Safe Harbor (4 page)

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.

* * *

H
E
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

T
HERE
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.

He might as well die swimming toward the promise of
something
than die out here, treading water. Going nowhere.

Pain knifed through him with every stroke he took, and his left arm held him back. To compensate, he poured it on with his right.

The more he swam, the farther away the shore appeared. It couldn’t be moving. And yet, it was.

He wasn’t going to make it. He was going to die out here.

Die and nobody would even know what happened to him. That he had been on the right side.

No, it was too soon for him to die.

Too soon!

* * *

G
ULPING
AIR
,
HE
realized that his eyes were shut and he forced them open as he sucked in more air, gasping as it went in.

He tried to get up but hands restrained him. Gentle hands. But stronger than he was right now.

Where...? He was in the middle of the ocean.

Wasn’t he?

The fire scissored through his chest, cutting it to ribbons.

“It’s okay. You’re safe now,” a woman told him in a soft voice.

He’d heard her voice before. But that had been a hallucination, hadn’t it? Was he hallucinating now? Or could this actually be real? The pressure of her hands had felt real.

His eyes had closed again and he pried them opened. There she was, still standing over him. She had to be real. A honey-blonde vision trying to restrain him.

“Who—who are you?”

Was that his voice? It couldn’t be. It sounded so weak, so raspy. And yet, it really hurt to talk. Each word felt like a shard of glass being scraped along his throat.

Stevi hovered over the stranger, worried that he might try to get up again. He was clearly weak and more than likely, his legs wouldn’t hold him.

“I’m the woman who found you on the beach and brought you back to the inn,” she told him.

The man’s expression was blank as he repeated, “The inn?”

“My inn,” Stevi told him. Convinced he was going to stay put, she released her hold on him and sank into the chair beside the bed. “Well, actually, it’s my family’s inn, but we all own a piece of it. My dad wanted it that way.” That part probably made no difference to this man. She had to remember to stop volunteering more information than people wanted. “What happened to you?”

Wait a minute, he thought. If this woman wasn’t a hallucination, if he’d been pulled back into the cruiser and she was working for the people who had tried to kill him, then he couldn’t admit to anything. He couldn’t break now. There’d been accusations, coupled with torture, but he hadn’t admitted a thing, hadn’t said a word to save himself and end the torture.

“I don’t know,” he finally managed to get out.

Stevi sat back in her chair, staring at him incredulously. “You don’t know,” she repeated. “You don’t know who shot you?”

Crenshaw. Larry Crenshaw shot me.

Or at least Crenshaw was responsible for the bullet that had been fired at him. Even if the man hadn’t pulled the trigger.

If he hadn’t jerked away, the bullet could have easily found his heart—and ended everything.

It started coming back to him.

He hadn’t been pushed; at the last minute, he’d jumped. Jumped because the ocean was his only chance of getting away. If he’d remained on board, he would have been killed. That was a given.

He felt weak enough now that if someone had said he’d bled out and was dying, he would have assumed they were telling the truth.

“And you found me?” he asked, his voice as gravelly as that of a man who’d been smoking for seventy-eight years.

Beginning to realize that he
wasn’t
on the cruiser anymore, he felt a compelling need to get the details straight. “And you brought me here?”

“Yes.” She seemed to be studying him closely.

He squinted his eyes, taking closer measure of her. Granted his head was still throbbing and the wound in his chest kept shooting balls of fire, making it a struggle to speak, but something just wasn’t adding up. This perky blonde looked as if she would have trouble holding up a large bouquet of flowers, much less dragging him anywhere. He weighed a good one-eighty. The woman did
not
look as if she could move that on her own.

“By yourself?” Who else knew he was here? And just where was “here” really?

“I had help,” Stevi replied, her eyes never leaving his face. This guy didn’t seem threatening, but he wasn’t exactly reassuring her, either. Had she made a mistake, bringing him here?

She couldn’t help but wonder who was looking for him right now. Someone who looked like this, handsome even though he was bedraggled—and those green eyes of his, they were like two sparkling emeralds, luring her in—this was a person who didn’t go missing without a lot of people taking note of the fact.

“Husband?” he guessed.

Stevi shook her head. “Gardener,” she corrected.

“Why?”

Those eyes of his looked as if they could fish a confession out of a stone, she thought. If she tried to lie to him, she had a feeling he would be able to tell.

“Because he was there and he could be trusted not to talk until I wanted him to,” she said honestly.

“No, why did you bring me here?” he stressed.

Again she wondered if she had done the wrong thing. But now wasn’t the time to second-guess herself. Now was the time to try to get some answers of her own.

“Well, I couldn’t just leave you on the beach,” she told him. “You were bleeding—a lot. You probably would have died if I’d left you there.”

“It’s a bullet wound. Why didn’t you call the police? Or at least call an ambulance and get me to the hospital?”

Since he had provided her with the opening, she lost no time in getting to the tougher questions. “About that—”

She didn’t get a chance to finish asking before he answered. “Someone wants me dead.”

“Someone,” she repeated. That sounded incredibly vague. Weren’t there any more details?

“Yes.” It seemed as if he was struggling to talk. She didn’t like to think that he was in a lot of pain—she’d have to do something about that. And soon. But first, she just had to find out if this guy represented a threat to her and her family.

“Do you know who wants you dead?” she pressed. She’d drag the information out of him, if it was possible. And if, for some reason, he was having trouble remembering, maybe she could help him reconstruct the scene.

Oh, he knew who wanted him dead, all right. Just now, reliving those last few minutes in his dream, he’d seen Larry Crenshaw’s face vividly. But there was no reason for her to know. It would only put her in danger and that would be no way to repay her for her kindness.

His mind clearing a little even though his pain was definitely gaining on him, he was beginning to believe the woman.

“No,” he answered stoically.

“Do you know why you were shot?”

She just wouldn’t let up.
Yes, I know that, too.
“The less you know, the better,” he said, the words sounding almost guttural to him.

“Oh, right, because if whoever did this finds out you’re here and comes to finish the job, if you manage to escape and he finds me, I can tell him I don’t know anything and he’ll just believe me and go away. Or,” she said seriously, abandoning the cheerful, chirpy tone, “will he think I’m lying and just kill me instead?”

“You have a good imagination,” he murmured, clearly fading.

His eyes were closing again. Her need for him to tell her what she wanted to know before he fell asleep warred with her concern that he may need more medical attention than she and Silvio could provide. Her need to know what she was getting into here by sheltering him won out.

“Yes, I do have a good imagination, and right now, I’m imagining that you’re telling me the name of the monster who shot you—or at least
why
he shot you.”

She missed her window of opportunity. Weak, obviously exhausted by his ordeal and worn out by the effort it took to talk, the stranger had lost consciousness again.

She sighed. She had nothing. Not his name, not the name of the man—or woman—who shot him, or any real details of what had happened to him or why. For that matter, she didn’t even know if he was a criminal. Although there was still that feeling inside her, that feeling that had her convinced that he wasn’t.

Could she really feel this certain if he
was
a criminal?

Or was it that she wanted an exciting romance to fill her life and suddenly, there he was, waiting for her and she was bending the facts to fit the fantasy?

“Well, at least I know you’re not in a coma,” she said, consoling herself. “Next time you wake up I’m going to keep you talking until you actually
say
something that makes sense. Although...I guess first I should try to get some food into you and get you strong.”

A soft knocking on her door made her jump. She glared accusingly at the door.

Now what?

Glancing one last time at her unexpected, incommunicative houseguest, she hurried over. “Yes?” she asked, without opening it.

“It is me,” she heard a man say quietly, “Silvio.”

Silvio.

Had he come to tell her that he’d notified the police even though she’d asked him not to? Or maybe he’d told her father. She wasn’t sure which made her more nervous right now.

Stevi swung open the door quickly. “What are you doing here?”

Even as she asked the question, she grabbed hold of his wrist and pulled him inside, then closed the door behind him. While she didn’t want anyone seeing him outside her door—there was absolutely no reason for her to be talking to the gardener in her room—she also wanted him to see their patient and reassure her that she wasn’t hurting the guy by not rushing him to the hospital.

“Well?” she asked. “Is something wrong, Silvio? What are you doing here?”

He didn’t say anything immediately. Instead, he looked past her toward the man sleeping on the bed. “I came to see if there has been any change. But I see he is still not awake.”

Quickly she got him caught up on what had transpired since he’d left the room earlier.

Silvio was immediately on the alert. “Did he say anything else?”

“Just that the less I knew, the better.” She felt somewhat defensive of the man, especially since he was back to not being able to speak for himself.

“So he told you nothing.”

Excuses rose to her lips, but there was no point in trying to make the situation out to be better than it was. Silvio was right.

“Pretty much,” she admitted.

His eyes pinned hers. “Now can we go to your father and have him deal with this man? He has a right to know that someone who is not a paying guest is here, in his daughter’s room.”

“Not yet, please, Silvio,” she pleaded. “I know what I’m doing.”

“Maybe you do, but I do not,” he informed her. He spoke softly, as he always did, but his tone was unnervingly serious. “This is not right, Miss Stevi, having this man here like this in your room.”

“Maybe not.” She wasn’t about to get embroiled in an argument about it. She needed Silvio as an ally. “But if you’re worried about him...he can’t do anything to me. He’s much too weak. He tried to sit up and all I had to do was hold his shoulders and he couldn’t budge. He’s as weak as a kitten, Silvio. Really.”

Silvio snorted. “If he were a kitten, I would not be worried,” he said gruffly. He crossed over to the bed and glanced at the bandages he’d wrapped around the man’s shoulder earlier. “I should change these.”