Safe Harbor Read Free Page B

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
    A FTER 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.