Page 3 of The Second Chance in the Mediterranean
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I should have expected it,but a few minutes after Dom left, while I stood in the room trying to talk myself out of a panic, there was a heavy, insistent knock on my door. It flew open, and Seb stormed into my room.
“What the hell was that, Marce? ‘Nice to meet you’?”
I rounded on him and poked him in the chest with my finger. “‘What the hell was that?’? What the hell areyoudoing here?”
Seb stared at me. “What do you mean, what am I doing here? I sent you the information about the job; you wouldn’t have applied if I hadn’t connected you with Dom!” His nostrils flared. “I recommended you for the job and this is how you treat me?”
“I didn’t know you would be working here!” I roared.
“I told you, we were looking for a chef on my boat.”
“No.” I wagged my finger at him. “No.” I grabbed my phone off the desk and quickly pulled up the last email that Seb had sent to me. “You said, and I quote: ‘Marce, I hear you are looking for a job.Themisis hiring a chef. You might remember Captain Dom, who came toOdysseyfor a night.’” I held my phone up to his face. “Nothingabout you working here.”
Seb’s eyes started to show a hint of doubt. “I thought you knew I worked here.”
“How would I know that? I’ve been floating around on a little sailboat in the middle of the South Pacific for a few months. I didn’t have Wi-Fi most of the time!”
“Okay, okay, but seriously, it didn’t come up in the interview? Dom didn’t check to make sure it was okay with you?”
“Noooo!” I wailed. “I wouldn’t have taken the job if I’d known you worked here. I thought it was weird enough that you’d recommended me.”
His eyebrows came together in hurt. “You wouldn’t have taken the job?”
I blew out a breath, frustrated. “Well, this isn’t very smart, is it? We’re already fighting and we have to work together. This is my dream job.Porca puttana,” I cursed. “I knew it was too good to be true.”
Massaging my temples, I tried to figure out some options, but something tickled my mind. “Wait, did Dom ask you if it was okay?”
Seb shifted his eyes away from me. “Well, yeah. I figured I’d leave it up to you if you wanted to take the job or not.”
“What...why . . .” I didn’t even know where to start.
Hurt and then anger flashed in Seb’s gaze. “Look, you up and leftOdysseythe morning after we slept together and justsailed off.” He gestured out to a hypothetical horizon. “I thought you’d moved on with your buddy.”
I closed my eyes and tried to articulate my argument. “First of all, I hadn’t ‘moved on—’”
Seb cut me off, leaning into my space and frowning. “Oh really? I saw you sailing away with those guys. You looked awfully cozy to me.”
“Excuse me! There was no ‘cozy.’”
“He had his arm around you!”
“Okay, I don’t know which one you’re talking about”—he scoffed in disbelief—“but I wasn’t with either of them. Jonas and Eivind are like younger brothers to me. I was upset to be leaving!”
“Well, maybe you should have thought about that before you left.” And with that parting shot, Seb stomped out of my cabin.
I sunk onto the edge of my bed. Sure, I had been forced to leaveOdysseyand hadn’t even gotten to say goodbye to him. But Seb had kept his job, and how dare he treat me like it was my fault.
Three
After Seb stormed out,I spent a few minutes poking around and half-heartedly unpacking. As the head chef, I had my own cabin. Dom’s was probably a mirror image of mine. The two rooms were bigger than most crew cabins were, a privilege of our positions. That being said, my cabin was still tiny, especially when I thought of my childhood bedroom back in my parents’ almond orchard in Italy.
There was a double bed set into an alcove, a big wardrobe, and a small desk. The head was through a doorway, with just enough room to stand in front of the sink in the corner, next to the toilet, and one step away from the shower.
Small, but all mine. I grinned, thinking back toEik,where I had shared a bunk bed with Elayna and a bathroom with three people. I pulled out my phone, wanting to send a message to the crew ofEik.They knew about Seb, and I desperately needed someone to talk to, someone to ask for advice. ButEikwas in French Polynesia, with limited internet connection. Or were they on their way to the Cook Islands already? I didn’t know. I dejectedly tossed my phone onto my bed. I was on my own.
I washed off the stink of traveling in the shower and changed into my uniform, chef’s pants and a crew T-shirt from the neat stack on a shelf in the wardrobe. It should have been easy to crash, but the excitement of arriving and the emotions of seeing Seb had washed away my exhaustion, and I had to force myself to lie down and try to sleep.
