What is Twilight about?

First, Twilight symbolizes the merging of color and culture, where night and day, light black and white, blend into the future, and humanity becomes the kaleidoscopic melting pot that accounts for seven million Americans now embracing and celebrating more than one race, according to the 2000 U.S. Census. Second, the story takes a hard look at the unrealistic standards of beauty, thinness and happiness that Hollywood glamorizes, locking regular folk in an impossible and depressing quest for perfection.

And Twilight explores the mystical and phenomenal wonders of love -- the inexplicable sensations of meeting the other half of your soul, the heart-pounding thrill of the first kiss, and the desperation to knock down all obstacles keeping two lovers apart.

In the novel, legendary actor and painter Sonny Whittaker meets a spellbinding woman on the beach on a lush tropical island, in the wake of a terrifying attack. An erotic but anonymous interlude follows, confirming that his soul mate is just a whisper away. But back home in Los Angeles a few days later, this becomes forbidden love of the most scandalous kind--the woman is the judge overseeing Sonny’s high-profile divorce trial! And a poetic stalker wants to kill them both, as Judge Simone Thompson struggles to mask her overwhelming attraction for Sonny, find questions about her mysterious ethnic background and meet the father she has yearned for all her life.

Here’s a sneak peek at the pages, where Sonny -- troubled by threats to his family, his film and his future -- leaves the set of his movie to cool down, only to have his heart set on fire.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Sonny dashed toward the wooden staircase leading to the beach, the resort, the marina.

He had to be alone for a few moments, to extinguish the angst threatening to sear his very soul. With every step downward, the hypnotic rhythms of samba music became louder. Far below on the beach, men and women formed a fleshy snake of dancing and drumming on the sand, as they practiced for Carnival. Sonny ached to escape into the abandon of their dance.

Near the dancers, a cluster of women sunbathing on the sand waved to him. One of the women flipped a shiny black mane, rolled onto her back, offering up to the sun nipples as sweet and succulent as the top swirls of steaming cinnamon rolls.

“Obrigado,” he sighed playfully, saying thank you in Portuguese as his sandals scraped the sandy, flower-lined sidewalk leading to the marina.

A fiery surge slackened Sonny’s neck, shoulders, fingers, arousing tingly warmth far lower. His every cell craved the oblivion of lust, the opiate of a woman’s hot hiding places. There, he could climb into a sensual sanctuary, far away from the fear, the rage, the anxiety that was so viciously clawing his soul. But a deep, regretful ache seeped through his gut, as if he’d indulged in an extra fingerlick of frosting after eating the whole cake.

No more women. Unless she could pass Grandmama’s prophesied shiver test.

Sonny ran; his leg muscles burned. Lush vegetation shrouding the pebbled stone formed a sort of green tunnel, dotted with sweet-smelling purple and orange flowers. The docks and gleaming white yachts were a blinding-bright mirage at the end.

“My God.”

Sonny ran faster, sucking down air, his legs pumping with white-hot rage. He had to get away, escape to the serenity of his boat. Watch the water, the sun, perhaps meditate. With every step, waxy leaves shaped like giant hands sliced against his shoulders, his elbows, his ankles. He tripped on a rope-like vine.

And during that split-second when his body lurched forward, he thought of a painting: the lush green leaves of life closing in, trying to trap him, to stop him from fulfilling his life’s work as a father, an actor, a painter, a citizen of the world with so many gifts to share. Sonny ran faster, until the hot sun, screaming seagulls and lapping water overcame his senses.

“You should not be alone, Senhor Whittaker,” said a police officer who stood with another man in uniform at the marina entrance. One officer grasped the silver pole supporting the SANCTUARY archway. He nodded toward the shadowy path. “Especially there.”

“I’ll be on my boat,” he said, sandals pounding the white wooden planks of the dock. Sonny dashed past schooners, where fishermen were assessing their catches. He ran by more pairs of police officers, who were scanning gold-chain-draped older men with deep tans sitting like kings atop gleaming yachts where women sunbathed and children zoomed off on jet skis.

“Dharma’s Dream.” Sonny announced the black script letters painted on the back of his fifty-foot red cigarette boat. He jumped over the red, black and white stripes on the leather seat across the back. The boat rocked in the very last slip closest to the open water. All around, the hot, humid air rang with samba music, splashing water, buzzing motors and sun-revelers’ snippets of Spanish, Portuguese and English.

Sonny unlocked the thick gray Plexiglas doors leading down to the cabin, to the left of the steering wheel and raised white leather bucket seats. Down in the cabin, he pulled his sweat-drenched tunic over his shoulders.

His hands were still trembling as he removed sand-filled sandals. That note crinkled in the pocket of the drawstring pants of Xavier’s uniform. Sonny put on loose-fitting beige silk shorts, and slipped the poem into the right front pocket. He had to relax. Because he would explode, or implode, with anxiety and worry if he kept this up. The thought of anyone wanting to hurt his beautiful babies--

Sonny shot up the steps, over the narrow side ledge, to the red leather cushion on the long, A-shaped front of the boat. A huge basket of flowers floated in the blue-green water about a dozen feet away.

“No, not mine, but go back to sea anyway,” he said. Just last week, on February second, he had taken Asia and India across All Saints Bay, into the city of Salvador, for the festival of the Queen of the Sea.

“Angel Eyes,” Sonny said, the salty water frothing around his ankles on the yellow sand of Itapoa beach, “let’s make our wishes and let them set sail--”

Sonny put his basket of flowers into the water as the girls launched their two-foot-long boats of soap, lipstick and barrettes into the waves.

“Yay!” the girls cheered as the little boats headed toward the sunset, which Grandmama was watching further north in the Caribbean, to tell him just what it might portend on this evening. He would have to ask her during their Sunday teleconference.

He and the twins held hands and closed their eyes. In unison they recited their bedtime prayer: “Please keep us happy and healthy, safe and strong. Please keep us with our Daddy, and make our movie the best ever!”

As the girls clapped, Sonny whispered toward the shimmering pastel heavens: “And please bring me that woman who will make my very soul shiver.”

Now, Sonny stared at the turquoise horizon. “Yes, a woman as mystical and powerful as Iemanja.
Beautiful and brilliant. I’ve seen enough she-devils.” He laughed toward the sky as he laid back on the leather cushion, making that poem crinkle in his pocket. “Now, we deserve nothing short of a goddess.”

Sonny closed his eyes, savoring the hot sunshine on his face, his bare chest, his legs, his palms. Through his nose, he breathed slowly and deeply.

“Fome,” he whispered. That mantra signaled his muscles to slacken, his heartbeat to slow, his blood to cool. He had chosen the word with the help of his Buddhist spiritual guide back in Los Angeles.

“Fome.” It was Portuguese for hunger, but was often used in context with sexual desire. Other times he would say comendo, a word for eating that was also used to describe intercourse. The words often brought to mind the lusty heroine who seduced men with sex and food Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon, a novel by one of Brazil’s foremost authors, Jorge Amado.

Sonny smiled, remembering the madame on New York’s Upper West Side, who had taken Sonny into her home for a whole year. Wearing lace-and-satin outfits of every color, Lovelee would feed him an international smorgasbord by week’s end: Indian, Vietnamese, Nigerian, Italian, Brazilian, Mandarin. All while teaching him about Eastern religion. And rescuing him from the emotional abyss that had sucked him into a zombie-like void after his parents died some thirty years ago.

“Fome,” Sonny whispered into the hot breeze.

The deep horn of a yacht vibrated the air. Hot shards of worries shot back through his mind as Norris’ sleek white yacht approached, its round black windows, a helicopter on top gleaming in the sun. A boat Sonny had enjoyed many times.

“Sonny!” Marie blew a kiss with her left hand, from the second-level deck where she stood with two other women.

“Better wave with your other hand,” he called back. Then again, Norris could get just as much publicity out of her losing that boulder of a diamond as he’d gotten out of giving it to her on live TV.

Marie smiled, lifting her left hand to her trademark pearl choker, then finger-combing her hair that shined as brightly as a new penny. How could a sister so successful and intelligent be blind to Norris’s ulterior motive?

It seemed everyone but prim, professional and just-black-enough Marie knew the wedding was another Norris Haynes PR stunt. Like last year, when the media went wild over him breaking his leg while motorcycling, just in time for the release of Death Ranger, a box office blockbuster about a bold, Harley Davidson-loving bounty hunter. This time, Norris was getting married to tame his image, just in time for Oscar.
The starboard side of their boat hummed closer, now about ten yards away. Sonny squinted in the bright sunshine reflecting off the azure water. Marie turned to her companions--

“My God,” Sonny groaned. “That’s her.”

She was tall. Clear, buttery skin. Was she a fair-skinned Brazilian mulatta, an interpreter? A friend of Marie’s from the States? Her loose, sandy-colored hair blew back toward the horizon like yellow flames shooting behind a meteor. Not his usual preference -- Sonny typically found himself drawn to more petite women with dark eyes framed by lush brunette or black hair.

But this woman’s unconventional beauty was mesmerizing. If only he could see her eyes behind those oval, black sunglasses. They rested on a nose shaped like a little golden bell, pinched into a point.

Her full lips puckered slightly in the wind. They were the same shade of deep, dewy pink as the long-stem roses Popa used to bring home to Momma every Friday, after his shift at the flower shop. The same flowers Sonny placed on their side-by-side eternal resting places whenever he visited New York... and kept in his home as reminders of their hopes and dreams for him. And their lifetime of love--

My God, I could latch onto those lips and never let go...

The wind carved her white dress around an hourglass of bosom, waist and hips. The halter top cradled full breasts and a triangle of ripe, creamy cleavage.

“Welcome to Sanctuary,” he said deeply, staring at her.

She faced him, her eyes still hidden behind the sunglasses.

But he could feel her soul. It was whispering for him across the water so intensely, with such yearning, his head spun. The magnetic power between them made Sonny envision fingers of red fire shooting down from the sun, whirling in a sort of ying-yang circle with sharp waves churning up from the ocean, glowing with those diamond-dots glistening on the water. But if they tried to touch through this awesome karmic connection, would one of them get burned, or drown?

His blood pumped so fiercely, with such heat, it provoked a faint ringing in his ears. And it only got louder as her bare shoulders faced him squarely. Her delicate jaw rose slightly. She wrapped long fingers around the silver pole atop the rail. And she seemed to step forward.

“Yes, come to me,” Sonny whispered. His shoulders twitched. Goosebumps rippled from his face to his nipples and abdomen, thighs and toes.

He had the sudden vision of himself at the bottom of the sea, helplessly holding up outstretched arms, and she, like a golden mermaid swimming from a boat called Destiny, splashing down to rescue him from the dreary depths.

“Come all the way to me,” he groaned.

His skin felt electric, like when he walked through the billowing orange sheers between his paint studio at home, onto the terrace to watch the sun set over Los Angeles. On particularly dry nights, static electricity made little popping-crackling sounds, and he could actually see blue-gold sparks as the fabric brushed his skin.

That was how this woman -- this goddess delivered by Iemanja at his request -- that was how she was making him feel right now. Electrified.

Was that a smile, raising the corners of her beautiful mouth? The boat was drawing closer. The primitive rhythm of samba drums echoed his pounding heart; the lusty screams of dancers on the beach expressed all he wanted to say.

The woman’s lips, parting slowly, triggered a groan from deep inside him. It escaped into the salty wind and screams of gulls.

She raised a delicate hand, a supple arm. The color of her skin brought to mind one of his paints, butterscotch cream. The orange and white tube was sitting on his easel back home.

A thousand images1 and ideas for paintings flashed like an out-of-control slide show in his head. A glass bottle shaped like a woman’s body, scrolled with ELIXIR, topped with a porcelain knob painted like her face. Or the two of them holding hands, running through the treacherous jungle of life as a volcano spews fire in the background, and they are sprinting toward a glowing yellow ball around a house with a white picket fence. And, himself, bloody and beaten, crawling up a jagged, muddy mountain, where a lavender halo glowed around her and Asia and India, the three of them in angel wings--

“Sonny!” A man’s voice called from the dock.

But Sonny could not look away from the woman. No, his brain clicked and snapped like the camera he often used to take pictures of people and places, for future reference at his easel. Because now, if he never again saw this lovely vision of all that a woman should be, he had to make a detailed mindprint. The texture of her hair, the oval shape of her face. He would immortalize this vision tonight, after the girls practiced their song at the rehearsal dinner, after they were safe and sleeping...

He would make love to this woman’s image with the most sensuous sketching, the most tender brushstrokes. And if he could see her up close, to meet her, to know her name, to hear her voice--

“Sonny!” Yes, that was Myles. Hard footsteps echoing on the dock. But he could not turn around. The woman, she was removing her black sunglasses.

“C’mon,” Myles shouted with his New York accent, “somebody’s tryin’ to cast the Sonny Whittaker Horror Show, and you’re down on the boat alone! Bad deal, man.”

Heart exploding, palms slick, Sonny tried to look back at his best childhood friend and lawyer. “Are the girls--”

“They’re fine,” Myles said, jumping into the boat. “But Sonny, I’m hustling to get ready for this trial, and I need your help. So stop with the dreamy gaze and let’s go.”

The woman’s eyes, they were like two full moons shining toward him. Like his metallic paint called moonbeam gray. Milky blue in the center, ringed by an almost silver glow.

My God...

His very core turned white-hot.

A sudden shiver made his breath catch in his throat. His every muscle seemed to stiffen and slacken at once. And he felt as though his entire length, from his tingling toes to the hair on his head, was bursting into flame under her gaze.