Page 13 of The Sun & Her Burn

His hand had dropped to my neck, cupping the side of my throat warmly in his big palm. My pulse was probably beating a tattoo against his skin, but I didn’t let myself be embarrassed by it.

I tipped my head back to look up into those sunlit-gold eyes and smiled more genuinely than I had in months.

“I’d like that.”

“Bene,” he said with a satisfied grin that edged on smug. He let his hand fall away and started walking again. “Tomorrow, you will show me where you like to surf.”

“Oh, will I?” I raised a brow at him. “I’m not sure you could keep up.”

He laughed again, and it felt like such a gift to have him here in Los Angeles with me that if I were a different kind of girl, I could have cried.

Instead, I stuck out my tongue at him and smeared the side of my melting cone against the arm of his white dress shirt as I sprinted past him.

“Prove you can keep up!” I hollered.

“You brat,” he called out from behind me.

I laughed as I surged through the edge of the ocean away from him, feeling lighter than I had in years.

4

SEBASTIAN

Ididn’t sleep that night.

The moon, almost as bright as the pale morning sun and full in the sky, was visible outside my hotel window and only fueled the sense of nostalgia that kept me awake. Between thoughts of Adam and his current plight, running into Savannah with Tate and Jace, and finding Linnea in the city of Los Angeles, my brain was too mired in thought to find rest.

Instead, for the first time in much too long, I wrote.

The story came to me the way remnants of a dream did, in snapshots of scenes and blurry colors smeared behind my closed lids.

But it was so vivid, so tangible I could taste the Cornish Sea in my mouth as my fingers flew over the keys, could feel the hot stage lights on my face.

The title came to me before anything else.

The Dream, I typed out with one finger while sipping grappa,and The Dreamer.

When five o’clock rolled around and it was time for me to get in my car to pick up Linnea from her house for our morning surf,my fingers were cramping, and my eyes were gritty with the sand of exhaustion.

But I had written the rough outline and twenty pages of a new screenplay.

Much likeBlood Oath, it was semi-autobiographical, with the truth of my life hidden beneath the layers of a story set in the early 1900s in London and Cornwall. It revolved around Emerson Bainbridge, a struggling artist who began to dream vividly about a woman who inspired him to create masterpieces that launched his career. His obsession with the ideal of her was already unhealthy, but when he saw a woman who looked exactly like his dream girl bathing in the Cornish Sea while on vacation with his wife and family, his love turned to a kind of madness.

Freud, I was sure, would have had a field day with the parallels, but I didn’t care.

I was too awed and bewildered that I had felt so compelled to get a story down on the page again. That I could see it so clearly in my mind’s eye, as clearly as Emerson Bainbridge saw his muse in his dreams.

I called Andrea Felice as I stumbled around the hotel room changing into my swim trunks and grabbing my wetsuit.

“Sebastian, ciao, amico mio,” he answered warmly. “It is early in America, no? Why are you calling me like this? Not that I am not happy to hear from you always.”

I smiled, as I always did when I was talking to Andrea. He was one of the only people in my life who knew the whole of my history, every last sordid detail. Yet he never treated me any differently for knowing about Seamus and his mafia debts, or what happened that year in London between Adam, Savannah, and me.

Andrea was my family as much as Mama, Elena, Giselle, and Cosima.

“I’ve written something,” I admitted, grabbing the keys to the Lamborghini Urus SUV I’d rented for my stay.

Once a driver, always a car lover.