Page 63 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)

“There is no price too high for a chance at a Sebastian Lombardi original,” Tate declared, moving his hand from my shoulder to my neck for a squeeze. “You can count on Richardson Productions winning that bid.”

Happily, I was saved from continuing the conversation by the music heralding everyone back to their seats for the final round of awards for the night.

I sat at my table of peers and co-stars, feeling oddly bereft and alone as I waited for the nominees for Best Actor in a Drama to be called. My gaze floated over the many gorgeous faces to land on the only two I really cared about in the room.

Linnea was looking at me, her eyes widening when they caught mine. She lifted her phone and wiggled it a little in my direction.

I pulled my cell from my pocket and found waiting notifications.

A new group chat had been created and named with only three emoji: a sun, a moon, and some stars.

Linnea: I’ve always wanted to fuck a Critics Choice Award winner.

Adam: You have fucked a Critics Choice Award winner.

Adam: Two of them.

Linnea: It’s different when it’s a fresh win. Sebastian can hold his award while we suck him off, and if he doesn’t drop it, he can come.

Adam: Well, if that isn’t incentive to win, I’m not sure what is.

Adam: Break a leg, Sebastian.

Linnea: We’re rooting for you!

I swallowed thickly as I rubbed my thumb over the screen. Such silly texts, really, to mean so much to me. I could barely breathe past the feeling of happiness filling my chest like helium.

So when they called my name as the winner some minutes later, I was already beaming ear to ear when I stood, kissed Winona on the cheek, and climbed the stairs to the stage.

I always prepared a speech because it was bad luck not to, but most of them were fairly standard. Thank the organization, thank the studio, and the cast and crew of the movie, especially the director and my co-stars. Then, move on to my beloved Mama and sisters.

Only this time, I ended with something significantly more enigmatic than I ever had before.

“And finally, to the people who remind me to never stop dreaming, even when those dreams seem impossible. I have always had a relentless and dangerous optimism in my heart that has encouraged me to pursue wild opportunities and unlikely outcomes. Yet here I stand today holding an award for a career everyone told me would never be mine. I’m happy to continue to prove my naysayers wrong and to keep dreaming of impossible universes. ”

As the crowd erupted into applause, it was Adam and Linnea whom I sought out in the darkness. Adam lifted his glass to me, waiting for me to find his gaze. Linnea did a fist pump that made my wide smile deepen so it cut almost painfully into my cheeks.

That night, they proved they sucked me off until I dropped the award to the floor, but because I was a winner, they still decided to let me come.

We were busy, the three of us, so we spent most of those days apart from each other.

Linnea no longer worked at the restaurant, but she spent a lot of time in the guesthouse with Miranda or working on designs.

She had landed a guest appearance on a popular sitcom that filmed in LA over the course of three days at the end of the week, and she laughed when I insisted on taking her to the production lot the first day to show her around.

I had podcast interviews, live interviews, a spot on a late-night show, and a shoot for St. Aubyn cologne at El Matador State Beach, while Adam continued to prepare for his role as Anton Daventry, which was set to start filming in mid-March.

Even though we didn’t spend the days together, we found each other at night.

I liked to cook, so I often helped Bruce whip up something for dinner or teach him some of Mama’s recipes.

Linnea would wander in next, usually in low-slung sweatpants and a teeny top that left acres of skin exposed beneath the bottom of her breasts and the base of her smooth stomach.

We would chat until Adam ambled in, usually wrapping up a phone call or email on his cell.

Aside from acting, he also owned a stake in a popular winery in Sonoma and various other lucrative business holdings. Though he didn’t speak to his father and step-mum, I knew his vast fortune was what kept them in comfort in their manor home in Cornwall.

Only when we were settled around the dining table outside on the terrace did we pick up the script for The Dream & The Dreamer to review the plot and conduct informal table readings.

They helped make the story come alive in a way I couldn’t have fully imagined when I first wrote it during those fevered few days.

It became even clearer that Adam and Linnea had become my muses, and there was something almost scary about that, scarier than being their lovers.

A man and his muse were scared, but often fraught with complications.

As evidenced by the very plot of The Dream & The Dreamer .

I tried not to think of it as a bad omen.

Savannah called me three times and texted me a dozen more.

I only read the first one.

Savannah: The Dream & The Dreamer is Oscar bait, Sebastian. Absolutely amazing. Call me back so we can talk production.

This morning, after the three of us fell back to sleep, I woke to Adam’s hand on my face.

My cheek had been pressed to his chest, one arm and leg slung over his body while Linnea did the same on his other side.

A small part of me wanted to document every one of these small in-between moments, because I knew how quickly things could change.

“Morning, Sebastian,” he murmured, rubbing a thumb along the roughness of stubble on my jaw.

“ Buongiorno , Adamo,” I echoed in Italian. “What’s on your mind?”

“I’m going to marry Linnea,” he told me in a hushed murmur.

It was absurd to be shocked by the statement.

Of course, I knew this.

It was in their contract.

Linnea had even mentioned that they’d moved up the timeline so they would probably need to get married in the next few months.

Oscar Hampton was a figlio di puttana .

However, the idea of them getting married triggered a primal response in my brain even though I tried to rationalize it away.

Adam and Savannah had been married.

They had brought me in to save their marriage and look how that ended up.

Linnea and Adam were only contracted to be married for three years.

What happened to them when those were up?

What happened to me?

“Will you go with me to buy the ring?” Adam’s voice jarred me from my spiralling thoughts. “I want you to have a say in it.”

“Why?” I asked before I could curb the vulnerability of the question.

Adam’s gaze turned wary, and he examined my face for a moment before responding. “In public, I might walk alone with Linnea, but in private, we are three. I thought that was what you wanted?”

I blinked up at him, taking a moment to steady myself with the sight of his familiar, handsome face.

The creases beside his eyes and mouth had deepened over the years, a smattering of silver threaded through the gold at his temples, but those green apple eyes and the firm, full mouth were the very same.

Had I ever stopped loving him? I wondered.

It didn’t feel like it.

“It is,” I confessed.

“Then you’ll go with me to pick out her ring,” he declared, smoothing his hand up into my hair to pull me closer for a kiss that started as a brush of lips and devolved quickly into something deeper.

Even in the morning, he tasted so fucking good.

“I picked out the Patek Phillipe for you all those years ago,” Adam told me, keeping me close so his verdant eyes were all I could see.

“Savannah didn’t know what it was we were giving you.

That was a mistake. I don’t want to make the same one now.

This ring…I feel like it should be from both of us? ”

“What are you saying?” I asked as my heart hammered so hard I thought I might be sick.

“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 get her 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 very private 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.”

I wanted to ask again if the publicity was that important, but I had already insulted him enough for one day.

As always, he seemed to read me anyway. “I thought I would do it at the Oscars,” he admitted. “On the red carpet.”

My mouth dropped open in shock, which Adam seemed to find hilarious.

“It’s just…you’ve never been much for public displays of affection,” I tried to explain. “Even with Savannah.”

“I do wonder if that was more of Savannah’s influence,” he said, scuffing his toes in the sand. “Linnea is very open with my physical affection, and I find myself enjoying it immensely.”

I fought the urge to reach for his hand, the fantasy of holding it while we walked down the beach a long-ingrained dream.

“Do you think she would hate it?” Adam asked. “I already made some calls, but I could change the plan. I want her to…” He sighed and rubbed a hand down his chin. “I want her to want to say yes.”

“Honestly? No, I think she would laugh and find it delightfully over the top,” I said with a chuckle as I rubbed my stubbled jaw. “Your team would love the photo op, too.”

Adam raised a cool brow at me. “They would. Something can accomplish two things at once. Someone with experience in a ménage might understand that.”

He startled me into chuckling. “Touché.”

“It’s why I’d like to have a more private moment, too. One I’d very much like you to be part of.”

I gave in to the impulse to bump my shoulder into his, and when I did, Adam rewarded me with that small, tender smile he used to give me in London. It still had the ability to stop my heart in its tracks.

“What did you have in mind?” I asked.