea what I’m like,” he told Silvio.

Silvio’s dark, penetrating eyes never left his. “I was a man like you once,” he countered. “Always looking over my shoulder, never knowing whom to trust. Being loyal to what I believed in, but never knowing if the people who were with me one day would turn on me the next.” He paused, allowing the description to register. “Death came for me several times and always went away empty-handed. Does that sound familiar to you?”

Mike didn’t bother responding to the question. They both knew the answer to that. Instead, he asked the gardener, “What changed?”

Silvio leaned on the rake he was holding and looked around the grounds for a moment. Over the years, he had had a hand in renovating almost all the inn’s landscaping. This was as much his now as it was Richard Roman’s.

“I came here,” he replied simply. “Not by my design. By accident—I thought,” he added quietly. “Mr. Richard gave me a place to stay and asked for nothing in return. Asked no questions, only listened.”

This revelation, coming for apparently no reason, made no sense to Mike. Was something about to happen? “Why are you telling me this now?”

“Because it was something I thought you needed to know.” The reply was enigmatic and only served to confuse him further.

Mike shook his head. “Are you telling me to go or to stay?”

“Neither. That is a decision only you can make. No one can make it for you.”

For the first time since the gardener had come up behind him, Mike took a long, hard look around the surrounding general area. Without realizing it, he had walked in on a work in progress. Silvio was apparently in the middle of fertilizing a section of the garden.

“Need any help out here?” he asked.

Silvio considered the offer the way he did everything. Carefully, giving no clues as to his feelings about the matter.

“I have several bags of fertilizer on the truck,” he said matter-of-factly.

“How many are you going to use today?” Mike asked.

“All of them.”

Mike nodded. A deal had been struck in his estimation.

Words weren’t necessary.

* * *

M
AYBE
HE
WAS
coming around and changing his mind, Stevi thought, standing off to one side and watching the two men interact. Maybe Silvio was telling him how staying on at the inn was tantamount to beginning a new life, something she got the feeling Mike wanted, not to mention needed.

Nobody knew Silvio’s full story. The only thing she and her sisters were certain of was that the man hadn’t always been a gardener. Her dad had said he’d been a doctor in Argentina.

Because of what she felt was an air of mystery around the man, when she’d been younger, she’d envisioned Silvio as being an enforcer before he had come to stay with them. Seeing his medical skills in action recently put an entirely different focus on his past.

Blessed with more than her share of curiosity, Stevi had still made her peace with the idea that she was never going to know Silvio’s full story. He had a right to his secrets.

But not knowing Mike’s story was a whole different matter. Though she hadn’t said anything to anyone, she wanted to know everything there was to know about this man.

Initially, there had been just idle curiosity motivating her, but she’d been willing to let it ride. Now, however, things were different.

Now she was in love with him.

Never having experienced the emotion beyond the puppy-love stage, she was still certain she knew love when she fell into it—and she had, headfirst. And although she’d heard that along with love came respecting the other person’s boundaries, in this case she didn’t know what those boundaries were and so she was desperately trying to test them.

In effect, she wanted to know every single inch, every single nuance, every single fact there was to know about the man, about his past and about what paths he’d taken that brought him to her shores—literally.

She had no idea how to find out any of this and she instinctively knew that prying into his life wouldn’t go over too well.

Moreover, she couldn’t shake the feeling that when he talked about leaving, it wasn’t just talk. He was serious and about several days—if that much—away from walking out of her life.

She had to find a way to make him want to stay.

* * *

“Y
OU
COULD
OFFER
him a job,” she told her father. She’d turned to him as her first avenue of appeal in her quest to get Mike to remain at the inn. “Like you did to Silvio and Dorothy—and Jorge,” she threw in for good measure.

“Jorge was already looking for a job when he came to me,” her father pointed out. He leaned back in his chair, unconsciously steepling his fingers as he thought. “As for the other two, I told each of them that they had a job here for as long as they felt like staying.”

“Okay.” Stevi nodded, waiting for her father to say “but.”

She didn’t have a long wait.

“I offered Mike a job when he came to me asking for some way to repay me for letting him stay here at the inn.”

She realized she was holding her breath as she asked, “And?”

The memory was still very fresh in his mind. “And Mike said he was just looking for some kind of temporary work, nothing permanent.”

“Temporary turns into permanent sometimes,” she pointed out. There was no missing the hopeful note in her voice.

“True, but prodding doesn’t work in this case. We’ll just have to wait and see how it goes. Mike
does
know that he’s welcome to stay here for as long as he needs to.” He looked at his daughter for a long moment, studying her closely. “The problem is that his definition of ‘needs to’ could be totally different from ours.” Richard smiled broadly at his daughter. “Cheer up, honey. My mother used to say that if something was meant to be, it would be.”

“It can be a lot easier if you make it be,” she told her father. When he looked at her quizzically, waiting for her to elaborate, she said, “If you ask him to stay on, he wouldn’t turn you down.”

“I can’t make him stay if he doesn’t want to, Stevi. Besides,” he said, looking at her knowingly, “I don’t think I’m the deciding factor in his ultimate decision whether to go or to remain.”

The way her father was looking at her led her to only one conclusion. “You think it’s me?” she asked incredulously.

He knew it was her. “I’ve seen the way he looks at you when he thinks no one else is watching. I’d say that you figure very prominently into Mike’s decision about his future.”

She sighed, feeling as if she was trying to swim upstream and the current was relentlessly pushing her back. “You’re telling me he’s leaving because of me?”

Richard looked at her, apparently puzzled. “He hasn’t said anything to me about leaving.”

Stevi blew out a breath, wishing she was as confident about this as her father was. But she really doubted she’d gotten her signals crossed.

“Mike was helping me hang the streamers and the lanterns for the celebration and I asked him if he was going to attend the party. He didn’t think he’d be here by then.”

She knew she shouldn’t allow the note of desperation to enter her voice but it did anyway. “Dad, it’s only a few days away.” She bit her lower lip.

“Why don’t you focus on the time you have?” her father suggested kindly. “Who knows? Maybe Mike’ll wind up changing his mind, or delaying his so-called departure date—and then all this agonizing you’re going through would have been for no reason.”

Stevi read between the lines. It wasn’t hard. She knew her father. “So you won’t talk to him?”

“Honey, you can’t pressure anyone into doing something they don’t want to. A lot of times, having a talk with someone winds up getting the exact opposite reaction.”

“I’ll try to remember that the next time Alex starts trying to order me around,” Stevi said, trying her best to look as cheerful as she knew her father wanted her to be. It wasn’t easy.

“By the way,” he segued into a question he’d been meaning to ask, “speaking of job offers, have you given my offer any more thought?”

Her father’s proposition was never very far from her mind. “You mean your putting me on salary as the inn’s event planner?”

He smiled as he nodded. “That’s what I mean.”

“I’m still thinking about it,” Stevi told him. She slanted a glance in his direction. “Maybe if Mike was staying on, I’d be more inclined to stay, too.”

He assumed she wasn’t really being serious—but just in case she was, Richard told her, “Blackmail does not suit you, Stevi. I didn’t raise you that way.”

But she had a reminder of her own to bring up. “But you
did
raise me to be resourceful, remember?”

He laughed and shook his head. “You know, you really should have become a lawyer, Stevi. You have a knack for twisting things around until they come out to your advantage. Clients like that when you do it in their favor.”

“If only it worked on my father, as well,” she said brightly, batting her eyelashes at him in an exaggerated fashion, lest he took her seriously.

“Go.” Her father laughed, pointing toward his door. “Some of us have work to do. Come to think of it, all of us do. The Fourth is closer than you might think.”

That, she thought, leaving his office and closing the door behind her, was exactly what she was acutely aware of.

* * *

M
IKE
WAS
STILL
helping Silvio with the last of the bags of fertilizer they had brought off the truck when she came looking for him.

“Are you and your strong back available to me later on, or does Silvio have dibs on you for the rest of the afternoon?” she asked innocently, looking from Mike to the gardener.

“You’ve come just at the right time, Miss Stevi,” Silvio told her. “I am finished with him if you want him.”

Oh, gosh, do I ever,
she caught herself thinking even as she remembered to paste a smile on her lips.

“I guess that answers your question,” Mike said, stripping off the thick work gloves Silvio must have loaned him when he’d started the job. He held them out to the gardener. “Thanks.”

Silvio nodded, sticking them in his back pocket. He went about his work without a word—but Stevi had the feeling that the man was watching them as they walked away and continued to watch them until they disappeared around the side of the inn.

“I’m surprised Silvio accepted your help,” she said once they were out of what she assumed was the gardener’s earshot.

“Why’s that?” Because of his upbringing, or more accurately, the lack thereof, he had become a jack-of-all-trades, except that he tried to be as good in whatever endeavor he was currently working as he possibly could.

“Because Silvio’s the type who likes to work alone and I think he also likes to appear as if he doesn’t need anyone’s help.” Amusement curved the corners of her mouth, but only fleetingly as she said, “I guess he never bought into John Donne’s ‘no man is an island’ theory. That’s a—”

“A poem, yes, I know,” he said, nodding.

“You took poetry?” she asked incredulously. She couldn’t see someone like Mike signing up for a poetry class. He would have to be taken in, kicking and screaming.