Out of the Ashes (14 page)

“What wasn’t supposed to happen?” Olympia tore a piece of bread from the loaf they were sharing and popped it in her mouth. “What are you talking about?”

Maria paled and looked guilty at being caught talking to herself. Lowering her eyes, she began tracing the pattern in the white lace tablecloth with her finger.

“Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just an old woman rambling on about fate and destiny.” She sighed and cast a pitying look in Sera’s direction. “It just seems that after all you’ve been through, it’s time for you to have a chance at love, that’s all.”

Sera picked up her glass of wine and watched as the light from the candle on the table refracted in its burgundy depths.

“Well, Maria, I suppose love just isn’t meant for someone like me. It seems that the Fates or Destiny or whatever’s out there has screwed up once again.”

* * *

Hershel paced the floor of the dimly lit living room, glancing at the clock on the mantel as it slowly ticked away each passing minute.

Ten thirty-six.

Where on Earth could Marsha be? She’d sent a boy with a note saying she’d run into Serafina and Olympia and was going to have dinner with them. That had been at half past five. Honestly, how long did it take three women to eat?

As if in answer, he heard the front door to the building open and close. The sound of shuffling feet and muffled giggles echoed down the center hallway. He jerked open the front door to the apartment to find Serafina propping a nearly limp Marsha against the doorframe.

“My stars, what’s going on here?”

Marsha’s head popped up, bobbing precariously on her thin neck. She squinted at Hershel, finally appearing to focus her bleary eyes on his face.

“None of your business, Signore Man.”

The smell of cheap wine wafted to his nose, telling him all he needed to know. She was blind drunk.

“Maria! What has gotten into you?”

Serafina transferred Marsha’s weight into Hershel’s arms, then looked at him through her own bloodshot eyes.

“Be careful, He-
Heberto
,” she warned him in a slurred voice. “
She’sh
had a good dose of male bashing tonight. She jus’ might turn on you while you sleep.”

“Male bashing? What do you mean?”

“It’s all
Da
-
hic
-
vid’s
fault.” Marsha punched Hershel in the arm, startling him so badly he nearly dropped her. “Men are pigs.”

Her wobbly head plopped on his chest, where she closed her eyes and proceeded to snore softly.

Oh, no. What had David done now?
Hershel looked from Marsha to Serafina and back again. And what had the two women done to his poor wife?

“Sorry,
Heberto
.” Serafina turned and wove her way to the base of the stairs, bumping into the wall before she got there. “Olympia and I corrupted her tonight. Be prepared. She’s probably going to wake up mad as hell at you in the morning, but won’t remember why.”

She started up the steps, stumbling on the second one. Gripping the rail tighter, she concentrated on taking the next step carefully, as if her life depended on it.

“Why would she be mad at me?”

Serafina snorted. “Because you’re a man.”

Hershel watched her stagger up the rest of the stairs and listened as she tumbled into her apartment and slammed the door.

Closing his own door, he shifted Marsha’s wilted form in his arms. As tiny as she was, her dead weight felt like a wet sack of cement.

He looked down at her sleeping face, with her mouth sagging open and tiny snores growling from the back of her throat. Why, he hadn’t seen Marsha this
shnockered
in over two thousand years.

“Come, dear. Let’s get you to bed.”

As he half-dragged his wife to their bedroom, Hershel was already dreading tomorrow. It wasn’t going to be pretty.

The
chunk-
thunk
, chunk-
thunk
of David’s shoveling was giving Sera a pounding headache. Of course, the vat of wine she had drunk the night before wasn’t helping matters any.

The talk—or what she remembered of it—with Olympia and Maria had eased some of her wounded feelings. But not all of them. The sting of his rejection still hurt.

When she thought back on it, though, she couldn’t really blame him for what he’d done. After all, she’d been crying and hanging all over him like a clinging vine. What red-blooded male wouldn’t take advantage of the situation? She just wished the red-blooded male in question hadn’t already been attached to someone else at the time.

At least she had to give David credit for stopping things before they went too far. If it had been left to her, who knows what might have happened. Sex in the excavation pit? At the time, the prospect had seemed appealing, but now the thought made her ill.

Men. She should have known better. Hadn’t she learned anything from her past mistakes?

“So this is where they stuck you.”

Speaking of past mistakes. Sera groaned inwardly and looked up into the face of Giovanni Ragusa. Her day just wasn’t going to get any better, was it?

“I suppose it was too much to hope you’d never venture over into this area of the ruins.”

Giovanni smiled, but the humor never quite reached his piercing dark eyes. He glanced around the site, and she could tell from the way he pursed his lips that he was mentally criticizing how she’d chosen to set it up. His scrutiny passed briefly over the area where David was working and shot back again. Following the direction of his gaze, she turned to see David staring back at the two of them. Both men straightened their spines and stood taller as they appeared to size up each other.

How typically male
, she thought.

“You can stop snooping, Giovanni,” Sera said, bringing his attention back to her. “We haven’t gone deep enough yet to find any artifacts for you to steal.”

He actually had the audacity to look offended.

“I don’t steal artifacts.”

“Steal the credit, then.” Damn, but his claiming the silver cup still rankled her.

“Poor, poor Serafina. Still touchy over that little misunderstanding, are we? I would have thought you would be over that by now.” He shook his head as if he were talking to a disgruntled child. “Besides, look at what you have now. Just what you’ve always wanted—your own dig site.”

She rose to her feet and climbed out of the hole so he wouldn’t be looking down on her quite as much.

“That’s right, and anything found here will be credited to me. No more
misunderstandings
.”

Standing over six feet tall, he still laughed down at her.

“Yes, but unfortunately this is a poor section of the town. Nothing but small merchants’ shops and vendors’ stalls. No rich villas or temples. I doubt you will find anything of importance here.”

“Then I guess that means you’ll be leaving?”

Giovanni might have taken the hint had David not chosen that moment to head to the trucks with another load of debris. He rolled the dirt-filled wheelbarrow up to them, nearly running over Giovanni’s right foot.

“Oh, sorry about that,” he said to Giovanni, but she could tell by the mock-innocent look on his face and the flip tone of his voice that he really didn’t mean it. She had to bite her lip to keep from laughing as Giovanni jumped out of the way at the last minute.

The two men glared at each other, and she could practically smell the testosterone permeating the air.

Ridiculous. Neither of them gave a fig about her, but being the pig-headed men that they were, neither was willing to back down.

Glancing back and forth between them, she was struck by the differences between the two men. Both had black hair, but where Giovanni’s was shiny and smooth, David’s was soft and wavy. Giovanni had high cheekbones and a strong, prominent jaw line, while David had full lips and a dimple in the middle of his chin.

Both were tall, dark, and handsome—trouble times two and more than she could deal with on top of her morning-after hangover.

With a heavy sigh, she did the inevitable and introduced them.

“Giovanni Ragusa, this is David Corbelli, my assistant. Giovanni is one of the senior archeologists at the ruins.”

David wiped his hand on his sweaty shirtfront before offering it to Giovanni.

“I know. I’ve seen him around.”

Giovanni’s lip curled slightly as he looked at David’s offered hand. Finally, he took it, the muscles of his forearm bunching as he shook it with undue effort. David didn’t even flinch, returning the shake with a grip that turned his knuckles white.

Sera couldn’t control the roll of her eyes. If she didn’t separate them soon, they’d probably start arm wrestling in front of her to prove who was more manly.

“If you don’t mind, Giovanni, we have a lot of work to do.”

“Yes, I can see that.”

He finally released David’s hand, staring long and hard at him before turning his attention back to Sera.

Sera should have known by the look in Giovanni’s eyes that he was going to do something. She should have known from past experience that he would not leave without getting the upper hand on her—or David.

He reached out and, with the tender touch of a lover, ran the back of his fingers down her cheek.

“
Fino
a
più
successivamente
allora
,
il
mio
amore
.” Until later then, my love.

He did it so fast, she didn’t have time to react. She didn’t even draw a breath until after he started walking away.

“
Il
mio
amore?
” David asked, his brows raised high and an incredulous look on his face.

“Not hardly.” Not anymore. She squeezed her eyes shut, willing the sensation of Giovanni’s touch to go away.

When she finally opened her eyes, she found David watching her. He was furious, but at whom?

“Why do you put up with that if he’s not your boyfriend?”

Why, indeed? The initial shock gave way to anger. Anger at Giovanni for attempting to stake a claim on her in front of David. Anger at herself, because she hadn’t seen it coming and stopped him. And anger at life, because she could do nothing about it.

“He has seniority over me, and, like it or not, the archeological world is a male-dominated profession, and a woman who wants to do more than dabble is barely tolerated in it. He could have me fired if I don’t follow the rules, and I don’t know what I would do if I couldn’t work at the ruins.”

David turned his attention back to Giovanni’s retreating figure as he strutted down the road.

“But is it worth putting up with that?”

Sera tried to swallow the sour taste in her mouth.

“Unfortunately, I don’t have a choice.”

* * *

Hershel crept quietly into the apartment. Early that morning, Marsha had done little more than growl at him when he’d turned on the light to get dressed. He’d beat a hasty exit, leaving her still in her bed. Now, with the house silent and no lights on, he wondered if she’d even gotten out of bed all day.

“Hershel, is that you?” The voice from the living room startled him as he walked past the darkened doorway.

“Yes, dear. It’s me.” All the shades had been drawn, and he made his way to his favorite chair from memory. “Are you still among the living?”

“Unfortunately,” she groaned. After a long pause, she spoke again. “Did you know David has a girlfriend?”

Hershel turned his head, pinpointing Marsha’s voice in the vicinity of the couch.

“You mean Serafina?”

“No, not Serafina. There’s someone else.”

“Someone else? Since when?” As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could tell she was lying down, but he couldn’t figure out which end was her feet and which was her head.

“I don’t know. He just told Serafina about her yesterday.”

Yes, he had definitely been talking to her feet. He turned his head slightly so he could speak to where her head should be.

“That can’t be. Not after how I saw them together on Friday.”

“Well, it is. And we need to find out who she is so we can put a stop to this nonsense. The last thing we need is another woman getting in the middle of things.”

Hershel scratched at his forehead. Something just didn’t seem right.

“I don’t understand it. There was nothing in his contract mentioning another woman. Where did she come from?”

“Who knows?” Marsha grumbled. “With our luck, it was probably in the fine print, and neither of us had our glasses on to read it properly.”

“It doesn’t make sense.” He slumped in his chair, trying to make rhyme or reason of this latest turn of events. “When I talked to David today, he didn’t say a thing about having a girlfriend.”

“Well, of course he didn’t. Why would he mention it to you in passing, when it took him this long to tell Serafina, and he sees her every day?”

“We weren’t just chit-chatting.” How dare she belittle his efforts. After all, he was the one slaving away at the ruins, doing all the dirty work and making sure David and Serafina bonded, while she stayed at home in ease and comfort. “As a matter of fact, I had to spend a good deal of time trying to talk him out of leaving.”

“He was going to leave?” Marsha’s dark form struggled to a sitting position. “As in ‘quit the job at the site and go away?’ He was going to leave our Serafina?”

“That’s right. He never came right out and said why he wanted to leave, but you and I both know it’s because he found out she’s American. I imagine it’s got him running scared.” Hershel straightened a bit in his easy chair, feeling more important by the moment. “In the end, I convinced him to stay.”

“That’s good.” A heavy sigh came from the shadow on the couch. “Hopefully, he won’t change his mind before we have a chance to get this other woman out of the picture.”

He hoped so, too. Sitting in the dark silence, Hershel tried to put his finger on what had gone wrong. Another woman? After the lip-lock he’d seen the two of them sharing under the tent, that puzzle piece just didn’t fit.

* * *

Rain fell in large droplets, splattering mud where it plopped on the water-soaked ground. The rain had been coming down off and on for days, turning the hard, sun-baked earth to brown sludge. Tiny rivers ran down the middle of the stone streets, finding the path of least resistance in the ancient wheel ruts carved by centuries of wagon traffic. It was a miserable time to be working at the ruins, but then, miserable weather suited Sera’s mood just fine.

David had barely spoken to her since the infamous kiss. An unspoken understanding seemed to hang between them that they would stay on professional terms and nothing more from now on. That would have suited her fine if their relationship had never progressed beyond that in the first place.

But it had.

She had come to see David as not just a laborer, but as a friend. She missed the way he constantly teased her, always trying to make her open up or to laugh in the moment.

She missed the way he always seemed eager to learn about the history of Pompeii and the methods of excavating the site, how he seemed genuinely interested in her work.

She missed the way he called her Sera, his nickname for her ever since they met. She’d hated it then because it sounded too American, and anything American reminded her too much of her father. But like it or not, from then on, she had been Sera to him.

She shook her head at her thoughts as she dug out another chunk of wet earth with her trowel. Funny how it hadn’t taken long for her to start referring to herself as Sera, too. And even funnier still, American-sounding though it was, she really didn’t mind anymore.

American. She still wasn’t convinced that her being half American didn’t have something to do with his change in attitude toward her. She’d had enough experience with others treating her differently once they found out about her tainted blood.

She sighed, feeling the weight of regret deep in her chest. If only she hadn’t told him about her father. If only she hadn’t broken down and sobbed out her whole sad story to him. If only she hadn’t thrown herself in his arms and kissed him. If only there weren’t someone else in his life. If only…

Her legs throbbed from kneeling in the wet pit, and her back ached from staying hunched over in the damp air all day. The tent over her head offered some protection, but a fine mist kept seeping its way in under her rain slicker to moisten her clothes underneath.

She looked up as David walked by with his wheelbarrow filled with rocks and wet earth. Day after day, he worked alongside her in the rain and the mud, never complaining. Of course, he’d actually have to speak more than two words to her in order to complain.

Deciding to stop for the day, she packed up her supplies, covered the screening table with a tarp, and followed him down the road. She stayed a short distance behind, giving him the space he obviously wanted, and watched as his broad shoulders bore his heavy burden down the rutted street.