Page 8 of The Sun & Her Burn

“I really don’t know what to do with you, Linnea,” Cynthia said, pinching the bridge of her nose as if I’d given her a sinus headache. “Your tits are too huge to model unless you want to do swimwear?”

I made a face thinking of some of the most famous models in the world like Cosima Lombardi and Adriana Lima. There was nowayI was appealing enough to model in next to nothing.

Besides, I actually liked acting, if I was ever given the chance to do it. I had always been reluctant to follow in any of Miranda’s footsteps, but it was a secret desire of my heart to act and do it well in something worthwhile.

“At this point, I have to think I have been more than fair to your mother in representing you when you clearly do not have what it takes to make it in the industry,” Cynthia declared, fishing papers out of her Birkin.

They fell to the bar top with an ominousthawp.

It was a termination letter.

You would think that at this point in my life, I would be used to life’s habit of kicking me in the teeth, but I still felt the blow all the way through to my feet.

“It’s just not working out,” Cynthia said with saccharine kindness, placing her hand lightly on my arm. “No one is more upset about it than me.”

I fought the urge to roll my eyes and won, a minor triumph. The dishonesty of Hollywood never failed to set my teeth on edge.

A slight ruckus behind me drew my attention over my shoulder in time to witness a tall, dark, and handsome man shove back from a table with a snarl.

“I thought you had more integrity than that,” he growled at the woman across from him as he buttoned his blazer before turning on his heel to stalk away from her. “If you print that nonsense, I’ll use every ounce of influence I have toburyyou, Isla.”

On his way toward the door, his gaze snapped up to lock with mine, and my breath arrested in my lungs.

Sebastian Lombardi.

The man I had first met ten years ago as a petulant teenager on a cold night in London by the Meyers’s swimming pool.

We had become friends during the year he lived with the couple in their Chelsea townhome, but when he moved to New York City, our relationship devolved into exchanging postcards. I still had every single one, tied off with ribbons and carefully kept in a box under my bed in Miranda’s bungalow. Even ten years on, he still wrote to me.

But I had not set eyes on him in a decade.

And time had been very, very friendly to Sebastian.

Even at eighteen years old, he had been tall and broad-shouldered with the kind of huge hands that set a female mind to fantasizing, but he was a man now, filled out and packed with dense muscle I could see beneath his close-fitting, expensive clothes. His hair was longer, maybe from a shoot, the waves more pronounced as they fell across his forehead into those tiger yellow eyes that pinned me to my seat like a predator’s.

Speaking of secret desires of my heart, Sebastian Lombardi had been lodged there since the moment I saw him arrow smoothly into the pool and break through the crust of the water, inky hair slicked back from his tanned face, full mouth parted on a breath I wanted to taste with my tongue.

“Linnea Kai?”

His voice was deeper, his accent the very same as it had been back then, thick and rich as Italian coffee. I had watched him act in films where he pressed those vowels smooth and cut his consonants into hard edges like an American, but I always preferred his voice like this. It was pure music.

“Sebastian,” I said, already standing even though I could not remember doing it. “Hey.”

Embarrassment burned through me at the trite greeting, but I was still struck dumb by our chance encounter. I knew he still lived in New York City to be close to his family and only came to LA to film or do the media circuit. The odds of running into each other had always seemed so slim that I didn’t even think to tell him I had moved to the city.

Or maybe I had, but I was too ashamed to admit why.

The anger crackling around him like an electric storm fell flat in an instant as a broad grin overtook his face. Without hesitation, he changed course to stalk toward me, not stopping until I was in his arms. I laughed breathlessly as I wrapped my own around his neck and he lifted me off my feet, a feat given how tall I was especially in heels.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” he murmured into my hair, and I thought I might have heard him inhale deeply like he was sniffing my perfume.

I grinned as he set me carefully on my feet, keeping my hands on his chest because I still wasn’t sure he was real. I’d dreamed of seeing him again in the flesh so many times, yet the moment was as surreal as a Dali painting.

“I didn’t know you were in town!”

“Doing the rounds forWaking Nightmare,” he explained with a one-shoulder shrug, but his eyes were intense on me as they scoured my face. I had forgotten how unnerving that golden stare was, how much it felt as if he could see through flesh and bone to the very center of you. “Are you busy? Now that I’ve had the good fortune to run into you, I don’t intend to let you go until we have properly caught up.”

“Catching up on a decade of life will take a while,” I warned him, but the width of my smile ruined the effect.