Page 32 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)
“You have been creating a career and life without Savannah Richardson and Adam Meyers for the last ten years,” he said curtly, but he wasn’t totally unfeeling, couldn’t be as an Italian or a filmmaker.
He stared at me hard for a moment before sighing, rubbing a hand over his salt-and-pepper beard.
“I won’t work with Savannah. I never liked her. ”
I had known Andrea for long enough to read the space between each word. My heart kicked in my chest.
“You always liked Adam,” I said, forcefully mild.
The server returned with my espresso, opening his mouth on a smile that was immediately dashed when he caught Andrea’s glower. He scuttled away.
“Did I?” Andrea asked, sipping his grappa.
“It was he who introduced us,” I reminded him unnecessarily. “You once said he was the kind of actor who could convince you of anything.”
“That does not sound like me.”
I smiled because, of course it did. Andrea was almost as dramatic as Adam.
My old friend sighed. “You wrote the part of Emerson Bainbridge for him, didn’t you?”
I stared at my left wrist, still surprised sometimes when I found it bare, without the heavy weight of the watch Adam and Savannah had once given me.
“I didn’t write it for him,” I said honestly. “But I think I wrote it in part because of him.”
“ Certo ,” Andrea said, looking pained and weary. “Of course, you did. Just as you wrote it for her . Niente di nuovo sotto il sole. ”
There is nothing new under the sun, the expression meant. As in, of course my life still revolved around the same couple it had ten years ago.
I shrugged helplessly because I had, but also because I did not have the words to explain how I had written it because of someone else, too.
Linnea.
In Emerson’s imagination, Hallie Whitehall was fully realized as the consummate temptress, womanly, haughty with the kind of arrogance that comes from great beauty and great breeding, elegant and well-heeled.
She was something to possess, another treasure to add to his collection of expensive trinkets.
But the reality of the living, breathing Hallie was nothing so cultivated.
She was a whirling dervish of vitality, rough around the edges because she had grown up in lower-class London but beautiful and talented enough to pull herself out of the slums and onto the stage where she was set to become a sensation.
It was this version of Hallie that Thatcher Radcliff, Emerson’s best mate and the private detective he hired to find her, fell in love with.
The dreamer in love with his dream was a very different supposition than two real people in love with each other.
I might have written the screenplay because of my past with Savannah and Adam, and the way it had shaped me, but I wrote it for Linnea and Adam to bring the story to life.
“Does it matter why I wrote it?” I asked a little gruffly. “I wrote again for the first time in years. I thought you would be thrilled.”
“Of course, I am,” Andrea scoffed. “No one is more thrilled than I am to be able to collaborate with you like this again. I only worry for your heart. When one like you has such a giving soul, it is often taken advantage of.”
I huffed out a resigned laugh and ran a hand through my hair. “We are who we are, flaws and all.”
Andrea gave me a lopsided smirk. “Just so. Certainly, this is a theme in The Dream & The Dreamer . It can be a masterpiece, Sebastian. We will make it so. Just tell me what you need, and we will do it.”
“Adam,” I said immediately because there was no point in denying that while Emerson and Thatcher were both intrinsically tied to different parts of my psyche, I had envisioned my ex-lover as the posh British star of the show.
Andrea rolled his eyes and flapped his hand through the air. “ Si, si , I know.”
“I want to play Thatcher,” I admitted because he was whom I related to the most. The hardworking white-collar man who fell in love with a woman knowing she was not meant to be his. “And I want Linnea Kai to audition for the role of Hallie.”
Andrea’s wiry grey and black eyebrows shot into his hairline. “The young, untried actress who is best known for being Miranda Hildebrand’s daughter and Adam Meyers’s current paramour?”
“The same,” I agreed a little stiffly. “Though she is much more than the sum of those parts.”
“If this is because you want to get into her pants, Sebastian, I am sure there are easier ways,” Andrea said mildly.
Even though I wanted to state unequivocally that this part was hers, that I had written it for her and that only Linnea could pull off that intoxicating mix of sophisticate and ingenue, I decided to let it rest.
Linnea would prove me right herself.
“Just give her an audition,” I suggested. “If you are not happy with her, Andrea, we will cast someone else.”
“Someone with star power,” he suggested. “Studios would love to attach a big name to a project like this.”
“ Blood Oath starred a no-name Italian,” I reminded him. “It won us both Oscars.”
“ Concesso ,” he granted. “She will audition. Anything else?”
“I have to at least speak with Savannah and Tate before we take it somewhere else,” I added, though the idea of doing so was tantamount to torture.
Savannah would not take kindly to the idea of someone else being involved in producing the film. Both because she would, rightly, think I owed it to her, given what she had done for me on my first screenplay, and because, unfairly, she still liked to think of me as hers.
Andrea finished the last of his grappa in one short gulp, shook his head and wiped his mouth simultaneously, and then slammed the glass back on the table.
“It’s your funeral. Just try to survive long enough for us to get this thing into pre-production, hmm?”
“I’ll try,” I said. “But I make no promises. She’s little, but she’s fierce.”
The Richardsons' estate was in Brentwood, a particularly posh and old-moneyed neighborhood of Los Angeles, where the homes often looked like transplants from Britain.
I found it ironic that Savannah had left England only to end up in a proper-looking English country manor home, with the palm trees shading the winding drive being the only incongruent aspect.
I had texted ahead and been told that Tate was at work, but Savannah was home after a charity brunch event, and I could find her in the back garden for a pot of tea.
Again, the American showed her decade in London had given her more than just a British ex-husband.
The butler, Edgecumbe, led me through the Tudor-style home to the back terrace where my duchessa sat at a white marble table surrounded by a perfectly manicured array of boxwood hedges and flower beds.
In a wide-brimmed straw hat with a white ribbon tied around the center and a white sheer button-up tucked smartly into wide-legged white trousers cinched with some kind of brown designer belt, Savannah Richardson looked ready for her centerfold in House & Garden magazine.
I loved that about her, though. She matched herself to every aesthetic perfectly, highlighting her surroundings by allowing them to highlight her sense of style and grace. She was a studied thing of beauty, intelligence in every artifice.
I let myself admire her for a moment before she noticed us, thinking back on a time when she had sat with me in an entirely different garden in London.
“Sebastian Lombardi, ma’am,” Edgecumbe announced me and then deftly excused himself back into the house.
“Sebastian,” Savannah echoed, standing to wait for me to come to her and then opening her arms to brace them on my forearms as I ducked to press a kiss to either of her soft cheeks.
She smelled, as always, of freesia and gardenias, an English garden warmed by the hot blood beating beneath her pale skin.
“Savvy,” I said, as I pulled away to smile down at her. “You look bellissima , as always.”
Faint color tinged her cheeks, but she nodded politely and waited for me to move to the seat opposite her before sitting down again.
“You are too charming for your own good,” she scolded me without heat, reaching for a Spode china teapot and pouring us each a cup of tea without asking how I took it. “I know you prefer coffee, but this garden calls for Earl Grey, I’m afraid.”
I accepted the tiny saucer, worried I would crush it with a single spasm of my thick fingers. Carefully, I put it down in front of me.
“You were not very kind when I last saw you,” she started in right away, looking up at me through her lashes as she sipped her own tea.
I raised a brow at her and realized it was something Adam would have done. “Wasn’t I? You were clearly in the middle of something with Tate and Jace, and I was in the middle of an interview. It was not the time for casual conversation.”
“You were flippant, once again, about working with me,” she noted sharply. “Are you waiting for me to prostrate myself before you? Because that will not happen.”
Anger curdled in my gut. “It is a good thing, then, that I have seen you prostrated for me before.”
“Don’t be crude,” she snapped.
“Don’t be cold,” I countered coolly.
Tension hummed between us.
Not even the birds seemed to sing from their trees.
From somewhere inside, I could catch the faint strains of Bach playing over the speakers.
And suddenly, I was tired. Exhausted, even, with the both of us.
Warily, I rubbed a hand through my hair and rolled back my shoulders to rid myself of their stiffness. “Let’s start again, shall we? How are you, duchessa ? I’ve missed you.”
It was miraculous to watch the way the kind words softened her, water blurring the edge of her carefully painted lines.
Her smile, then, was tiny but true.
“I’ve missed you, too,” she admitted. “It makes me irritable.”
A Savannah-style apology.
I inclined my head in acceptance of it.
“What has kept you from me?” she asked casually, though there was nothing casual about her.