Safe Harbor by Marie Ferrarella Read Free Book Online Page B

it?
    Slowly turning, moving in a circle, he searched for the vaguest signs of land. There had to be something.
    Something.
    He thought he heard seagulls and searched for them even though he knew they could just as easily be heading for the open water as they could for land. He searched anyway.
    There was nothing else to cling to.
    And then he saw them. Saw two seagulls descending in the distance.
    Disappearing in the distance.
    He might as well die swimming toward the promise of something than die out here, treading water. Going nowhere.
    Pain knifed through him with every stroke he took, and his left arm held him back. To compensate, he poured it on with his right.
    The more he swam, the farther away the shore appeared. It couldn’t be moving. And yet, it was.
    He wasn’t going to make it. He was going to die out here.
    Die and nobody would even know what happened to him. That he had been on the right side.
    No, it was too soon for him to die.
    Too soon!
    * * *
    G ULPING AIR , HE realized that his eyes were shut and he forced them open as he sucked in more air, gasping as it went in.
    He tried to get up but hands restrained him. Gentle hands. But stronger than he was right now.
    Where...? He was in the middle of the ocean.
    Wasn’t he?
    The fire scissored through his chest, cutting it to ribbons.
    “It’s okay. You’re safe now,” a woman told him in a soft voice.
    He’d heard her voice before. But that had been a hallucination, hadn’t it? Was he hallucinating now? Or could this actually be real? The pressure of her hands had felt real.
    His eyes had closed again and he pried them opened. There she was, still standing over him. She had to be real. A honey-blonde vision trying to restrain him.
    “Who—who are you?”
    Was that his voice? It couldn’t be. It sounded so weak, so raspy. And yet, it really hurt to talk. Each word felt like a shard of glass being scraped along his throat.
    Stevi hovered over the stranger, worried that he might try to get up again. He was clearly weak and more than likely, his legs wouldn’t hold him.
    “I’m the woman who found you on the beach and brought you back to the inn,” she told him.
    The man’s expression was blank as he repeated, “The inn?”
    “My inn,” Stevi told him. Convinced he was going to stay put, she released her hold on him and sank into the chair beside the bed. “Well, actually, it’s my family’s inn, but we all own a piece of it. My dad wanted it that way.” That part probably made no difference to this man. She had to remember to stop volunteering more information than people wanted. “What happened to you?”
    Wait a minute, he thought. If this woman wasn’t a hallucination, if he’d been pulled back into the cruiser and she was working for the people who had tried to kill him, then he couldn’t admit to anything. He couldn’t break now. There’d been accusations, coupled with torture, but he hadn’t admitted a thing, hadn’t said a word to save himself and end the torture.
    “I don’t know,” he finally managed to get out.
    Stevi sat back in her chair, staring at him incredulously. “You don’t know,” she repeated. “You don’t know who shot you?”
    Crenshaw. Larry Crenshaw shot me.
    Or at least Crenshaw was responsible for the bullet that had been fired at him. Even if the man hadn’t pulled the trigger.
    If he hadn’t jerked away, the bullet could have easily found his heart—and ended everything.
    It started coming back to him.
    He hadn’t been pushed; at the last minute, he’d jumped. Jumped because the ocean was his only chance of getting away. If he’d remained on board, he would have been killed. That was a given.
    He felt weak enough now that if someone had said he’d bled out and was dying, he would have assumed they were telling the truth.
    “And you found me?” he asked, his voice as gravelly as that of a man who’d been smoking for seventy-eight years.
    Beginning to realize that he wasn’t on the cruiser