Safe Harbor (6 page)

Where was his shirt?

Scanning the room, he found it in a crumpled, bloody heap near the window, discarded by whoever had bandaged the wound in his chest.

Had that been her? Stevi?

Or the gardener she’d mentioned?

He liked the idea of her being the one who had seen to his wound far more than someone who spent the day with his hands in fertilized dirt.

“Probably owe my life to you, Stevi. Sorry I can’t stick around to thank you properly, but having me around probably isn’t safe for either of us,” he murmured.

Standing up, his dizziness immediately intensified.

Struggling to keep upright, Mike took all of five steps away from the bed and toward the door before he felt his knees buckling beneath him. He began to bite off an oath, but the words vanished before they reached his tongue. Vanished as his knees met the floor.

By the time the rest of him hit the floor, he was out cold.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“I’
D
LIKE
TWO
breakfasts to go, Jorge. Same as yesterday,” Stevi requested as she came sailing into the kitchen.

“Good morning to you, too,” Cris called out as she glanced up from the steel prep table, where she was working.

Lost in her own thoughts regarding the man she’d left in her room, wanting to get back there as soon as possible because she wasn’t really all that certain she could trust Mike to stay put, Stevi looked toward her sister in puzzlement. She’d heard her voice, but not what Cris had said.

“Excuse me?”

“I said ‘Good morning,’” Cris repeated, articulating each syllable.

“Oh, right.” Stevi flashed a lightning-quick smile in her sister’s direction. “Good morning.”

Cris frowned. “Are you okay?”

“Just fine,” Stevi assured her breezily, then looked at her innocently. “Why?”

“Where were you yesterday?”

Stevi looked at her sister as if Cris had lapsed into gibberish. “What do you mean where was I? I was right here.”

By that, it was obvious Stevi was referring to the inn. That wasn’t what Cris was asking her sister. “I mean for lunch and dinner. You didn’t come to the dining area, or to the kitchen. No one saw you,” Cris added.

Stevi shrugged dismissively. She watched Jorge getting her order together.
Faster, Jorge. I’m getting the third degree here.

“I was busy.”

Cris stopped chopping green onions, laying her knife down on the chopping block. “Doing what?”

Stevi tossed her head. Her hair swayed about her oval face. “Do I ask you to account for every minute?” she asked defensively. “To account for every meal you make?”

“I wasn’t asking you to account for every minute. I was just wondering where you were after running off with two breakfasts yesterday morning,” Cris pointed out.

As if on cue, Jorge crossed over to Stevi and handed her a bag with the two breakfasts.

Thank you!
Stevi thought.

Stevi gave the man a bright, grateful smile and said, “Thank you, Jorge. See you later, Cris.”

The next moment, she was gone.

Cris looked after her departing sister even after Stevi had gone through the swinging door. With a sigh, she shook her head.

Turning toward her assistant, Cris asked, “Does she seem like she’s acting weird to you, Jorge?”

Jorge busied himself with cleaning up his pans before going on to the next order that had been sent in. “Not my place to say.”

“But if it was your place to say?” Cris prodded.

Jorge raised his dark eyes as he looked up at her. “Then yes, she is being unusual.”

“Even for Stevi?” Cris asked. Everyone was aware that her sometimes overly sensitive, certainly impulsive sister took things to new highs at times.

Jorge gave her a long, penetrating look, then went on to prepare an elaborate Belgian waffle. “You already have the answer to that.”

Yes, she did, Cris thought. She looked off in the direction her sister had taken and chewed thoughtfully on her lower lip.

Something was up, she thought. The question was: What?

* * *

S
TEVI
HURRIED
DOWN
the hallway, hoping she wouldn’t run into anyone before she reached her room. Or at least not run into anyone who would bombard her with questions, such as where was she going so fast, what was in the delicious-smelling paper bag, things like that.

She went as fast as she could without appearing to run, because that was sure to bring questions from even the most casual guest at the inn.

It wasn’t until Stevi had closed the door of her bedroom behind her and turned that she saw him.

Saw Mike.

He was out of bed and lying facedown on the floor, in much the same position he’d been in the first time she’d laid eyes on him.

She didn’t remember dropping the bag containing their breakfasts. Yet she was aware of rushing to his body.

“Oh, Mike, we have to stop meeting like this,” she muttered under her breath.

Turning him over onto his back, Stevi attempted to rouse him again. This time she was successful. He opened his eyes.

“What happened?” he asked, dazed.

“You tell me,” Stevi answered. “I left you in bed. You promised me you’d stay there.”

There wasn’t a part of his body that didn’t ache. It surprised him then, that despite the varying levels of pain he could still assess her features, still feel some sort of a pull toward his bossy guardian angel.

“I didn’t want to inconvenience you any further,” he told her.

She laughed shortly. “News flash, Mike, finding you on the floor like this isn’t exactly an improvement. Here, let me help you back into bed.”

Squatting, Stevi angled her body so that she could take his good arm and drape it over her own shoulders for leverage.

“No, that’s all right. I can do it myself,” Mike protested.

Except that he couldn’t and the upshot of it was that he fell backward and she wound up tumbling down with him. Less than half a second into the maneuver, she had landed, splayed out on top of her wounded patient.

Stevie felt a flash of awareness, followed by a wave of embarrassment that made her cheeks burn.

This was
way
too much contact with someone whose name she’d just learned less than half an hour ago, she thought.

“Sorry, this isn’t the way to get you into bed. At least,” she stammered, tripping over her own tongue, “not the way we both want to get you into bed.” That didn’t come out right, either. “I’ll stop talking now,” she announced since he was laughing.

“Oh, please, don’t make me laugh,” he pleaded, still directly beneath her. “It really does hurt, you know.”

She made no comment. “Okay, we’re going to do this together on the count of three,” she said.

“Okay,” he agreed gamely.

Looking at her, he would have never guessed she was as strong as she was. And she was definitely even more attractive close-up.

Eyes on Mike, Stevi began to count off the numbers. “One—two—”

“Stevi?” Cris cried. “What’s going on? Who is this man?”

“No wonder you haven’t been out of your room all day,” Andy chimed in, crowding in behind Cris. “Did you bring one for me?”

Thrown off balance by her sisters’ unexpected entrance, Stevi barely stopped herself from pitching forward again.

Braced, she shifted her body, then jumped to her feet, instantly defensive. She hadn’t heard them knock. Were they spying on her?

“What are you two doing here?” she demanded.

“We were worried about you. Who
is
this?” Cris asked, her eyes shifting toward the unidentified, rumpled man.

“Mike Ryan,” he spoke up, introducing himself. They looked alike, the three women. It wasn’t a stretch to figure out they had to be related. Sisters, most likely.

“I found him on the beach,” Stevi said quickly.

“Wow. And I thought your seashell collection was getting out of hand.” Looking from Mike to Stevi, Cris demanded, “What’s he doing on the floor in your room?”

“He’s supposed to be in my bed,” Stevi said pointedly to Mike.

“In your bed? Are you nuts? And what was he doing there?” Cris’s voice rose with every word.

Andy laughed under her breath.

Stevi ignored Andy. “He’s supposed to be healing,” she informed her older sister. “Now if you’ll give me a hand here, Andy, we need to get Mike back into bed.”

Andy looked to Cris for permission. “Is it okay?”

Stevi could tell exactly what she was thinking. Her baby sister was worried about it getting back to their father. This mess, whatever it was, was her doing, not Andy’s. Andy got into enough trouble on her own without adding this to the mix.

“Cris, he’s hurt,” Stevi pointed out. “He was unconscious when I found him.”

“If he was unconscious when you found him on the beach, just how did you get him into your room by yourself?” Cris asked. It didn’t take a math genius to see that the height and weight factor were more than Stevi could have handled on her own.

She was not about to get Silvio into trouble for this.

“That’s not important now,” Stevi answered, dismissing the subject. “What’s important is that he’s hurt, and didn’t Dad teach us to always help those in need? Well, Mike needs help.”

Cris turned to look at the man the argument was about. She was starting to feel queasy again and her head was beginning to pound, but she still needed some basic answers.

“Who are you?”

“He already told you his name,” Stevi said. “And he’s hurt and needs help. That’s all Dad knew about Dorothy when he took her in and gave her a place to stay. The same went for Silvio. And—”

Cris raised her voice to talk over her sister. Everyone knew Stevi could go on forever. “None of them were wounded,” she stressed.

“Externally,” Stevi insisted. “Internally, though, they all were—”

The argument was escalating. Mike raised his hand, drawing attention back to him. “Please, ladies, I don’t want to cause any trouble. Just give me a minute to pull myself together and I’ll go.”

Cris turned to scrutinize the man more closely. If she succeeded in getting him to leave, then what? What happened to him?

“Do you have somewhere to go?” she asked Mike in a somewhat less than indignant tone.

Right now, he knew he couldn’t go back to what had been his “home” for the past two years. They were probably waiting for him there in case he had survived. And he knew that he couldn’t easily reclaim his former life—not that the agency would let him right now.

Moreover, he had no idea whom to trust. Someone had leaked information, blown his cover. Lying low here was his best and only option, but not if it was going to be the source of friction and trouble among these three women.

“I can find somewhere,” he told Cris vaguely.

“How?” Stevi demanded. Turning toward Cris, she filled in the important blanks. “He has no wallet, no money, no credit cards. He doesn’t even remember how he got hurt. How’s he supposed to fend for himself if he can’t even stand up?”

Cris sighed. Stevi was right. Her sister had managed to breach her outer wall to reach the part that was a pushover. She couldn’t just toss the man out in this condition.

“You can stay here—until you get better,” Cris qualified.

“I appreciate the offer, but I don’t want to be any trouble,” he protested.

“I think we’re past that at this point,” Cris told him. Turning toward Stevi, she repeated, “He can stay. But Dad has to know.”

Stevi winced at the thought. “Cris—”

“He has a right to know. It’s his inn.”

“Dad said it belongs to all of us,” Stevi protested. “That means one-fifth is mine. I can have Mike stay in my fifth.”

Cris frowned and shook her head in complete disbelief. “I think you’re wasting your time as an event planner. You should really think about becoming a lawyer. You could talk the ears off a brass monkey.”

Stevi disregarded the sideways compliment. “I don’t care about the ears on a brass monkey, I care about winning you over.”

“You have won me over. He can stay,” Cris repeated, looking at Mike, who had managed to draw himself up into a sitting position on the floor. “But that’s my one condition. Dad has to know.”

“Okay,” Stevi agreed. “But can we take our time telling him?”

“Like when? Halloween?” Cris asked with a touch of sarcasm, her temper uncustomarily short.

“Labor Day?” Stevi countered, only half kidding.

“Stevi, he— Oh, Lord.” Her eyes widened and suddenly her face looked very peaked, the way it had the other morning.

“Cris?” Andy asked uncertainly. “What’s wrong?”

Cris didn’t answer. Instead, she spun on her heel and rushed into Stevi’s bathroom.

Andy started to follow her, worried that her older sister was going to suddenly be sick. She was startled when Stevi barred her way.

“It’s okay,” Stevi assured her—clearly Cris hadn’t had that conversation with the rest of the family yet about her pregnancy. She sure hoped her sister had at least been able to tell their father when Jorge called him into the kitchen yesterday morning.

Andy looked at her as if she was crazy. “What do you mean, ‘it’s okay’? Cris looks as if she’s going to throw up.”

“She is,” Stevi said.

She still remembered what Cris had gone through when she’d been pregnant with Ricky. She’d kidded her that she spent so much time in the bathroom, the post office was going to forward her mail there. Stevi hoped it didn’t go as hard on her this time.

Andy still hadn’t made the connection. “Then I should—”

“Andy, she’s pregnant.”

Andy blinked. “She’s what?”

“Cris is pregnant. With child. Of the bun-in-the-oven persuasion,” Stevi explained.

But Andy shook her head. “No, Stevi, you’re getting her confused with Alex.”

“Alex and Cris are
both
pregnant. Cris didn’t want to steal Alex’s thunder because it was Alex’s first baby.”

Andy struggled to keep her jaw from dropping. “Really?”

Stevi grinned as she nodded. “Really. I think she wanted to be the one to tell the family, though.”

Holding on to the side of the nightstand, Mike managed to just barely drag himself into an upright position. The room still spun a little and waves of weakness kept insisting on washing over him, but he’d manage. He’d been in worse situations and somehow survived and even come out on top. This would be no different. All he needed was a couple of days of rest, but that was a luxury he wasn’t about to find here.

Stevi suddenly realized what the man she’d found on the beach was attempting to do. Hands on her hips, she confronted him. “Just where do you think you’re going?”

He tried once—in vain—to get around her. That failing, he tried reasoning. “Look, you people have enough going on. You don’t need me around to complicate things.”

“We’re a fifth-generation bed-and-breakfast inn run by a man with four daughters. Trust me, we live for complications,” Stevi said. “The complication we don’t need is you passing out in our reception area.”

He could understand that. It might make it difficult to explain to the guests. “I’ll take the long way around, the way you said you did.”