Page 144 of The Sun & Her Burn

“I’m saying you are a part of this. Of me,” he clarified. “Ask me how often I dreamed of you.”

“How often?”

“Every day. It didn’t stop when I opened my eyes in the morning, either. I saw you everywhere I went. I even bought this house because I imagined you here,” he murmured. “I could see you as clear as day in the kitchen, out by the pool in those tight black shorts you like to wear, here in my bed with the moonlight on your skin.”

I watched him swallow hard and mimicked the gesture. He was saying so many things I had waited for years to hear him say, so why was my heart racing as if I was being chased?

Had some part of me been infected with his pessimism? Because I couldn’t stop thinking about how it had all ended so horribly for us before.

“I want to be with you both,” Adam continued, holding my gaze so intractably I could not even find it in me to blink. “However we can. Marrying Linnea will make it safer to spend so much time together.”

Bile rose on the back of my tongue. “Are you marrying her because of Oscar and the rumors or because you want to?”

I noticed Adam’s free hand was in Linnea’s masses of golden hair, and it stilled at my question. She was deeply asleep, her mouth lax and slightly open as her lids fluttered with a dream only she could see.

Dio mio, she deserved more than a marriage of convenience.

“I want to marry her,” Adam said finally, and his voice was ironclad. “Not just for the reasons we signed on the dotted line for. I wouldn’t ask you to go with me to pick out a ring if this—she—didn’t mean more to me than that.”

“I’m sorry,” I said because I could tell I had offended him. “I can tell you care about her.”

Love felt like a forbidden word.

I had said it once before to him, and I wasn’t sure I had it in me yet to say it again.

Even to Linnea.

Even though that stomach-flipping, heart galloping, gravity-redefining feel was by any other word, love.

The kind of love that rearranged galaxies.

“Let’s go get our girl a ring,” I said.

And the smile that Adam gave me in return was brighter than any diamond we saw that day.

We didn’t gether a diamond.

Of course, we didn’t.

Our sunshine girl was brightness and colour, vivacity and spirit. Nothing so cold, clear, and staid as a white diamond.

And one stone didn’t seem right either.

Not when it was coming, ostensibly, from two men.

We visited four jewelers before realizing that nothing was right for Linnea, but fortunately, at the fourth, the jeweler suggested we get something custom-made.

Adam asked if he could have it done in twenty-four hours.

Even though it had been a very long time since I was a poor boy in Napoli, the cost took my breath away for a moment.

We agreed the wedding ring, a two-stone affair that would nestle on either side of the single gem on the engagement ring, could wait. We both wanted me to be there when she saw that one, the ring that represented us both.

Afterward, we drove back to Adam’s house, but instead of going inside, we took a walk on Carbon Beach. Technically, it was open to the public, as all beaches in California had to be, but most people didn’t know the access points, so it was still a veryprivate stretch of sand, mostly inhabited by the insanely rich and famous.

“How are you going to propose?” I asked as we shucked off our shoes and walked in the damp, hard-packed sand right by the waves.

“I had a very public idea,” Adam admitted, “but I have a private one, too. I thought I could do both.”