the very real form of a man.
A man lying very still and facedown in the sand.
She didn’t remember how the last fifteen feet were reduced to less than a foot. Couldn’t remember if she ran toward the prone body or if she approached it cautiously. Given her usual recklessness, she probably ran.
But suddenly, there she was, standing over the immobile body of a man, wondering if he was dead or just unconscious.
“Mister?” she addressed softly.
There was no indication that he had heard her.
“Mister?” she said a little louder this time.
Still no reaction.
She put her hand on his shoulder and gently shook him. Again, no response.
Was he dead?
So far, in her world, death was something that occurred offstage, like her mother’s passing and Uncle Dan’s recent demise.
Her breath felt as if it had become solid and was backing up in her throat.
Drawing her courage to her like a shield, Stevi took hold of his shoulder again, rolling him to turn him faceup.
It wasn’t easy.
He was far from a small man. She wasn’t good at judging things like height, but he had to be well over six feet. And young. Those were sculpted muscles she was pulling on, hard even though they weren’t tensed.
When she finally got him on his back so that she could get a better look at him, Stevi’s breath caught in her throat.
She had to be looking down into the handsomest face she had ever seen, bar none. And—she was no expert when it came to this—she was fairly sure that was a bullet wound in his chest close to his shoulder.
Now that he was on his back, she saw that he was bleeding.
Tearing the bottom of her oversize T-shirt, she bunched it up into a huge wad and pressed it against the wound. She needed it to stay in place, but it wasn’t as though she came equipped with bandages or tape—or rope.
But she had a headband, she thought. Pulling it off, she looped it up his arm to his chest and then tied it as best she could.
Leaning in closer, Stevi tried to find some signs of life, some indication that he was still taking in air and that his heart was beating.
Just when she was inches away from his face, her attention focused on his chest, the man’s eyes suddenly flew open.
Stevi stifled a gasp.
“No police,” he said in a low, raspy voice, grasping her wrist.
The next second, his hold loosened, his fingers lax against her wrist.
He was unconscious again.
CHAPTER TWO
STEVI STARED DOWN at the man’s face. Scores of questions crossed her mind. Questions he couldn’t answer because he was unconscious.
Crouching over him, Stevi gingerly placed one hand directly before his nostrils and one on his chest, trying to detect some signs of life. While she didn’t feel his heart beating, she did detect just the slightest bit of breath coming from his nose.
She sighed with relief. He was still breathing. But who knew for how long? The makeshift bandage she’d created was discolored from all the blood it was soaking up. She needed to get him up to the inn and from there, to a hospital.
But none of this was going to happen if she didn’t get someone to help her. However, what was she going to say? She didn’t know the first thing about this man who had washed up on her beach. Why had someone shot him? Was he some kind of a criminal?
Well, whoever he was, sinner or saint, she couldn’t just let him bleed to death.
Her father would know what to do. Rising to her feet, Stevi frowned. Or maybe, since he was stronger, she should get Shane. It was still early and her brother-in-law wouldn’t have gone to work yet. He was renovating a house not far from the inn, which meant that he wouldn’t be leaving until around seven. People didn’t like to hear construction before seven.
The person she really wished she could go to was Wyatt. She’d grown up with him; he was like a big brother to her. Wyatt always knew what to do. But her brother-in-law was in L.A. rewriting one of his scripts.
That wound needed to be treated now.
Despite what the man had said, the right thing to do was to call the police.... Staring down, she hesitated. Something in her gut—and for the life of her, she wouldn’t have been able to say what—told her not to call them. At least, not yet. Not until this man had an opportunity to tell her what had happened.
Until he could speak for himself, she was going to be his voice. And his protector.
She just hoped she wouldn’t regret it.
She looked up the hill toward the inn. Was it her imagination, or did it suddenly look to be even farther away than she’d thought?
The winding road that led from the side of the inn down to the beach was just wide enough to accommodate a truck.
Silvio, the inn’s gardener, had one.
If she could pull off a last-minute double wedding for her two sisters, she could do anything.
Stevi took off for the inn.
There was an unconscious, bleeding man on the beach depending on her.
* * *
“TELL ME AGAIN—and this time I would like to hear the whole reason—why do you want my truck?” Silvio Armado Juarez asked his boss’s third daughter.
He thought of the girls as his own. He’d found his way to the inn some eighteen years ago, after having been forced to leave Argentina behind. His wife had already taken their three-year-old son and disappeared, and he’d barely managed to scrape enough money together to make it to the United States. He’d already spent most of what was left of his meager savings trying to find them, but never had. And then his time had run out and he’d had to leave. Fast.
The night he’d stumbled into Ladera-by-the-Sea, he certainly wasn’t looking for salvation. But in Richard Roman, Silvio wound up finding that and so much more.
Stevi shifted beneath the man’s watchful, dark eyes. “I, um, found something on the beach and it’s too big for me to carry up.”
“You found what on the beach?” It was clear that he wasn’t about to budge, or hand over the keys to the truck, until he was satisfied with her answer.
Lying had never been her strong suit. “It’s big and clumsy,” she explained with a small, careless shrug, praying for the interrogation to be over.
“Everything has a name, Miss Stevi, even big and clumsy things. And if it is
