Epilogue
Erika
The balcony of their villa looked out over the Cantabrian Sea—perched on a cliff, open to the sky, a view with no equivalent in Los Angeles.
Los Angeles didn’t have this light. Erika had been trying to name it for a year.
The closest she’d come was somewhere between cerulean and something that didn’t have a word yet.
Her sketchbook lay open in her lap. She wasn’t drawing. Just looking.
The silence here was different. Not the heavy quiet of Anneliese’s mansion, or the sterile echo of his Malibu house. Something alive in it.
The door slid open behind her.
“Llevas una hora ahí fuera.” His voice, still rough from sleep. Arms coming around her waist from behind, warm bare skin, the shape of him against her that she’d learned over the last year, through repetition, through the body, until it stopped being new and started being home.
“The light was doing something.” She leaned back into him. “I needed to look at it.”
“Tell me why,” he murmured against her ear.
“Still working on it.”
He made a sound against her hair. He knew her well enough to know that was the right answer.
His gaze drifted past her to the room behind them—her studio, bright and airy, the walls covered in a year’s worth of work.
Portraits of him. Landscapes of the coast. The harbor at dawn.
And in the center on the large easel, the piece she’d finished last week—Anneliese’s face, fierce and protective and full of a love that still caught her off guard, even now.
It had taken four months for the Silver Lake shipment to arrive. Worth every week.
“Are you nervous?” he asked.
“Terrified.” She laughed. “The gallery show is next week. What if no one comes?”
“Then I’ll buy every single piece,” he said. “And we’ll have the most beautifully decorated house in all of Spain.” He kissed her temple. “They’ll come. And they’ll love it.” A beat. “The world is dying to see what the ‘Other Morgan’ has been up to.”
She rolled her eyes. Below them, a familiar voice cut through the morning—sharp and decisive, the tone Anneliese used when she was winning an argument and knew it.
“Looks like the circus is back,” Erika said.
“Anneliese doesn’t need us down there for another two hours,” he said against her hair.
Stefan looked over her shoulder, smiling.
His mother was already down there—white apron, coffee in hand, stationed at the craft services table like she’d claimed it three Sundays ago and had no intention of leaving.
Sunday dinner in her kitchen was non-negotiable.
Erika had stopped arguing about it after the third week, when the sofrito smell had finally made it into a painting she couldn’t stop looking at.
Down on the beach, a film set was taking shape on their private stretch of sand.
Anneliese—hair brilliant and unapologetic, hands moving the way they did when she was making a point no one was going to argue her out of—was in the middle of what appeared to be a very pointed disagreement with the director about something in the Paradise Found script.
Bradley stood beside her, arm around her shoulders, watching with a quiet smile.
He knew exactly how this was going to end.
“I still can’t believe you let them turn our beach into a film set,” Erika said.
“Anneliese can be very persuasive.” He pulled her closer. “Besides, it was either this or the Bahamas. I chose the lesser of two evils.”
“Is that Isabelle’s director?” Erika asked. “She looks terrified.”
“Anneliese is producing and starring. She’s not taking any chances.” He dropped his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “I heard they’re writing a part for a reclusive Spanish-based artist. Know anyone who might be interested?”
She turned in his arms to face him. “I think,” she said, “that I’m happy right where I am.”
“Qué coincidencia.” His eyes dropped to her mouth. “So am I.” He pulled her closer. “Though I can think of several ways to improve the morning.”
“You can think all you like.” She pressed a hand against his chest. “Shower first. I need to wake up properly.”
His grin—the real one, the one that had taken her six weeks on a film set to see and several months after that to stop drawing from memory—spread across his face. “I’ll even let you use the good shampoo.”
“I love you,” she said.
“Te amo, Princesa,” he replied, pulling her close. “Always.”
Erika looked at the sketchbook in her lap. Picked up the pencil.
Home wasn’t a place. It was this—the light she’d been trying to name for a year, the sound of the village below, his arms around her, and across the room on the easel, Anneliese’s face. Fierce and protective and entirely herself.
It was everything she’d never dared to imagine. And it was hers.