Safe Harbor (5 page)

“Got more right here,” she volunteered, going into her bathroom and opening her medicine cabinet. She got out the alcohol again, as well as more bandages, and was back in a moment. “Were you a physician’s aide for long?”

Silvio shrugged. “Long enough. It really is not important.” Then, because she was waiting for a number, he gave her one. “Ten years.” He glanced at her over his shoulder. “Why?”

“Because I think that anything to do with medicine is impressive and I’m just surprised you never told any of us about that before now.”

“There was no need to before now,” he said matter-of-factly as he removed the old bandages and began to disinfect the area again. “No one had been shot before today.”

“True.” She peered at his profile as he worked. “But why keep it a secret?”

“Why not?” he countered. “It is part of my past, my other life, and what I do here, at the inn, is my life now. I am not interested in the man I was, only in the man your father brought out in me.”

She knew better than to ask him why he couldn’t be both.

For now, she was just glad he had the necessary skills to save her mystery man.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“W
HERE
ARE
YOU
going to sleep?” Silvio asked. Finished rebandaging the stranger’s wound, the gardener wiped his hands on a hand towel as he turned around to face Stevi.

Caught up in wondering about the unconscious man’s identity and just how he came to wash up on her beach, Silvio’s question seemed to come out of the blue and she wasn’t prepared for it. It took her a moment to bring herself back into her sunny bedroom.

“What?”

“Where are you going to sleep?” Silvio repeated. “He is in your bed. That means you cannot be in your bed.” It seemed a simple enough question as far as he was concerned. “Where will you sleep?”

She shrugged. She hadn’t thought that far ahead yet. “I’ll worry about that tonight.” One glance at Silvio’s face told her that he wasn’t satisfied with her answer. “Don’t worry, I’ll come up with something. I promise.”

He had no authority over her, but the situation as it stood still bothered him. “I still think we should go to your father and tell him about this man.”

“We will,” she assured him. “I just need to figure out how to approach him with this.”

What she was really looking for was a way to get her father to agree to help, even though circumstances were a bit edgier than they had been when, say, Dorothy or Silvio had turned up at the inn, down on their luck.

“The truth should do it,” Silvio told her matter-of-factly.

“Are you speaking from experience?” she asked.

Right now, she would have welcomed any input.

“We are not talking about me,” Silvio pointed out. “We are talking about the man in your bed.”

Despite the somewhat grave situation, Stevi laughed. “That sounds salacious.”

“What?” He had come to English later in his life.

“Never mind.” It had been a feeble joke, not worth repeating. “This will all work out, Silvio, I just know it,” she said with confidence. “And I promise not to get you into trouble.”

His eyes pinned hers as effortlessly as the odds-on favorite wrestler pinned his opponent. “It is not me getting into trouble that I am worried about.”

She smiled and brushed a quick kiss on his cheek. “Yes, I know. Thanks for caring, but really, I’ll be fine.”

“When he wakes up again, call me,” he told her, pulling a cell phone out of his pocket.

She looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t know you had one of those. Good for you,” she said, delighted.

For the most part, technology was something that Silvio tended to ignore or resist.

“It was a gift from your father. He thought I should have one. As if there was someone to call,” he said more to himself than to her.

“Okay, I’ll give you a call if he wakes up. What’s the number?”

Silvio stared at the phone. “I do not know. Nothing is written on it.”

Stevi put her hand out. “Here, give it to me. I’ll find it.”

She had a hunch Silvio hadn’t turned the cell phone on—and he hadn’t. When she proceeded to do just that, the cell’s number briefly lit the screen.

Handing him the phone back, she said, “I’ve got your number. You want to write it down?”

“Why?” he asked uncertainly. “I would not be calling myself.”

She laughed and shook her head. “I guess you have a point.”

Pocketing his phone, Silvio moved toward the door and opened it. “You will call me?” he asked again, pressing the point home.

She raised her right hand as if she was taking a vow. “The second he opens his eyes and I get a chance, I’ll call you.”

Silvio appeared to catch the significant phrase buried in rhetoric. “See that you get the chance,” he told her sternly.

She crossed to the door and eased it closed behind the gardener. “Yes, sir,” she promised for the umpteenth time.

* * *

H
ER
MYSTERY
MAN
slept for the rest of the day. Several times, uneasy about his condition, Stevi held a mirror up to his face to see if he was breathing. It was something she remembered reading in a short story once. At the time, she’d thought the trick was rather silly and ancient. Now she was glad she remembered since his chest gave the impression of hardly moving.

Stevi stayed in her room all day. She didn’t want to take a chance on leaving and having the patient wake up while she was gone.

She was fairly sure that he was as weak as she had told Silvio he was, but there was always the outside chance that he would wake up and use whatever strength he did have to leave the inn. He was in no condition to fend for himself in the outside world and if, as in all good spy stories, whoever had tried to kill him should see him out and about, this time they might finish the job. She doubted very much if the man would be able to defend himself, as weak as he was.

So, to guard against that happening, Stevi remained in her room. She’d had the scrambled eggs and ham she’d brought for breakfast and when he didn’t wake up, around one o’clock she had the plate of cold, somewhat soggy pancakes for lunch.

Throughout it all, she kept her eye on the stranger, fairly certain that he’d be awake by dinnertime.

He wasn’t.

Silvio had not come by again and she didn’t want to impose on him, so she didn’t call him. She also didn’t have anything to eat for dinner. Stevi decided to tough it out, telling herself that skipping a meal once in a while wasn’t a huge sacrifice. As long as nobody missed her and came looking for her—especially if Cris was making her big announcement to the whole family about her pregnancy.

She hesitated, then decided they’d never miss her in the loving chaos that was bound to erupt when the baby news came out. She didn’t really want to miss that—she was happy for Cris, she really was—but she was so preoccupied with what she’d undertaken, she was afraid she’d draw attention from her sister.

She dragged two spare comforters out of the back of her closet to create a makeshift sleeping bag of sorts.

“Hope you appreciate this,” she told her houseguest, climbing in between the layers of comforters.

She dozed rather than slept.

Several times during the night she thought she heard her roommate stirring and she bolted upright.

But each time she thought she heard him, Stevi discovered him still sleeping.

He slept through the night.

She really didn’t.

By morning Stevi felt achy and the worse for her impromptu sentry duty. Depleted of energy and yet oddly wired, she skipped her morning run, choosing instead to spend the time observing the man in her bed.

As time went on, she grew somewhat anxious. Maybe the reason he hadn’t woken up all day was because he
had
slipped into a coma, she thought, becoming progressively more worried.

She forced herself to put her concerns on hold until after she showered and got dressed. This time around she cut her prep time by half.

When Stevi came out of the bathroom, she was disappointed to find that her mystery man hadn’t come to.

She stood over him for several minutes, debating what to do next. She didn’t want to leave him like this and she definitely didn’t want to take a chance on making his condition worse by just assuming that he was all right when he could very well not be.

If he was all right, wouldn’t he have woken up by now?

Very gingerly, she shook his right arm. When there was no response, she did it again, a little more forcefully this time.

By the fourth attempt to wake him, she was shaking the stranger by his shoulders.

Even though she was trying to wake him up, when his eyes suddenly opened at the same time that he grabbed her by the wrist she was
not
prepared. The quick movement brought a gasp from her and a groan from him. It didn’t take an Einstein to figure out that the searing pain had caught him by surprise.

“Morning,” Stevi said with forced cheerfulness.

“You.” With a sigh, he released her wrist and fell back against his pillows. “So I didn’t dream you. You’re real.”

“Absolutely,” she assured him.

He looked around the room, vaguely remembering it from what he’d thought was his dream but obviously wasn’t. What he wasn’t clear about was exactly where he had landed. “And this is—”

“Still my bedroom in the inn,” she said. “Before we go any further and you possibly pass out on me again, I need a name.”

He looked blankly at her. “A name,” he repeated.

“Yes.”

His eyebrows drew together as a puzzled expression descended over his face. “You don’t have a name?”

This was going to be harder than she’d thought. “
I
have a name.
You
don’t have a name. At least, not one that you’ve given me.”

He was still staring at her as if she was speaking some foreign language. Had the bullet wound scrambled his brain, as well? Loss of blood could do a lot of things.

Gamely, she forged ahead anyway. “I’ll start you off. My name is Stephanie Roman. Everyone calls me Stevi.”

He frowned. “That’s a man’s name.”

“That’s a subject for a different time,” she told him rather than launching into an explanation as to why she and her sisters all had boy’s nicknames. “Your turn. What’s your name?”

He didn’t answer her immediately. Instead, he took in a long breath as he looked around his surroundings again. The room had a great deal of sunshine coming in through filmy white curtains. The sunlight made the room look bigger somehow, despite the clutter. There were clothes waiting to be hung up, books waiting to be put back on the shelves lining part of one wall and a desk that had at least two layers of things piled on it.

This was not a room that belonged to a person with control issues. He turned back to look at her. “Is this your bed?”

She had thought that was self-evident. Obviously not. “Yes, but—”

“Where did you sleep?” he asked, feeling guilty for having displaced her.

“On the floor, next to the bed.” She waved at the bunched-up comforters at her feet. “Stop changing the subject. Why won’t you tell me your—”

“Ryan.” The name emerged before she finished her question.

Ryan. Nice, she thought, nodding. “Okay, Ryan, next—”

“Mike.” His head was muddled, he realized. He was doing this out of order.

She squinted, as if that would somehow help her absorb this.

“Which is it?” she asked. “Ryan or Mike?”

He closed his eyes for a minute. The room was beginning to spin and the sunlight that was streaming into it was hard on his eyes.

“Both. Mike Ryan,” he told her. “My name is Mike Ryan.”

That sounded almost fake, she thought. Until it was proven otherwise, she supposed she’d have to take him at his word.

“Okay, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” she asked. Actually, it was from her point of view, but she didn’t want to approach this with a negative attitude. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question was still ahead. “Who shot you?”

He raised his green eyes warily to her face.

“I’m not sure.”

Granted there had been a lot going on at the time, but he was fairly sure that he
did
know who had pulled the trigger. And that it was on the orders of Larry Crenshaw. But for now, he decided to keep that to himself because he still wasn’t sure just where he was or who this woman was—who she worked for. And until he was sure, he needed to play it very close to the vest.

“Okay,” Stevi said gamely. “Do you know
why
you were shot?”

Was she really just some beautiful Good Samaritan or was she pumping him to find out how much he remembered about the incident?

His memory of the incident that had almost been his undoing was crystal clear, but if he claimed ignorance, it might buy him a little time.

He went that route. “I don’t remember.”

She just looked at him.

After a beat, she said, “Yesterday, when I asked, you said the less I knew, the better. And now you’re telling me you don’t remember.” She pinned him with a look. “So which is it?”

To be honest, he didn’t remember saying that, but he took her word for it.

After thinking for a couple of moments, he said, “I didn’t want to admit that I didn’t remember. I thought it made me look stupid.”

She supposed that could be plausible. And then again... “And you don’t care if you look stupid today?” she challenged.

He shrugged his right shoulder. The other one appeared to want to mimic the movement, but pain prevented this...Mike...from moving it.

“I thought I owed you the truth, since you’ve put yourself out so much for me. I guess that trumps looking stupid.”

Stevi smiled. Finally, she was getting somewhere. Not a very productive somewhere, granted, but at least she was further along than she’d been yesterday. Baby steps, she told herself.

“Thank you.”

Uncomfortably, he waved away her thanks. “Who else knows I’m here?”

“I was delaying the press release until this afternoon.” When she saw the startled expression on his face, she felt guilty. “That was a joke,” she said quickly. His expression returned to normal. She’d already labeled it “stoically good-looking.” “Sorry, no jokes until you’re stronger. Are you hungry? Do you want to clean up in the bathroom?”

As if in direct response to her question, Mike’s stomach growled, reminding him that it had been close to two days since he’d eaten.

“Sorry about that,” he mumbled.

“I’ll take that as a yes to food,” she said. “I’ll get you some breakfast. Anything in particular you’d like to eat?”

Food was food. He thought of it as fuel. “Whatever you bring back will be fine.”

Stevi pushed aside the comforters on the floor for the time. She hesitated. “Promise you won’t go anywhere until I get back?”

Mike answered her question with a question of his own. A rhetorical one. “You’re bringing back breakfast, right?”

She flashed him a grin. “All right, then I’ll be as quick as I can.”

Stevi left, closing the door behind her.

Mike gave it to the count of ten. The door remained closed. Sitting up, he swung his legs out from beneath the covers. He was somewhat surprised, not to mention relieved, that he was still wearing his pants. That was one less thing he had to do, one less article of clothing he had to find.