Page 53 of The Second Chance in the Mediterranean
“It’s not funny.” I poked his side, even though I was laughing too. “We almost got caught.”
Seb pulled me under his arm. “Want to head back?”
“Sounds good. I’ve done enough damage for one day,” I said, holding up my bag. “Besides, I think it might be best if we can disappear for a few hours where no one will catch us.”
Twenty-Five
We lay on the bed,breathing hard and letting the sweat cool off our skin. Seb’s head was down by my hip, his breath blowing hot air over my flesh. His legs were crammed into the space by my shoulder on the inside of the bed, knees bent and legs akimbo. I slid an arm around one of his legs and let my fingers trail over his oblique muscles.
Seb propped his head up to look at me and grinned. “You look pretty fucking sexy all blissed out.”
“Cocky,” I teased, tugging at his leg hair. He grunted and rolled his upper body over me, pinning my arm between us and resting his head on my thigh. I sighed and closed my eyes, enjoying the way he stroked a light hand up my stomach.
Seb’s head came off my thigh. “Who are those people?”
I opened my eyes and looked up, following his gaze to the framed photograph on the desk. “Those are my great-grandparents.”
“Wow,” he remarked. “They look fancy.”
“They were fancy.” I rested my head back down on the pillow, but Seb shifted and moved above me. He swung a leg over my head and straddled me backward. “What are you doing?” I said, mystified.
“Getting the photo.”
“That view was...”
He looked over his shoulder and winked before throwing his other leg around and sliding off my bed. “You can have any view you want, flaquita.”
With Seb’s long arms, he didn’t even have to take a step before picking up the frame. He climbed back on the mattress with me, sitting at the head of the bed. “Tell me about this.”
“It’s just a picture of my great-grandparents.”
Seb looked up, serious, and nudged me. “Come on, Marce. I know what a pain it is to have personal things to truck around when we have our jobs. And yet you have this, so tell me about it.”
I struggled up and sat next to Seb. “This is my great-grandpa Alfieri Giordano, and my great-grandma Tonia. And in this photo, they’re on theMonte Rosa,a cruise ship, in 1931.”
“Jesús.”Seb squinted at the photo and looked closer. “I don’t have any photographs of my great-grandparents. And this is...not just an old photo, but wow. A cruise ship in the 1930s...”
“Yeah, it’s pretty neat.”
“I wonder where they were going,” Seb said.
“Norway.”
He gaped at me. “How do you know that?”
“Nonna Tonia wrote a diary about the trip, and there was a whole photo album. I found it all up in our old, musty attic when I was a kid.”
“That must have been amazing to read.”
I shrugged. “It was a little tough to read, actually. I was at this age where I was starting to rebel against my parents, and reading the journal...”
Seb wrapped his arm around me, waiting patiently for me to go on.
“It was really obvious to me, even at my age, that my great-grandparents had had a lot of money. And money was something that was argued about constantly in my home growing up. We never had enough. And I pieced things together while I was a teenager that my dad had made some bad investments, sunk some money into the orchard my parents have, and the way the industry was turning... Anyway, my mom resented my dad a lot.”
“Are they still together?”
“Yeah, amazingly enough. Visiting them is a major pain. It’s all very loud, Italian, yelling, and not in the good way.”
