Page 66 of The Sun & Her Burn

“I made him,” I agreed. It felt like chewing glass. “I’ve regretted it every day for the last ten years even though I probably wouldn’t change a thing even if I could go back in time.”

“Why?” she asked.

As if it was a simple question.

As if there was a single answer I could give her.

“If I knew why, I wouldn’t have descended into a bottle for so many years,” I told her before taking a sip of the sparkling water she’d bought me without asking, forsaking the selection of beer and wine. “I wouldn’t still be in therapy.”

“Yeah,” Linnea agreed on a sigh. “When I was young, I used to think that if you could figure out the problem, it would just fix itself. It took growing up to realize localizing the issue is just the first step, and sometimes you never figure it all out.”

“I believe it is the December figure who is supposed to be the wise one in a May/December romance,” I lectured her.

She wrinkled her nose at me and stuck out her tongue.

“Much better,” I agreed, impulsively biting the end of that scrunched nose.

When I pulled back, there was such a lovely look of tenderness on her face that I forgot to breathe for the second time that day.

“Oh, Adam,” she said softly, not pitying but empathetic, as if my hurts were hers. “What are we going to do with you?”

“Ply me with fried foods and play passive-aggressive games with my ex-wife?” I suggested dryly.

She shook her head, golden hair slithering over her shoulder and releasing her heady perfume.

“You could have him,” she said honestly. “If you wanted him. Sebastian is not the kind of man who falls out of love, I think.”

I blinked at her, suddenly enraged that she would say that.

Both that itcouldbe true and that it couldn’t be farther from it.

“So could you,” I breathed, the words punched out of me.

Her mouth twisted. “If he had wanted something more than friendship, he could have asked me out instead of wrapping a bow around my neck and gifting me to you.”

“Sebastian is nothing if not a martyr,” I said wryly. “He would always give up his own happiness for someone else’s. He thought you needed this more than you needed him.”

She cocked her head as if considering it, propping her chin in her hand as she tapped a french fry over her mouth.

“You know, for a very long time, he was all I wanted,” she mused. “But now that I am starting to know him better, I get the sense that I fantasized about a myth, and I want to get to know the man.” She slid her gaze coyly to mine, long lashes casting deep shadows on her cheeks, which were painted pink in the setting sunlight. “I feel that same way about you.”

“That I’m a man of mystery,” I said with an arrogant smirk to deflect that intimacy we were building so tightly around each other.

“That I might like the man much more than I liked the legend,” she explained solemnly. “That I feel privileged to get to see behind the mask, however exquisitely you’ve crafted it.”

Something icy slid down my spine, real fear, the kind I hadn’t felt since Sebastian Lombardi moved into my carriage house ten years ago, and the tectonic plates of my life had begun to shift beneath my feet.

“You don’t know the first thing about the real me,” I told her, baldly, even a little cruelly. “If you did, you would not have such a romantic look in your eye. I may have been bred a gentleman, Linnea, but I am a natural-born sinner. The extent of which would make your innocent ears burn.”

“You can’t shock me,” she protested. “I may be younger than you, but I’ve been a curious girl all my life. Perhaps some of my exploits would appallyou.”

This was dangerous territory in a way our previous conversation—which I had been so desperate to change—was not.

I did not need to think of Linnea as a hot-blooded creature with curious fantasies and a wealth of experience. Best to let her remain an untainted saint-like figure, too young and innocent to experiment in my infernal playground.

She was already too gorgeous to ignore, the lush curves and long limbs, the perpetually tousled hair that begged for a firmgrip so that one could plunder the soft, full set of that sassy mouth.

God, the things I would do to her without even knowing how many things she might want to do to me in return.