shot—condition to go but up here to the inn and in her opinion, the man looked as though he was in no shape to climb the hill.
“Then let us go look together to see if it is gone. If it is not, then we will bring this something you found up to the inn. Agreed?”
The smile Stevi had pasted on her lips took a little more effort to maintain as she realized there was no way around this.
Silvio was coming with her.
She should have known this would happen. Over the years, out of gratitude and allegiance to her father, Silvio had appointed himself their guardian angel-in-chief. Guardian angels, apparently, had tremendous sticking power.
“All right, sure, I could use the extra help,” she said.
She followed Silvio to his vehicle, a truck he now owned after paying off his debt to her father over the years. The proud man had insisted on that.
She and Silvio got in the cab. When Silvio placed his hands on the steering wheel, he glanced over toward her, waiting for her to finish buckling up. When she did, he nodded in satisfaction and started up the truck.
As it rumbled to life, Stevi knew she had precious little time. “Um, Silvio, I’m going to need you to do something for me,” Stevi began hesitantly.
“I am listening,” he responded, guiding the truck slowly down the winding path.
She pressed her lips together, searching for the right way to phrase this. There really wasn’t one. She just had to hope he would grant her this request.
“I would like to keep this a secret between the two of us.”
“Keep what a secret between us?” Silvio raised one salt-and-pepper eyebrow.
“It would be just for a little while, until I can get all the facts together,” she said, her voice rising as she spoke faster.
“You are not answering my question,” Silvio said.
Stevi had never heard him raise his voice. Even so, she and her sisters always knew when the man was less than pleased.
“I need you to agree before I answer you,” Stevi blurted out.
While Silvio had come to love all four of the girls as if they were his daughters, that didn’t mean he would allow any of them to lead him blindly. Love, to him, meant giving the other person the benefit of your experience and your honor.
“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
