Safe Harbor by Marie Ferrarella Page A

knew, for their sake. If they collapsed and cried, their father would be there to make it all better for them.
    But who did he have to depend on when their mother died? Stevi now wondered. And now, even when his best friend and Wyatt’s father, Dan—the man she and her sisters had grown up thinking of as an uncle—had died, she knew that her father had come here, to his office, to close the door and be alone with his thoughts and his memories and just possibly, to pretend for a little while that life was continuing just as it always had, with her mother and Dan in it.
    She didn’t like intruding on him when he was in the office with the door closed, as it was now. But he was the one who wanted to talk to her so she felt that she had to interrupt his solace.
    All it took was one quick knock.
    Her knuckles had hardly touched the wood before the door opened and her father was standing in front of her.
    “Hi,” he greeted her as if they hadn’t just been together a little while ago in her room.
    “You said you wanted to talk,” she said. “So here I am.”
    “Come on in,” he invited, gesturing. When she crossed the threshold, her father closed the door behind her. Indicating the chair in front of his desk—an antique desk that had been handed down from generation to generation, right along with the inn.
    Stevi perched on the edge of the chair, ready to spring to her feet if need be.
    Sitting down himself, her father leaned back in his chair and observed his third-born. “You can relax, you know. I’m not preparing to drag you over hot coals—twice.”
    If possible, she sat up a little straighter. “I know that.”
    He went on to tell her, “I wanted to ask for a few details about Mike.”
    “That’s what I have,” Stevi said, forcing a cheerful note into her otherwise nervous voice. “Just a few details. Very few,” she emphasized. And then, before her father could say anything more, words began to spill out of her.
    “He was just lying there yesterday, Dad, on the beach, when I was jogging back to the inn. He was bleeding and he grabbed my wrist and said...” She hesitated. What he’d said was “No police,” but she didn’t think her father was ready to hear that.... “He said, uh, ‘Help me,’ then he passed out. I couldn’t just leave him there,” she cried, then doubled back on her sentence when she realized it wasn’t factually accurate. “Well, actually, I did leave him there—”
    He tried to stop her. “Stevi—”
    “—because I went to get someone to help. I was going to get you, or Shane, but I saw Silvio first, so I asked him and at first he didn’t want to—”
    He tried again. “Stevi—”
    “—because he felt it was being disloyal to you, but I convinced him he had to come and he brought his truck so we could get Mike up to the inn and—”
    “Stevi!”
    Stevi stared at her father, startled into silence. She couldn’t remember the last time she had heard him raise his voice—to anyone.
    After a beat, she asked, “What?”
    “Breathe,” he ordered. When she looked bewildered at the instruction, he added, “Now.”
    Stevi nodded and took in a huge breath, her eyes riveted to her father’s face. He signaled that she needed to take in another breath when she let the first out, so she did, still keeping her eyes on her father. Her breathing became more regular.
    “Better?” he asked.
    Stevi nodded. “Better. I was just trying to explain how Mike got into my room.”
    “I really just wanted to know if you’d ever seen him before you came across him on the beach.”
    “No. But I—”
    Her father held up his hand to stop another possible flood of words.
    “You don’t have to explain anything else. I understand that you saw someone who needed help and you helped him. Considering that I’ve been doing that myself all these years, I can’t really fault you for doing the same thing, now, can I?”
    Stevi pressed her lips together, then began to frame a reply.