Page 2 of Chasing Caine

A knock came at the open door.

Dr. Bianca Capasso stood there, fists shoved deep into the pockets of her lab coat. She was in her mid-thirties, average height and build, with shoulder-length light brown hair. Her glasses dangled on a beaded chain over her Park employee lanyard. “Ciao, Dr. Ferraro. Any word on the missing part?”

Her eyes flicked from Mario to me, to the desk and back up again. It would be a long four months working with her if she couldn’t get her nerves under control.

I stood and slipped my phone into my pocket. “The delivery company is looking. If they can’t find it within the next week, they’ll deliver one from Delaware.”

“You had an inventory list, didn’t you?” she asked. “Who signed for the rest of it?”

“Océane.” I shrugged.

Bianca frowned at the Parisian microbiologist’s name—she shouldn’t have been signing for deliveries. Unlike Mario and Bianca, who worked at the Pompeii Archaeological Park full-time, Océane was a PhD student, only joining us for the duration of my project. But she was cocky, and it hadn’t surprised me.

“Is there any work we can do while we wait?” she asked, still hovering in the doorway.

“I want to say yes, but if the lens is more than a couple of weeks late, we’ll end up stopping again. Perhaps we tell everyone they have a week off, then we can regroup?”

She nodded, muttering, “So strange.”

“Strange?” Mario asked.

Bianca’s lips tightened and she focused on Mario. “Did you hear about the pigment pots?”

The Park was the most-visited archaeological site in the world. Within its borders, it held an immense treasure of historic significance, including dozens of tiny terracotta pots filled with pigments of various colors. From the smallest, the size of an olive, up to the larger ones more akin to lemons, they normally sat nestled in foam-lined drawers in storage at the laboratory.

Mario and I looked at each other and shook our heads.

“Three of them have gone missing.” She jostled her fingers around in her big pockets, as though she fiddled with something. Always anxious, this one. “First the lens for your laser, now these pots. Perhaps a curse has finally arrived for us.”

Mario laughed. “Curses only strike the robbers who steal antiquities, not those of us who preserve and study them, Bianca. Everyone knows that.”

Still, it was a strange coincidence.

A smile tugged at my lips. What would Samantha do if she were here? The night of the gala, she exposed a stolen painting at the charity auction. She was focused. Determined. Utterly brilliant. If she were here, she’d leap into action and begin an investigation. Perhaps that’s what I should do.

Sì, that would be something I could text her about. Surely she wouldn’t ignore me with information like that. What would I send her? In my head, I could imagine my fingers on my keyboard,Ciao, bella. You won’t believe what happened here. I tracked down—

“Dr. Ferraro?”

I snapped my eyes up to Bianca, whose brows furrowed. I’d missed something. “Scusi. I was thinking about the lens and other options.”

Mario nudged me. He likely guessed I was covering.

“I was saying… there’s a mosaic in one of the other rooms in the Casa di Marte. It needs to be extracted and brought into the lab for some repairs. Did you… want to help me with that?”

I’d almost booked a flight to Michigan three times already since my arrival. Torn up my father’s contract with the Park and just left. But my family name came with obligations. A broken heart didn’t absolve me of my duty.

Working on the mosaic with Bianca would be the type of distraction I should jump at. But it was not what I wanted: To finish this project in Napoli and get back home. It was the only way I could follow through on my promise to Samantha that I would spend all the time in the world regaining her trust.

“Grazie, Bianca. It’s a good offer, but I think I’ll focus on tweaking the work schedule. If I can figure out how to shave a week or two off, we can finish when we were originally supposed to.”

The only other choice was to track down the missing lens or find another one available somewhere, which was proving more difficult than expected. Letting fate derail this project was not an option.

Because I had to return to the States and win my woman back.

Chapter 2

Samantha

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