Page 14 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)

“You’re dangerous,” I said, sidestepping him because I couldn’t breathe right with him so close, and I was frankly terrified by my crush on him.

For the first time in my life, I understood why they called it a “crush” because it threatened to annihilate you under the weight of it against your heart.

“I think you mean charming,” he countered with a crooked smile.

“Did you just come over to flirt with my mother, or did you need something?” I asked, slanting him a look that made him laugh again.

God, I loved that husky sound and the way humor lit those sun-gold eyes.

“Actually, I was hoping to chat with you about something. Can you spare a few minutes away from her?”

I frowned, but nodded. “Sure, let me just take the flowers in to her and put on the TV. We can talk on the back porch. Do you want a glass of lemonade?”

Something about that made his lips twitch. “Why don’t you go to Miranda, and I’ll pour us some lemonade? I’ll meet you outside.”

I swallowed thickly because I liked the familiarity of having him help himself in my house.

Even if it was Miranda’s, I had made it feel like my own over the years as much as I could, repainting the outside, adding charm to the cluttered, fussy interior.

I liked having Sebastian in this space even though he seemed too large and lovely for the little house.

I placed Miranda’s flowers on her side table and put on General Hospital for her, turning on the baby monitor I’d bought so I could check on her when I wasn’t in the same room, and trailed out the back door after Seb.

He sat on the wicker loveseat, staring out at the little yard with its flowering bushes.

“You garden for her?” he asked.

I shrugged one shoulder and took a seat beside him, lifting one foot onto the cushion to hug my knee before accepting the glass he handed me.

“She likes having a pretty garden. In London, Wyndam used to surprise her with all these exotic varieties.”

Sebastian stared at me for a long moment, his gaze so penetrating I thought he could see through my skin and bones to the secrets and dreams I had written in invisible ink on my soul.

“You’re something else, trottolina ,” he murmured. “Which is why I wanted to talk to you. You promised that if I had a reasonable offer to make your life better, you’d take it.”

I blinked. “I believe I said, if you had a reciprocal offer that would be good for both of us, I would hear you out.”

“I have one, only it’s not exactly for me,” Sebastian admitted. “Do you remember our conversation about Adam? I told you that he’d recently been the cause of some…speculation.”

“Yeah,” I said slowly, trying to figure out where this could possibly be going.

“Well, without going into particulars before you agree to meet with him, he could use an image boost in the media. A contractual relationship with someone who would agree to be his girlfriend, be seen out with him going to events and dinners etc. until everything cools down.”

I crinkled my nose. “Like a prostitute?”

“ Cazzo , Linnea, not like a prostitute.” His shocked and dismayed expression was so pure, it made me smile despite myself. “Like a fake girlfriend. It would help with the gossip surrounding him, especially when he is on the precipice of securing a role he has always dreamed of.”

“The Daventry part?” I asked because while I didn’t keep up with celebrity gossip, I did track film news, and it had been all over the news that Adam Meyers was up for the role of the iconic British spy.

Seb dipped his chin. “Yes. He’s worked hard all his life, and he’s meraviglioso , a true generational talent. He deserves not only the role of a lifetime but to be free of this gossip about his sexuality.”

“Ah.” I was shocked by the idea that Adam Meyers was into men, if only because his marriage to Savannah and string of girlfriends since had been so well documented. “He needs a beard, then.”

“He likes women,” Sebastian said firmly, but the words carefully left room for conjecture.

He liked women, but he might also have been attracted to men.

Interesting.

“Do you have a problem with that?” he asked, his voice cooler than I’d ever heard it.

I met his eyes, noting the way his jaw clenched and his eyes went stale.

“Hardly. I hooked up with my best girl friend when I was eleven, and I’ve been attracted to all kinds of people my whole life. It would be hypocritical of me to judge others, wouldn’t it?” I asked with my own sharp smile.

I was used to defending myself. When Miranda found out about my first girlfriend in high school, she had insisted I move to England to live with her and Wyndam. She said it was to better my education, but Dad and I both thought it was to split Kaleigh and I up.

Sebastian blinked at me, obviously caught off guard by my blasé confession.

My smile softened and turned sly. “Are you imagining me with a woman, now, Sebastian?”

He swallowed thickly but returned his usual charming grin. “Would you blame me if I did?”

“Just as long as you know my bisexuality isn’t something performative to turn men on,” I allowed. “I may be a two on the Kinsey Scale, but I’ve loved women before, and I could again.”

“I do not think I have ever met someone so comfortable with themselves,” Sebastian said, a thread of awe in his voice. “You must teach me.”

I laughed. “You seem secure enough in yourself.”

He shrugged one shoulder, twisting slightly so that his knee was up on the seat pressed into my thigh. “In many ways, not all. I try to be kind to myself, though.”

“Me too. Life is too short and too frequently horrible to spend it hating myself for who I am.”

“You know, I absolutely agree with you. Which is why I think you are just the woman to date Adam.”

It was my turn to blink, so shocked by his proposition, my thoughts turned to static as my brain went off-line.

Date Adam Meyers?

Four-time Academy Award winner Adam Meyers.

Once married to Savannah Meyers with a history of dating Hollywood’s hottest actresses and models.

A man so gorgeous that he’d been voted Sexiest Man Alive twice and his billboard for the movie Stranded on Sunset Boulevard had to be taken down because the sight of him shirtless and wet in the Pacific Ocean had caused too many fender-benders.

Not to mention, he was thirty-eight, twelve years older than me and infinitely more experienced.

I may have spent one dreamlike afternoon with him in southern England teaching Sebastian and him how to surf, but it was an isolated incident. I never spoke to him before or after even though we were not infrequently in the same vicinity because Savannah and Miranda were friends.

It was a memory I cherished, evidence that a perfect day could exist.

“What?” I finally asked.

Sebastian bit the edge of his grin at my reaction. “I know it seems unorthodox, but you were the one to encourage me to help him.”

“I meant buy the guy a coffee or lend him a kind ear,” I spat incredulously. “Not loan me out to him like some benevolent pimp.”

“Linnea.” His voice was a cross between a growl and a chuckle, as if he was both appalled and amused by me.

He took my flailing hands in his, smoothing his thumbs over my knuckles.

“This is neither a joke nor some kind of scandalous proposition. This is me seeing two people I care about who need help and providing a solution. You would enter a contractual agreement with Adam to pretend to be his girlfriend, to appear with him in public, with the understanding that absolutely nothing sexual would occur between you. And in exchange, he would pay you and, intentionally and incidentally, help you with your career. Believe it or not, this kind of arrangement exists in Hollywood.”

When I opened my mouth to protest again, he continued, “This isn’t just about the fact that you—that Miranda —needs help. This is also about your dreams. You are too young to have given up on yourself.”

“I haven’t given up,” I bit out, suddenly furious with him.

Wrenching my hands away, I stood to pace along the porch, needing the movement to work out my frenetic thoughts.

“Life isn’t easy, Sebastian, and sometimes you have to make choices.

I made the choice to come to Los Angeles and help Miranda.

I still go on auditions, even if it’s not as frequently as I’d like, and I still work on my designs.

We may have been friends for a long time, but only through those letters.

Don’t pretend you know me or what I most long for, all right? ”

I finished standing before him, the air too hot and fast through my lungs, a vibrating finger pointing in his face.

Sebastian only stared at me placidly, resting his ankle on top of the opposite knee.

“ Bene , Linnea. Tell me, what is it then that you most long for?”

What an impossible question to answer even though I’d essentially goaded him into asking it.

I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to take him by the neck and shake him.

Love! Success! Security!

But a quiet voice, almost a whisper yet impossible to ignore, said something different.

A witness , it spoke.

Someone to be with me through all the peaks and troughs of life. To see how hard I struggled and strived to be better, to hold me when I needed a hug, to observe even those things I did not want anyone to know about myself and to somehow make me feel better about them.

Companionship was too tame a word.

A lover seemed too shallow.

I wanted someone to stand beside me in this cruel and glorious universe and never stop holding my hand.

I wanted him .

And Sebastian had just made it painfully obvious he was so uninterested in me romantically that he was willing to offer me for a fake relationship with a man he barely even knew anymore.

Pain and confusion tangled up in my throat and made it hard to breathe.

When I visibly struggled to find words, Sebastian dropped his foot to the ground and leaned forward on the bench to gently take my hands. He was so tall that even though he was seated and I was standing, I didn't have to look down far to see into those topaz eyes.

“You said to me that you do not wish to be alone,” he said softly, his gaze searching my face for what I didn’t have the vocabulary to say.

“I understand that sentiment very well, and Linnea, no one knows that feeling as well as Adam. He has been alone for too long, and now he is struggling under the weight and scrutiny of a scandal that could take his only dream from him. I do not tell you this so that you will do this out of pity. I tell you this so that you know the two of you have more in common than you might think. That beyond helping two friends out of difficult situations, I am proposing this deal because I think it could help you both heal.”

“I’m not broken,” I said, an automatic argument because I wasn’t.

I was a twenty-six-year-old woman with her health, her beauty, and her brains, a roof over her head, and a family back in Maui who loved her.

Sebastian raised a brow and then slowly lifted my hands between us to showcase the way my nail beds were ripped apart, some stained with blood, the others scabbed over. It was a stress tic I’d developed as a girl, picking at my nails until they were open wounds.

I didn’t remember ever telling Sebastian about it, but wasn’t that part of his power? That he could look at a person and see through to their underbelly, no matter how layered their mask was?

Wasn’t that secretly why I had not told him when I moved to LA?

A part of me had known he would swoop in to save the day because he simply could not help himself from sticking out his neck for the ones he loved.

“He hurt you,” I said, as a last-ditch attempt to get out of this deal that seemed both too good to be true and a horrifically bad idea. “I don’t know if I can be friends, even fake friends, with someone who could hurt you the way he so obviously did.”

Every muscle in Seb’s body tensed for a moment before he gathered a deep breath and expelled it in a controlled exhale.

“I have thought a lot about that over the years. The truth is, I knew what I was getting into when I agreed to our unusual arrangement. Savannah isn’t the kind of woman to take no for an answer, but how was it going to ever end but in agony, hmm?

I was an eighteen-year-old chauffeur, and they were married. ”

He shrugged as if none of it mattered, but his eyes were stale with old wounds. “Honestly, something about helping you both like this feels like closure. Like something good coming out of the bad. Maybe Adam and I can find our way to being friends again.”

“Well,” I said after a moment, forcing humor into my tone to mask the noxious mix of hope and fear wrapping strong hands around my throat.

“You’ll have to be if I agree to this. I don’t intend to lose your friendship now that we are living in the same city, and if I’m supposed to be…

” I wrinkled my nose. “Dating this guy, then you’ll be around each other. ”

Sebastian laughed, a full-bellied movement that erased the unease from his expression.

When he finished, his eyes were sparkling, and he used his grip on my hands to tug me forward into his lap, a ploy I was beginning to think was his trademark.

I settled easily on his lap, though, looping my arms around his neck and staring down into that happy face.

“You know, most women would be falling over themselves for even the chance to fake date Adam Meyers,” he informed me.

I would have fallen over myself to date him, but again, that didn’t seem to be an option on the table.

I shrugged. “I grew up around celebrities, the only person I’ll ever willingly fall over myself for is Taylor Swift. What I wouldn’t give to meet her.”

Sebastian laughed again, holding me close enough that I could feel the way the humor moved through his strong body.

I watched him, brushing my fingertips through the short hairs on the back of his neck, and wondered how the hell I could ever pull off being in love with another man when I was falling head over heels for the one sitting me in his lap.