Page 88 of The Sun & Her Burn

Linnea laughter lit up the car, drawing Sinclair’s and Giselle’s attention momentarily before they went back to whispering and kissing.

“I will believe it when I see it,” she teased.

Teased.

The affection was so clear it burned like the touch of unfiltered sunlight.

“I believe it, though I’ve never seen it,” Sebastian murmured, drawing my notice. His lids were low over those tiger-yellow eyes, his mouth parted so his tongue could touch the rim of his lower lip as if tasting a sense memory. “You’ve always moved well for such a big man.”

It was stifling warm in this infernal SUV, but I didn’t yank at my collar as I so wanted to.

“What else do you remember about the way I move, Sebastian?” I drawled, just to affect him the way he had me.

The hitch in his breath felt like an Olympian victory.

This is a very bad idea, I told myself, and found, much to my horror, I did not possess the willpower to care.

We pulled up in front of Temptations to find the entryway packed with paparazzi and fashionably clad Angelenos, but the moment we alighted from the car, the bouncers converged to make a path for us.

“Adam,” someone yelled over the chaos. “Are the rumors about you and Oscar Hampton true?”

It took every single ounce of experience as an actor not to flinch from the question. A moment later, Linnea was pushing up under my arm, wrapping her own around my waist so that we were pressed intimately together.

She shot a megawatt smile at the asshole who’d hollered at me and responded blithely, “Should I be jealous you aren’t asking about me?”

A few of the paps laughed at her, and one obeyed her unspoken requested by asking, “Linnea Kai, are you and Adam in love?”

Behind me, Sebastian pressed a hand to my back even though he was turned away from the cameras to fade into the background as we paused to address the question. Giselle and Sinclair were already ahead of us, waiting at the door.

“What do you think, Mr. Meyers?” she practically purred, turning into me and running both hands up my torso, around my neck, and into my hair in a blatant act of possession.

In the sparkling lights of the camera flashes, her eyes seemed iridescent.

“Do you love me?” she asked me, smiling through the words.

I palmed her throat, letting that bestial side of me show for a moment. Both because the media would love it, and because I wanted to mark her and show them—show her—just how much I wanted her to be mine.

“How can someone resist loving the sun when it shines so brightly down on them?” I asked before I bent down to kiss her.

It was our second kiss ever and tonight.

Both performative.

But I had never, in all my years acting with dozens of co-stars and handfuls of love scenes, felt so moved by my own demonstration.

I wanted to pour myself down her sweet, citrus-flavored lips until she was claimed inside and out by every inch of me. It wasn’t just about possession. It was about feeling safe.

Linnea had given me a safe haven in the shite storm of my life, a place so free of judgement and constraints it made me free to hope again. Free to feel.

So I kissed her for the cameras, and I kissed her to escape them.

And in the end, I forgot why I was kissing her at all other than to keep feeling those lips on mine, the long line of her curves against my own.

Sebastian’s hand on my back shifted and dug into the muscles at the base of my spine.

A reminder that I was not at all alone.

The flashing lights of the cameras madly licking away left me half blind as I pulled away from Linnea and tucked her back under my arm.