wasn’t awake to feel the needle.
Finished with his handiwork, Silvio bit the end of his thread.
The stitches were small, neat and parallel. Gardeners, she was certain, didn’t know how to sew like that. Most people didn’t sew like that.
She looked at the man she had known almost from the very beginning of her life. What he had just demonstrated took training.
“Silvio?” she said uncertainly.
“Yes?” he responded, a guarded note in his voice.
“Where did you learn to sew like that?”
He shrugged. “I had a mother who was too busy to take care of the seven children she had given birth to, so I did what I could to help out.”
Stevi frowned. The stitches were more professional than those of a child who was desperate.
“And you sewed their clothes?” she asked, trying to coax more out of him.
“Sometimes,” he said with another shrug. “I also might have learned how to do that while I worked at the hospital.”
She really hadn’t known what sort of work Silvio had done in a hospital in his past. She’d made a few assumptions, she now realized. This was not the skill set of an orderly or a janitor.
Just who was this man her father had taken in all those years ago?
“Silvio?” she pressed.
“Yes?” His back was to her as he tried to make his patient as comfortable as possible.
Placing his fingers against the man’s pulse, he silently counted the beats, then quadrupled them. The heart rate was getting stronger, he thought with satisfaction. He hoped that this—caring for the stranger—didn’t turn out to be a mistake on his part.
He empathized with this stranger. In a manner of speaking, all those years ago he had been the one who had washed up on the shore. His shore had happened to be Richard Roman.
“What did you do at the hospital?”
Her question made Silvio lift his head as he stopped what he was doing. For a second, he stared straight ahead without turning to face her.
He decided a partial answer might be enough, so he told her quietly over his shoulder, “I was a physician’s aide.”
For a moment, she forgot all about the man lying in her bed and looked instead at the man she considered part of her family.
“Then what are you doing here?” He had a vocation, an ability to help people heal. Why would he be satisfied gardening?
Silvio turned around, his face the picture of earnestness. “Tending to your mother’s garden because your father asked me to.”
Stevi still had trouble accepting and processing the information. “Don’t you miss being a physician’s aide?”
There was a calmness in his voice as he answered her question. “If I missed it, Miss Stevi, I would be there. Instead, I am here, helping your father. Helping you,” he added, looking from her to the man he’d helped bring into her room.
It took all kinds to make a world, she reminded herself. And she didn’t want Silvio to think that she was questioning his judgment.
“I guess things work themselves out for the best.”
As to that, Silvio wasn’t 100 percent convinced, at least, not in this particular case. “That still remains to be seen, Miss Stevi.”
The patient appeared to be breathing more easily now, she thought. And it might have been her imagination, but she thought his color was a little better. A little less pale at any rate.
“How long do you think he’ll be unconscious?” she asked.
“That is difficult to say,” Silvio said. “The man has lost a lot of blood, but that appears to be the only wound. Since you do not want to take him to a hospital—”
“I don’t,” she said with feeling. “At least not until he can speak for himself.”
The expression on Silvio’s face was stern. “Hopefully, it will not be too late by then.”
“It won’t be,” she answered.
“How can you be so sure?” It wasn’t a challenge so much as a desire to know why she was so confident she was right.
“I just am,” she answered.
Silvio sighed. He was going to have to step up his efforts to watch over this family. “Then we will just have to wait and see,” he said calmly, like a man who was going to sit back and wait for things to unfold.
He rose from the side of the bed. From his perspective, there was nothing else he could do until the man woke up. But there was just one more thing he needed to know.
“When will you tell your father about this?” he pressed.
She nodded toward the stranger. “Not until he wakes up and can tell me what happened to him.”
She saw the doubt on Silvio’s face. She knew he was worried about her and she appreciated that the man cared enough to concern himself this way about her—about her whole family, really. But from her point of view, she was being rational in her decision.
“I need to have something more to tell my father than ‘Look what I found on the beach today, Dad. It washed up on the shore right at my feet. Can I keep it?’ I want to be able to explain how he came to be here and why he has that bullet wound in his chest. Or Dad will think I’m crazy.”
Silvio’s eyes locked onto hers. “I could see your father’s point.”
“I know, I know,” Stevi agreed.
She closed her eyes as she searched her mind for something she could say that would ease Silvio’s doubts.
“On some level, so can I,” she finally admitted. “And I really can’t explain why, but something tells me that bringing him here, having you take care of him, instead of carting him off to the nearest hospital and handing him off to be someone else’s problem, is the right thing to do.”
He appeared unconvinced. “Right for who, Miss Stevi? Him? Or you?”
Again, she didn’t have anything logical to offer as an explanation. A gut feeling didn’t really translate all that well into logic.
“Maybe both. Him, definitely.”
“And if he is a criminal?” Silvio pressed.
But he’s not. I just know it. She flashed the gardener a smile. “Then you and Shane and Wyatt will protect me.”
“And who will protect me from your father when he finds out that I let you do this?”
Stevi’s grin grew wider, brighter, as she answered,
