Page 45 of The Sun & Her Burn

“Oh, don’t worry, people will see evidence of our date. Besides, I think you could use some loosening up, and if we just go to some fancy restaurant downtown, there is no way I’ll get to know the real you.”

The real me.

What a concept.

I had not made any new friends or true connections in years, as if my heart had frozen after the trauma of losing my male lover and my wife a decade ago.

Perhaps it had.

And that almost painful sensation in my chest now that Sebastian was back in my life, thrusting Linnea into it too, was the return of feeling to that essential organ.

“I am much less interesting than the characters I play on screen,” I warned her, uncharacteristically defensive.

“I highly doubt that. Let’s play a game.”

“A game,” I echoed.

“Yes, it’s called questions. I can ask you anything, and you have to answer honestly, but I have to do the same.”

“That isn’t a game, Linnea. It’s an interrogation.”

“Po-tate-oh,” she said, “poh-tah-toh. You can go first if you’re scared.”

I wanted to argue that this was a childish game, but I was curious about her, too.

What kind of girl changed her whole life to take care of a mother who didn’t deserve her?

What type of woman agreed to a fake marriage with a grumpy celebrity for three years of her life when she was young, and gorgeous, and fun enough to find true love herself?

“If your mother and money weren’t obstacles, what would you be doing right now?”

She hummed, drumming her fingers along to the beat of the music as we drove out onto the highway heading south.

“I don’t think I’ve ever really thought about that,” she mused, almost a little surprised. “Even before Miranda got sick, I had my dad and uncles to take care of.”

“Usually that’s the other way around, isn’t it?”

She shrugged. “Probably, but my dad was only twenty-two when I was born, and his brothers were all still in their teens. I kind of feel like I grew up with them. They started a boat charter company when I was a kid, and I was helping them out before I needed a training bra.”

A surprised chuckle worked its way free from my throat.

She was so guileless it was impossible to guard myself against it. I had spent years erecting walls against the kind of cultivated pressure of personas that abounded in Hollywood and back home in the aristocratic circles of my father, but Linnea’s bright personality warmed me like sun through the woodgrain.

“I would be acting,” she continued, weaving through traffic like an LA native.

“Television or film?”

“Film,” she said instantly, then winced. “Not that I’m some highbrow who thinks one is better than the other. I just like the idea of the versatility, traveling to different places to shoot, and donning new characters every year. There has always been a great deal of sameness in my life, and I developed a craving for change. For excitement.”

The words shouldn’t have been erotic, but somehow, they made my blood heat. Change? Excitement? Those were things I was capable of giving her in spades.

If only our agreement allowed for a baser kind of understanding.

I thought of Sebastian’s uncharacteristic snappishness when I’d flirted with her about that very idea, and my gut cramped.

He was attracted to her. That much was obvious.

Any man with half a pulse would have been. More than her build—her heavy breasts, the nip in her waist, those endless legs caramelized from long hours in the sun, curiously attractive feet ending in toes painted sunshine yellow—she had an innate sensuality that spoke like a whisper in the dark. It begged you to wonder what you might do to her and she to you in the deepest hours of the night with only the moon to witness your shared depravities.