Safe Harbour - Marie Ferrarella Ladera by the Sea

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      “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,

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