Page 69 of The Sun & Her Burn

I had never known two people who seemed so confident as Savannah and Adam to be so secretly insecure.

And a small part of me rejoiced that Tate didn’t get that version of her.

He had the lady, but he did not have the wanton who emerged powerful and greedy under a steady hand and filthy command.

Only Adam and I had shared that.

That deep, vulnerable part of her.

So, I reasoned, I could more readily handle that Tate was married to Savannah, the Lady.

It had been years since I forgot about her existence enough to skip a date with her.

And here I had three times in a row.

I knew why.

Adam and Linnea.

They had consumed my mind to the point that I was overcome by the need to write this story.

This love story about a man who fell in love with the idea of a woman before he even met her, and then, upon glimpsing her in reality, began a crazed search that derailed his life in order to find her again.

I swallowed thickly, throat dry as dust, as I stared down at her text on the screen.

It wasn’t difficult to realize that Emerson’s obsessive search for Hallie Whitehall was a metaphor for my own obsessive vigil for Savannah.

The cell ringing in my hand startled me out of my depressing thoughts, Andrea’s name flashing across the surface.

“Ciao,” I answered in a voice that was creaky with disuse.

I looked at the hotel room around me and winced at the discarded water bottles littering the floor, three trays of room service that had largely gone uneaten and were sitting stale on the rumpled bed linens I hadn’t slept in for days.

“Sebastian,” Andrea shouted joyfully. “Come downstairs.”

I rubbed my gritty eyes again, thinking I had misheard him because Andrea should have been at his home in Tuscany.

“What?” I asked blearily.

“Come downstairs,” he demanded again. “Vieni. I am waiting at the bar.”

He hung up before I could question him again.

I stared down at my grimy white tee shirt and the same grey sweatpants I’d been wearing for much too long and decided, if Andrea was really downstairs, he could wait five minutes while I took a shower.

Afterwards, dressed in jeans so old they were softened to white in some places and a new, clean T-shirt, wet hair dampening the collar, I made my way downstairs to the hotel bar.

Andrea sat in one corner at a small table nursing a rocks glass of what I was sure wasgrappaeven though it was only eleven in the morning.

He stood when I approached, carting me into his arms to kiss me firmly on both cheeks as if I were just a boy and not a man six inches taller than him.

“Andrea,” I said on an exhaled huff of amusement and joy. “What are you doing here?”

“I read the pages you sent,” he said, speaking too loudly but in Italian, so I didn’t mind. His excitement was plastered across his swarthy features, his hands cutting shapes into the air as he spoke. “I had to come.”

“You liked them?” I guessed because if he hadn’t, he would have called me to say I had lost the plot.

Andrea was not a man who held back.