TODAY OUR GUEST AUTHOR, TANITH DAVENPORT, SHARES AN EXCERPT FROM HER NOVEL, 'TOTALITY'

“I’m sorry it had to be you.”

Azora Felton jerked upright in bed, struggling to catch her breath as the nightmare slowly faded away. For a moment she couldn’t remember where she was, the room unfamiliar, and then the memory of the plane ride and checking in came back to her—the Hotel Marinetti.

Sunlight blazed through the window, throwing patterns on the rich carpet. It looked like a good day for the eclipse.

She could hear movement in one, possibly both, of the other rooms in the suite. Maybe Hailie and Shanna were awake already. Picking up her phone, she checked the time and saw it was 8:30 AM. Still time before their room service breakfast was due to arrive.

The nightmare still echoed in her head, and Azora shook her head, forcing it back. It had been two months since she had quit her job as a 999 operator, two months since that horrible call.

Of course, she remembered as she scrolled through her emails, it was also two months since that message that had changed everything.

The message that had made this trip possible.

As she finished getting dressed, Hailie wandered into the room, phone in hand. She held it up, showing an article on the screen.

“I was right. Lorcan Moriarty is still filming here. It’s really close to the eclipse site too.”

“Not too close, I hope. We don’t want the area locked off.”

“Oh, not that close. Actually, I heard they’re going to break so the cast can be there for totality. So you might even get to meet him.”

“Lucky me.”

Azora couldn’t help smiling as Hailie moved back into the central area of the suite, calling to Shanna. Hailie was such a celebrity hound. For herself, Azora could take or leave them.

Although it might be interesting to have a movie cast at the eclipse site, even if that wasn’t what she would be looking at.

****

The sea stretched out in front of her, bathed in a strange, eerie half-light. Her phone in her hand, filming the scene, Azora lifted the eclipse camera with her other hand and looked through the lens at the dimmed sun.

A white crescent glowed through blackness, the sun with a bite taken out of it. Her first partial eclipse—and not to be her last.

Around her the other onlookers were calling out in excitement, holding up cameras and phones. Azora had spoken to a few of them while they were waiting for the eclipse to start. Quite a few of them called themselves professional eclipse-chasers—always hoping to see the holy grail, a total eclipse.

What she wouldn’t give to see one herself. But that was still to come.

“I flew out here from Australia to see this,” one of them had said, a young woman named Gina. “I’ve been saving up for ages.”

“I came from the UK,” Azora had told her, deliberately avoiding the question of how she had afforded the last-minute ticket. Other than Hailie and Shanna, she had told no one, nor did she intend to. She still hadn’t decided what she was going to do, other than travel—like this.

As she lowered the eclipse camera now, Azora turned to look at Hailie, who was taking photos with her phone, her black hair hidden under a baseball cap.

At least for this first trip she hadn’t had to come alone. She had been worried her friends wouldn’t be able to take time off from the animal shelter, but as Hailie had pointed out, she owned the place. She could do what she liked and leave her office manager in charge.

“I can get better images with this, you know.”

“Oh, I’m not taking pictures of the sun.” Hailie held out the phone to show her. “I’m trying to get the weird light on the sea. I’m thinking it might make a good background for our next ad.”

Hailie had opened an animal shelter eight months earlier, and running it as a non-profit took up most of her time. Shanna was her primary fundraiser, a job which involved slightly fewer hours but, to Azora’s mind, more inconvenience. She hated the thought of shaking people down for money, even in such a good cause.

They had often asked her to join them. It would have been more reasonable hours than her job, at least—she had never enjoyed working overnights. Azora had been considering it before she had quit, before events had transpired that meant she no longer needed to work.

She still had the email on her phone.

Good News. You’ve won a prize on the National Lottery.

She hadn’t always bothered to enter the lottery, but the Euromillions had been at a rollover amount of over a hundred million pounds, so she had decided to give it a shot. She had never won anything more than ten pounds, but anything was better than a kick in the teeth.

And then her life had turned upside down.

She hadn’t given a reason for quitting without notice. She had told Hailie and Shanna, but nobody else, and as things currently stood nobody would have noticed—she hadn’t started splurging on a new car or a new house yet. She had simply decided to start traveling—and this was what she had decided to do first.

Eclipse chasing.

It was just as well things had happened the way they did. After that call, she could never have gone back. She would have been expected to carry on as normal, and it would have been impossible.

Her workplace would have thought it was ridiculous. You’ve had bad calls before, haven’t you? All in a day’s work! And she had. But none that had done this to her—none that had left her so cold, struggling to feel anything but blankness.

She cast a quick glance at her friends, who were both trying to capture the event—Hailie on her phone and Shanna on her DSLR camera. Shanna’s blonde hair was falling in her green eyes, her freckles standing out in the glare of the sun. Azora had pulled her own dark hair back into a ponytail, not wanting it to get in the way of her view.

God, it was hot. She dug into her pocket for her sunscreen. She was lucky enough to tan easily, but in this degree of sunlight it would be easy to burn.

“Azora.” Hailie’s urgent whisper broke her concentration. “Look over there.”

Azora turned to look where Hailie was discreetly pointing. A small group of people had joined the crowd, noticeable by the presence of two security guards dressed from head to toe in black. Her eye was immediately drawn to the man standing between them, his dark hair falling over his expensive-looking sunglasses, a flame-red streak in his fringe.

She’d seen him before in articles online. This was Lorcan Moriarty.

Admittedly she didn’t know much about him. She wasn’t like Hailie, always reading junky news. But she had seen a lot of headlines about one bitter ex after another selling their stories to the press. He seemed to pick up and drop a lot of women in a short space of time.

Mind you, Lorcan Moriarty was an actor, so she supposed it was only to be expected. From what little she knew of actors, their relationships tended to be temporary. Lots of traveling, lots of intense filming periods, didn’t exactly lend themselves to long-term love affairs—even if he wasn’t in the habit of dating fans. And since most of these stories seemed to involve unknowns rather than fellow actors, he apparently did have a habit of dating fans. She knew a lot of celebrities didn’t like to do that, but if a cute fan wanted to sleep with him, it was hardly a shock if he said yes.

According to Hailie’s article, he was filming an action film called “In The Zone.”

From what she had read about him in the past, this was a bit of a departure for him. His last film had been a romantic drama called “Fly Me To The Moon,” and she had heard he was attached to an adaptation of “Mansfield Park,” although that could have been just a rumor. In any event, she had never heard of him doing action before.

Maybe he had chosen to bulk up for the film. Certainly she could see the outlines of firm muscles through his t-shirt, the edges of what looked like a dragon tattoo poking out of the collar. He was wearing tight-fitting jeans despite the heat. Sweat glistened on his neck and jaw.

Azora could see why Hailie was so obsessed with him. He was hot, there was no denying it.

That was one thing to tick off her bucket list, anyway. See a film star in the flesh. She deliberately didn’t think the word “meet.” She had no intention of bothering him off the clock.

The strange light was slowly becoming darkness, the sun almost blotted out by the moon. Voices around them were making awed comments, taking photos and video, as Azora held up her eclipse viewer again.

What she wouldn’t give to see totality.

A ring of blazing light.

But this was only a partial eclipse, the sun still visible at the top as the moon slowly passed across its face, and it didn’t matter that it wasn’t total. It was still worth every penny of the trip out to Spain.

From behind her she heard a gasp, followed by a thud, and Azora turned to see Lorcan Moriarty looking shocked as a woman holding a tablet—possibly his PA—lay on the ground in front of him.

What the hell?

The rest of Lorcan’s crew seemed to be in shock, nobody moving to help the woman. Before she knew what she was doing, Azora found she had crossed to the group and was kneeling on the ground next to her.

“Hello? Can you hear me?” She tapped the woman on the shoulders. “Can you open your eyes for me?”

Nothing. She leaned her head down towards the woman’s mouth and felt breath on her ear. Good. At least she was still breathing.

“Is she okay?” one of the crewmen asked uncertainly, and Azora looked up at him.

“Can you call an ambulance, please? Tell them she’s unconscious but breathing normally. I think she just fainted, but it’s best to be sure.”

As she started to move the woman’s arms and legs into position, Azora noticed a pair of feet approaching. Carefully she rolled the woman into the recovery position and adjusted her head to help her breathe.

“Hey.”

Azora stood, looking Lorcan in the eye for the first time. “Hi.”

Lorcan gestured towards the woman. “How did you know how to do that? Are you a doctor?”

“No. I used to be a 999 operator. You need first aid knowledge for that.”

I’m sorry it had to be you. The words from her last 999 call echoed in her head, and Azora forced them to the back of her mind, focusing on the moment.

Lorcan was still looking at her, and as she held his gaze, she noticed a hint of sympathy in his eyes, as though he had guessed—

No. He would never guess. But he might have had some idea of what 999 operators got to listen to every day, and maybe he could understand why she might not want to do that anymore.

Maybe.

Their look lingered, and Azora felt a flush rising on her body, her nerves beginning to tingle. It had been a long time since any man had made her feel … anything.

And she had to admit, Lorcan was an attractive man. She could see flecks of gold in his green eyes, a hint of stubble along his jawline, and that dragon tattoo that seemed to beg for her to follow it down his firm chest.

But he was Lorcan Moriarty, for crying out loud. He was a star. She was nobody.

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COMING SOON: On Friday, 30th May, we have team member and author, Dawn Treacher, who is sharing an excerpt from her latest novel, 'The Ninth Life of Norris'.