Page 125 of The Marriage Clause

And then on better inspection… Not pink. Red.

I sit up. "Everett."

Nothing.

"Everett."

His head turns. One eye opens against the glare.

He moves, and then hisses through his teeth so sharply it makes me flinch.

"Oh no," I say.

He pushes up onto his elbows and looks over his shoulder at the damage—angry red from his shoulders to his waistband, across his arms, and the back of his neck.

"Fuck," he breathes.

"You fell asleep."

"I can see that."

"In direct sunlight."

"Thank you, Aria. The obvious facts are very helpful right now."

I press my hand over my mouth because if I laugh he might actually murder me.

He tries to sit up fully and stops. Winces. Drops back down.

"You need aloe," I say, already standing. "Or—the villa probably has something. Don't move."

"I wasn't planning to sprint anywhere."

I find the after-sun in the upstairs bathroom. It’s a thick, cooling gel that smells like aloe and mint. When I come back down, he's managed to sit upright on the edge of the lounger with the umbrella opened up, forearms braced on his knees, head tipped forward.

His back is the worst of it.

Lobster red from his shoulders to his waistband. The kind of burn that's going to peel spectacularly in three days and hurt like hell for the next twenty-four hours.

"Okay," I say, unscrewing the cap. "Turn around."

He turns… slowly.

I squeeze gel onto my hands and touch his shoulders and he tenses immediately.

"Sorry," I murmur. "Cold?"

"It's fine."

It is clearly not fine. Every muscle in his back is locked tight, not from the burn but from the fact that my hands are on him and we both know what happened the last time they were.

I smooth the gel across his shoulders in long, careful strokes.

His skin is hot. Not just from the sun.

The silence gets thick fast.

I work the aloe down his spine, over the broad planes of his back, across the muscles that shift under my hands every time he breathes. The sunburn is angry—radiating heat back at my palms.