"Well, they tried to park it on my friend here. I'm just glad they didn't kill him."
"I'm sure he will be too, when he wakes up."
No doubt. Sunshine leaned her cheek against the stranger's head and listened to his slow, deep breaths.
What was it about him that she found so irresistible?
"Man," Wayne said after a brief silence. "Your father is going to be pissed about this. He'll have my balls for dinner when he finds out I took an unknown guy up to your place."
"Then don't tell him."
Wayne gave her a mean and nasty glare. "I cannot not tell him. If something happened to you, it would be my fault."
She sighed irritably as she traced the sharp line of the stranger's arched brows. Why did he seem so familiar to her? She'd never seen him before and yet she had a strange sense of deja vu. As if she knew him somehow.
Weird. Very, very weird.
But then she was used to weirdness. Her mother had written the book on the subject, and Sunshine had redefined it.
"I'm a big girl, Wayne, I can take care of myself."
"Yeah and I lived for twelve years with a bunch of big hairy men who made meals off little girls like you who thought they could take care of themselves."
"Fine," she said. "We'll put him in my bed and I'll sleep at my parents'. Then in the morning, I'll check on him with my mother or one of my brothers."
"What if he wakes up before you get home and steals you blind?"
"Steals what?" she asked. "My clothes won't fit him and I have nothing of any value. Not unless he likes my Peter, Paul and Mary collection anyway."
Wayne rolled his eyes. "All right, but you better swear to me you won't give him a chance to hurt you."
"I promise."
Wayne looked less than pleased, but he remained technically quiet as he drove them toward her loft on Canal Street. However, he cursed underneath his breath the entire way.
Luckily Sunshine was used to ignoring men who did that around her.
Once they reached her loft, which was located directly over her father's bar, it took them a good fifteen minutes to get the stranger out of the truck and inside her home.
Sunshine led Wayne through her loft to the area where she'd strung tie-dyed pink cotton fabric along a wire to seal her bedroom area off from the rest of the large room.
Carefully, they placed her unknown guest on her bed.
"Well, let's go," Wayne said, taking her by the arm.
Sunshine gently shrugged his touch away. "We can't leave him like that."
"Why not?"
"He's covered in blood."
Wayne's face showed his exasperation. It was a look everyone had around her sooner or later-okay, it was most often sooner. "Go sit on the couch and let me undress him."
"Sunshine..."
"Wayne, I'm twenty-nine years old, a divorced artist who took nude drawing in college, and I was raised with two older brothers. I know what men look like naked. Okay?"
Growling low in his throat, he stepped out of her bedroom and went to sit on her sofa.