Page 169 of The Sun & Her Burn

“Scusi?” I asked, forgetting English.

“I left Tate,” she said again, more firmly this time as she tilted her chin up to meet my eyes with steely determination. “For you.”

“For me,” I echoed.

“For Christ’s sake, Sebastian,yesfor you,” she snapped, then smoothed a hand over her dishevelled hair. “Of course, for you.”

“I don’t think there is any ‘of course’ about it,” I protested. “I asked you weeks ago to be with me, and you showed me the door.”

Cazzo, that seemed like such a very long time ago.

I had been holding on to her ghost for so long that it hadn’t even felt like a death when I’d given her up because I had already mourned for years.

It was different with Adam. I hadn’t been able to speak to him for loving him and being unable to have him. Living without him had been like breathing through an open wound because I’d loved him with a part of my soul Savannah had never seen fit to reach out for.

I had never been able to reconcile the loss of Savvy because the trauma of leaving the Meyers had felt so monumental, and she was an easier substitute as a part for the whole. She’d been easier to love, in a way, easier to fantasize about a future with because she was a woman and I’d always been attracted to women, but also because she’d done it. She’d left him! Whichseemed like the logical first step in being with me. So I’d never understood how she could have done that and not come to me.

I could never reconcile that hole blown through my heart, and I’d thought it would remain empty forever. But I couldn’t have known Linnea would rise in life like the sun in the east utterly eradicating the long shadows cast by my troubled past, and that I would grow to love her the way I did. I couldn’t have ever dreamed, even in my impossible universe, that the way I’d love Savannah would be a mere shadow of the way my heart was devoted to Linnea.

Just because she was the only thing that had ever made sense to me didn’t mean that she was the only thing to exist.

I couldn’t ever have conceived how loving Linnea could open the door to loving Adam again when I’d thought it forever closed and locked to me.

Yet none of that mattered now.

Because Oscar Hampton had closed the door on that future for me.

Fury writhed like snakes in my gut. I just wanted Savannah to leave so I could go to bed and cry in peace like a real man.

I knew now that she had never loved me.

Not like Adam did in ways enormous enough to terrify.

Not like Linnea did, as if I was as elemental to her as the stars in the midnight sky.

Polaris, Adam had called me last night.

Their North Star.

“Savvy,” I said, voice weary. “If you’re having problems with Tate, you should work through them. He loves you, and he deserves a chance to fight for you.”

“And don’t I deserve a chance to fight for you anymore?” she countered, standing up to stalk to me and poke a finger into my chest. Her indignation and passion shocked me out of my stupor slightly. “Why do you get to make grand declarationsand not me? I justleft my husband for you, Sebastian. Do you understand what that means?”

“Do you?” I countered, brows raised.

“It means I love you,” she shouted, shoving two hands into my chest and pushing hard enough to rock me back on my heels. “I love you, you fool, and I have since I met you even though it’s screwed up my plans.”

My laugh was a series of empty shell cases pinging to the floor. “And it hasn’t disrupted mine? If you are here to make me feel guilty, I won’t have it. All I have ever done if try to love you and be good to you.”

“You have been,” she said, suddenly so gently it almost gave me whiplash. Her big blue eyes were wide with sincerity. It occurred to me that though she was eighteen years older than Linnea, in so many ways she seemed more immature. “I don’t care what it does to my plans or my life. I don’t care about any of it anymore. I have to have you.”

“Is this because of Linnea and Adam?” I asked because I knew she had a feeling I was involved with them again.

Her mouth thinned for a moment before her eyes limned in tears. “It has to do with this,” she declared, pulling something from her pocket.

My watch.

The Patek Phillipe Celestial the Meyers had given me in London.