Page 36 of The Sun & Her Burn

“I mean it,” he pressed. “Acting is my passion and my profession. It will seem very often as if I love you and am the type of bloke worthy of your love in return. That allusion is a lie, Linnea. I won’t ever love again, do you understand?”

My gut soured at his sincerity. How could a man who stressed how young he was not understand how deeply wrong it was to close himself off to love for the rest of his life?

“I have no intentions of falling in love with you, Adam,” I said after taking a moment to collect myself.

It was the truth, too. I was currently in danger of losing my heart to an entirely different man with golden eyes and a pure heart of gold. I might be moved by Adam’s blatant sensuality and authority and intrigued by his broken, brooding nature, but there was no way I would ever get seriously involved in a very fake relationship.

I wasn’t an idiot.

“I know you probably aren’t used to hearing this, given you’re famous and fairly good-looking,” I continued with a wave of my hand as if those traits were meaningless. “But you are not actually irresistible.” At his look of wary surprise, I grinned. “Besides, I’m not into old men.”

“Thirty-eight is notold,” he snapped.

When our picture appeared on the most popular gossip website, The Backlot, the following morning, it captured the moment that followed and my head thrown back in belly-deep laughter.

9

ADAM

It was all over the media outlets by the following morning.

Adam Meyers has a new mystery woman.

No one had the time to figure out her identity, which I was grateful for, if only because Linnea had not yet actually signed the papers. We would discuss the particulars and our game plan when she arrived in an hour, accompanied by her lawyer.

And Sebastian.

My gut had been in knots since the moment I saw Linnea in Affaire last night. She looked nothing like the tall, gangly girl with bushy brows I remembered from a decade ago.

I had stood at the entrance while the host fetched the manager for me and watched Linnea Kai as she swept through her section with unconscious grace and a sway to her hips. She smiled easily and often, the expression bright enough to make me blink even from where I stood across the vast space from her. I watched as she laughed with an elderly couple, her thick mass of honeyed waves spilling down her back to the small of her tiny waist, her hands moving fluidly as she spoke. It wasn’tmerely her beauty that arrested me, but her animation, those large, expressive eyes and mobile mouth, the way she seemed committed to every emotion that churned through her.

Sebastian had a similar quality, a catching kind of passion that infected the most reluctant soul.

By the end of the night, after surviving Linnea’s sass and assertiveness, I knew it wasn’t quite the same magic that our Italian friend possessed.

In Linnea, it was expressed as enthusiasm.

A bright, effervescent curiosity about the world and everything in it.

After she playfully agreed never to fall in love with me, Linnea had insisted she get back to work even though the manager had assured me it was fine if she took the rest of the evening off. So I’d remained at the table to eat dinner alone and watch her interact with customers as they filled her section once more.

I couldn’t remember a thing about what I’d eaten even though Chef Devereaux was one of the best in the country, but I was left with a lasting impression of Linnea’s laugh as she chatted easily with her guests.

A frothy giggle like uncorked champagne spilled from the bottle.

I wondered what might have happened if I had run into her organically. Maybe one morning when I was jogging on the beach and she was out surfing, or a night at Affaire when I went for dinner with Chaucer and Rachel.

But the train of thought hit an abrupt dead end. The brutal truth was that I had lost interest in romance long ago, and one look into those vivid violet-blue eyes would have been enough to tell me this woman deserved a love for the ages.

I had already let down someone like that once in my life, and I wouldn’t survive if I did it again.

Despite all of that, I could not stop thinking about Linnea as I paced the kitchen, waiting for my ex-lover and future faux-lover to arrive. I had the terrible premonition that this arrangement was a truly disastrous idea.

“This is a fool’s scheme,” I declared for maybe the third time that day. “She’ll be eaten alive in the press, and I’ll be left worse off than I already am.”

Chaucer sighed. “It’s really not. And I hate to break it to you, Adam, but I’m not sure it can get worse than Oscar actually releasing the tape.”

“I still can’t believe you were stupid enough to make a sex tape,” Rachel, my agent, said with a shake of her head.