This was New Orleans where most anything could happen to a person while conscious.
Unconscious...
Well, there was no telling what the unsavory ones might do to him, so leaving him alone was not an option.
Just as her panic was getting the better of her, she heard someone call her name.
She looked around until she saw Wayne Santana's beat-up blue Dodge Ram pulling up to the curb. At thirty-three, Wayne had a ruggedly handsome face that looked a lot older. His black hair was laced liberally with gray.
She breathed a sigh of relief at seeing him there.
He rolled his window the rest of the way down and leaned out. "Hey, Sunshine, what's going on?"
"Wayne, could you help me get this guy into your truck?"
He looked really skeptical about that. "Is he drunk?"
"No, he's hurt."
"Then you should call an ambulance."
"I can't." She gave him a pleading look. "Please, Wayne? I need to get him back to my place."
"Is he a friend of yours?" he asked even more skeptically.
"Well, no. We just kind of collided out here."
"Then leave him. The last thing you need is to get involved with another biker. It's none of our business what happens to him."
"Wayne!"
"He could be a criminal, Sunshine."
"How could you say such a thing?"
Wayne had been convicted of involuntary manslaughter seventeen years ago. After he'd served his time, he'd spent several months trying to find a job. With no money, no place to live, and no one willing to hire an ex-con to do anything, he was on the brink of committing another crime to return to jail when he'd applied for a job at her father's club.
Against her father's protests, Sunshine had hired him.
Five years later, Wayne had never missed a day of work or been late. He was her father's best employee.
"Please, Wayne?" she asked, giving him the puppy-dog look that never failed to bend the men in her life to her will.
As he left the truck to help her, Wayne made a series of irritated noises. "One day, that big heart of yours is going to get you into trouble. Do you know anything about this man?"
"No." All she knew was that he had saved her life when no one else would have bothered. Surely such a man wouldn't hurt her.
She and Wayne struggled to get the unknown man upright, but it wasn't easy.
"Jeez," Wayne muttered as they staggered with him between them. "He's huge and he weighs a friggin' ton."
Sunshine concurred. The man was at least six feet five inches of lean, solid muscle. Even with the thick leather motorcycle jacket concealing his upper torso, there was no doubt just how well toned and muscular he was.
She'd never felt such a hard, steely body in her life.
After some doing, they finally got him into the truck.
As they headed toward her father's club, Sunshine held the stranger's head on her shoulder and brushed his wavy blond hair back from the chiseled features of his face.
There was a wild, untamed look about him that reminded her of some ancient warrior. His golden hair brushed against his shoulders in a loose style that said he was attentive to his appearance, but not obsessive about it.
Dark brown eyebrows arched over his closed eyes. His face was ruggedly scrumptious with a full day's growth of beard. Even unconscious, he was compelling and drop-dead gorgeous, and his nearness stirred something needful deep inside her.
But what she liked most about this stranger was the warm masculine and leather scent of him. It made her want to nuzzle his neck and inhale the heady mixture until she was drunk with it.
"So," Wayne said as he drove. "What happened to him? Do you know?"
"He got hit by a Mardi Gras float."
Even in the dim light of the truck's cab, she could tell Wayne was giving her the are-you-nuts? stare. "There's no parade tonight. Where did it come from?"
"I don't know. I guess he must have ticked off the gods or something."
"Huh?"
She brushed her hand through the man's tousled blond hair and toyed with the two thin braids that hung from his left temple as she answered Wayne's question. "It was a big Bacchus float. I was just thinking this poor guy must have offended our patron god of excess to have been run over by him."
Wayne muttered under his breath. "Must be another frat-boy prank. Seems like every year one of them is stealing a float and taking a joy ride in it. I wonder where they'll leave it parked this time?"
"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.