Read Online Safe Harbor by Marie Ferrarella - Free Book Online Page A

time around she cut her prep time by half.
    When Stevi came out of the bathroom, she was disappointed to find that her mystery man hadn’t come to.
    She stood over him for several minutes, debating what to do next. She didn’t want to leave him like this and she definitely didn’t want to take a chance on making his condition worse by just assuming that he was all right when he could very well not be.
    If he was all right, wouldn’t he have woken up by now?
    Very gingerly, she shook his right arm. When there was no response, she did it again, a little more forcefully this time.
    By the fourth attempt to wake him, she was shaking the stranger by his shoulders.
    Even though she was trying to wake him up, when his eyes suddenly opened at the same time that he grabbed her by the wrist she was not prepared. The quick movement brought a gasp from her and a groan from him. It didn’t take an Einstein to figure out that the searing pain had caught him by surprise.
    “Morning,” Stevi said with forced cheerfulness.
    “You.” With a sigh, he released her wrist and fell back against his pillows. “So I didn’t dream you. You’re real.”
    “Absolutely,” she assured him.
    He looked around the room, vaguely remembering it from what he’d thought was his dream but obviously wasn’t. What he wasn’t clear about was exactly where he had landed. “And this is—”
    “Still my bedroom in the inn,” she said. “Before we go any further and you possibly pass out on me again, I need a name.”
    He looked blankly at her. “A name,” he repeated.
    “Yes.”
    His eyebrows drew together as a puzzled expression descended over his face. “You don’t have a name?”
    This was going to be harder than she’d thought. “ I have a name. You don’t have a name. At least, not one that you’ve given me.”
    He was still staring at her as if she was speaking some foreign language. Had the bullet wound scrambled his brain, as well? Loss of blood could do a lot of things.
    Gamely, she forged ahead anyway. “I’ll start you off. My name is Stephanie Roman. Everyone calls me Stevi.”
    He frowned. “That’s a man’s name.”
    “That’s a subject for a different time,” she told him rather than launching into an explanation as to why she and her sisters all had boy’s nicknames. “Your turn. What’s your name?”
    He didn’t answer her immediately. Instead, he took in a long breath as he looked around his surroundings again. The room had a great deal of sunshine coming in through filmy white curtains. The sunlight made the room look bigger somehow, despite the clutter. There were clothes waiting to be hung up, books waiting to be put back on the shelves lining part of one wall and a desk that had at least two layers of things piled on it.
    This was not a room that belonged to a person with control issues. He turned back to look at her. “Is this your bed?”
    She had thought that was self-evident. Obviously not. “Yes, but—”
    “Where did you sleep?” he asked, feeling guilty for having displaced her.
    “On the floor, next to the bed.” She waved at the bunched-up comforters at her feet. “Stop changing the subject. Why won’t you tell me your—”
    “Ryan.” The name emerged before she finished her question.
    Ryan. Nice, she thought, nodding. “Okay, Ryan, next—”
    “Mike.” His head was muddled, he realized. He was doing this out of order.
    She squinted, as if that would somehow help her absorb this.
    “Which is it?” she asked. “Ryan or Mike?”
    He closed his eyes for a minute. The room was beginning to spin and the sunlight that was streaming into it was hard on his eyes.
    “Both. Mike Ryan,” he told her. “My name is Mike Ryan.”
    That sounded almost fake, she thought. Until it was proven otherwise, she supposed she’d have to take him at his word.
    “Okay, that wasn’t so hard, was it?” she asked. Actually, it was from her point of view, but she didn’t want to approach this with a