Read Online Roman Crazy by Alice Clayton, Nina Bocci - Free Book Online

mattress, praying for the bells to stop. They didn’t. Admittedly, they sounded lovely. I just wish they weren’t so damn loud.
    Ding, dong, ding. I flung the pillow at the window and nearly cried when it hit the wooden slatted shades, opening them up. Sunlight poured into the room, warming it in its beautiful Italian glow.
    â€œDamn it,” I muttered to myself, hiding my head under the blankets. Checking my watch, I calculated the time difference between Rome and Boston. A pang struck deep in my belly at the thought that Daniel would be finishing up his Sunday golf game and heading home, where we would have carried on with our routine pleasantries.
    Yet here I was lying in a bed that wasn’t mine, in a city that I was a stranger in when my life as I knew it was carrying on without me in Boston. I felt a subtle itch to call Daniel. To ask him when he’d be home so that I made sure everything was just so. Straightening artwork that I didn’t paint and setting the dining room table with china that wasn’t mine—these were all parts of a whole.
    Or, a hole as it were, because there was a gaping one in our marriage and it took me going to another country to accept just how far apart we had grown.
    Daisy knocked and poked her arm through the open door and jiggled a bag filled with something that smelled outrageously good. And fattening. Mmm, trans fat and cholesterol.
    I burrowed further into the blankets.
    â€œNo more snoring, cupcake. Time to get up and kick the rest of the jet lag in the ass. Oh, and finish filling in the blanks, please,” she said, laughing and sitting on the edge of the bed. “I’d prefer not to pry it out of you.” She rolled her neck and grimaced. “I have a crick in my neck from sleeping in that chair all night.”
    â€œI did cover you with a blanket,” I pointed out, reaching for the bag of pastries.
    â€œYou did; it’s nice to have someone tucking me in for a change. I’ve been swamped with this job, not sleeping too much. Still, I know better than to sleep in that damn chair; I shouldn’t have gotten comfortable. Henry Cavill could’ve been doing a striptease for me and I’d still probably have fallen asleep.”
    â€œOh please, there’s no way in hell you would have slept through that.”
    â€œWell, that’s true,” she replied with a faraway look in her eye. No doubt thinking of a dancing Henry.
    â€œWhat’s this job, anyway?” I asked, sitting up and pulling a pillow onto my lap. I smoothed my blond hair back, feeling how knotted up the back had gotten while I slept. Plucking a tie from the side table, I pulled it up, wrapping it into a loose bun.
    Sitting on the bed and chatting felt like we were back in college. Daisy looked the same, save for the hair. She was still tall and lean, probably from all the walking she did here, and her green eyes sparkled when she talked about work.
    â€œIt’s this old bank we’ve been working on for months. It’s almost done, but we hit a snag. One of the volunteers found outshe was pregnant and she can’t be in the studio or around the chemicals anymore. Even though we’re environmentally friendly, it’s a lot of funk when your senses are on overdrive.”
    â€œThat’s too bad. Is that going to mess up the schedule?”
    She sighed, flipping through messages on her phone. “Yeah, it’s not great. The volunteers, well you know, they make or break a job sometimes. Especially with tight funding. We moved someone else down there to pick up some of the slack, but now we’re short someone to replaster some of the Romanesque vases that we found.”
    â€œI like plaster.”
    â€œYou like plaster?” she repeated, confused.
    I nearly bit my lip to take back what I’d said, but then I thought about it. The instinct was right, I had the training, why couldn’t I help out? “I’ve got