Page 7 of The Sun & Her Burn

“What rumors?” I asked, suddenly bored with this game and conversation.

My gaze kept slipping back to the vibrant blonde at the bar, hoping to catch a glimpse of her face if she turned in her seat. Something about her called to me, faint as a siren’s song buried beneath the rhythm of waves. A recognition.

“About Adam Meyers,” Isla said, waiting with a coy smile when my gaze snapped back to her.

My heart lodged in my threat, beating so rapidly I thought I might gag.

Like a shark sensing blood in the water, Isla reached into her purse and retrieved a folded magazine I recognized as a trashy gossip rag. She handed it over like a magician pullinga rabbit from a hat, all smug superiority, waiting with tangible anticipation as I read the headline before dropping the curtain.

“The rumor is that he’s gay.”

3

LINNEA

“You still smell like salt.”

I sighed as I accepted my glass of sparkling water from the bartender, a man named Harry who’d taken me on a few dates last spring, hiding my sigh behind the lip as I took a much-needed sip.

“The waves were too good to pass up this morning,” I admitted even though Cynthia already knew that was where I had been.

She always knew.

Cynthia Gadon did not like me very much, but she had taken me on as an agency client as a favor to my mother, who was one of her oldest friends. Even though it was obvious she wished she could drop me, she wouldn’t. Not now, when this favor absolved her of visiting Miranda in her current state.

“You were late for the audition,” she informed me.

I tried not to roll my eyes. “Is that what they told you? Because I wasearly,and the only reason I couldn’t get into the room on time was because the casting director’s son wouldn’t let me through the doors until I agreed to go out with him.”

Cynthia bared her veneers at me, pale mauve-painted lips peeled back like a chimp’s. “You should have just agreed, Linnea. Why do you always have to make things more difficult for yourself?”

“More difficult for myself?” I echoed slowly, rage curling my fingers into claws around my glass. “How is it that men behaving badly ismyproblem?”

“The Me Too movement is over,” Cynthia started to lecture me, as she always did whenever I brought up issues like this at my auditions or on the rare project I landed. “You need to get your shit together and be professional.”

I closed my eyes and forced myself to take a deep breath so I wouldn’t bite her head off.

“I take it they didn’t ask me to come back for a second round?” I asked blandly even though the thought sucked.

It wasn’t like I was thrilled to be in a series of commercials for a national burger chain, but Miranda and I needed the money desperately.

As the tabloids had claimed eighteen months ago, “how the gold digger hath fallen.”

When my mother, Miranda, was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, her husband at the time—Paul, number five, a tech millionaire who was six years younger than Miranda herself—promptly divorced her and left her to care for herself.

Only Miranda had not cared for herself for a single moment in her entire forty-five years of life.

So, when she called panicked and weeping to say she needed my help, what was I going to do? Turn down the only mother I’d ever had?

Dad said I owed her nothing. She had given me half my DNA, but little more.

I didn’t exactly agree. Miranda Hildebrand loved me as much as she had the capacity to love anyone, which was to say, not very much. There was no doubt in my mind that she had a narcissistic personality disorder, so everything in life related to her and her desires. When I was younger, her British husband had decided he wanted them to be a perfect little family, complete with her estranged American daughter. So Miranda had hauled me out of public school in Maui, where I lived with my dad and uncles, to a posh private school in London.

For just shy of two years, she had tried her best to be a mother, but her husband, Wyndam, had actually been the better parent.

When I left in tears the night after my high school graduation, I never expected to see Miranda again, and I was not disappointed by the prospect.

Yet here I was, haggling with a woman who disliked me about a gig in a national burger commercial just to pay for Miranda’s bills.