Page 35 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)

I rolled my eyes so hard they almost stuck that way, making Ro and another girl, Shirley, laugh.

“I told you I’m not leaving to be his stay-at-home wifey,” I reminded them.

Dan, a gorgeous gay man who applied makeup like a wizard, batted his mascaraed eyes at me. “Don’t be coy, honey. We all know no one in their right mind would resist that future.”

“There’s nothing wrong with lying around naked all day waiting to serve that fine piece of ass,” Mary agreed.

“If we were ever friends, you’ll send pics,” Paris teased.

“Naked ones,” Dan qualified.

I laughed, covering my face with my hands. “You lot are incorrigible.”

“Just tell us, is he as well-endowed as I imagine in my dreams?” Mary asked.

I mimed zipping my lips. “No comment.”

“That means hell yes,” Rozhin translated.

There was a series of longing sighs.

“But in all seriousness,” Ro said, slinging her arm around my shoulders to tug me in for a kiss on my cheek. “You’ll remember us when you’re rich and famous, right?”

“Like I could ever forget you,” I promised. “And stop acting like I’m skipping town. We’ll still see each other.”

She pouted. “It’ll be different. It is different. You’re on the up and up, now.”

“Bitch,” Paris joked, elbowing me in the side.

“Astrid worked here, you know,” Shirley said, referring to Astrid Meeker, a relatively well-known TV actress who starred in a supernatural show. “She literally never spoke to any of us again.”

“I’m not Astrid,” I pointed out with a raised brow, smiling at myself when I realized it was an Adam mannerism.

“No, you are not.” Ro shmushed her face to mine as Mary fed me a piece of cake.

“Okay, okay,” our manager, Patrick, said as he came into the hub. “As sad as we all are to see Linnea go, is it too much to ask for you all to get back on the floor?”

There was a general grumbling, but everyone grabbed their things and exited the hub like good little worker bees leaving the hive.

Patrick stopped me before I could follow suit, his hand on my arm, our bodies close in the narrow neck of the hub before it spilled into the hall.

“I’m serious. We will miss you here,” he said quietly, his big brown eyes soft.

I offered him a little smile, a careful one, because Patrick had wanted to get in my pants for a long time, and I wasn’t about to give him the wrong idea about the kind of send-off I wanted now.

He was cute and sweet, and, unlike most of the other people at Affaire, he didn’t sleep around with back- or front-of-house staff. Rozhin had always thought I was crazy not to at least take him for a spin, but she didn’t know the secret desires of my heart.

She didn’t know I liked to be put on my knees, bent and folded like intricate origami by a master who was deft enough to handle me.

Patrick simply didn’t have it in him to satisfy me in the ways I’d always preferred.

“Adam Meyers is a lucky man,” he said, just a little edge of bitterness there.

My smile curled deeper. “Many would say I’m the lucky one.”

“Those people don’t know you,” he said simply.

And I thought it was one of the loveliest things anyone had ever said to me.

I patted his arm and pushed out into the restaurant toward my section to wrap up the last of my tables before Dan took over for the night shift.

Seven plates were carefully balanced in my arms when I looked up from clearing a table to see Sebastian walking towards me.

He hadn’t seen me yet, so I took a moment to catalogue how gorgeous he looked in black trousers, a knit, short-sleeved button-up, and slick leather loafers.

His ankles were shockingly sexy and tanned, exposed between the hem and the shoe in the European fashion of foregoing socks.

He had shaved his usual stubble, revealing the strong planes of his face, and his hair was carefully gelled back from his forehead in perfect waves.

It was as if the restaurant took a collective deep breath of appreciation as he moved through the space, all eyes on him.

So it took me a moment to notice who was with him.

A short, curvy redhead in a lavender sundress that swirled around her ankles the way her curls tumbled around her heavy breasts. She looked like some goddess emerged from the ocean, something beautiful and faintly dangerous.

For one heart-stopping moment, I felt rage consume me like the building had crashed over my head, crumbling my bones to dust.

Jealousy, I realized, after struggling to take a deep breath, was what I was feeling.

And completely unfounded, I noted a moment later, when a tall, lean auburn-haired man cut through the restaurant in their wake until he caught up with them at a table in Mary’s section.

He slid a palm over the woman’s lower back as he held out the chair for her, only moving away after she was seated and had rewarded his gentlemanly behavior with a kiss that was slightly inappropriate for public consumption.

The pressure eased from my chest, and I sucked in a relieved breath.

Giselle Sinclair and her husband, Daniel Sinclair.

Sebastian’s sister, a renowned artist specializing in provocative paintings, and the French businessman who owned, among other properties, this very restaurant.

Sensing me, or perhaps noticing the woman standing still as a statue in the middle of the restaurant carrying one too many plates, Sebastian looked up from his seat at the table and directly locked eyes with me.

I had the pleasure of watching warmth suffuse his features, his eyes the colour of the candlelight flickering atop each table.

I quirked a lopsided grin at him before slightly shrugging my shoulders to indicate the plates and hightailed it into the kitchen. It was steamy, too hot, and cacophonous, but it felt like an oasis after the tumult of feelings I had experienced in the dining room.

I had no right to be jealous of anyone Sebastian might date.

Not when I was ostensibly dating his ex-lover and best friend.

Not when he’d had the choice to date me for real and passed it up as if he had never been tempted.

“You okay, Lins?” one of the sous chefs asked as he carefully spooned fragrant butter over a steak in a sizzling pan a few feet from me.

I nodded and gave him a wan smile before heading back through the kitchen toward the locker room.

My shirt smelled of seafood sauce and that particular greasy kind of smoke that came from spending too long near a working kitchen.

The scent also permeated my thick hair, so I unwound it from its complicated Dutch braids and spritzed with some perfume from my purse before switching out my uniform for the last time.

I changed into a delicate white lace dress that hugged my curves until just above my knees where it flared slightly into a frothy hemline.

It was one of the newest pieces I’d finished in the late hours of the night when I was too wired to sleep even though I was exhausted.

I hadn’t created so many designs in years , but being on Adam’s arm had inspired me.

I wanted to look good, not just for the paps but also for him.

Though, I had originally packed this dress to impress an entirely different man. Adam, who would be picking me up any minute for a date to celebrate my last night serving at Affaire.

I groaned and banged my head lightly against the locker door after I cleared it out.

Was I officially the greediest girl in existence for lusting after not just one gorgeous movie star but two? Was it beyond wild for me to think that maybe—just maybe—if I tread forward carefully, I could have them both?

Or, more correctly, we could all have each other?

Even if being with Adam and Sebastian was a pipe dream for me, I’d do what I could to bring them back into each other’s lives. Some people were meant to exist in each other’s orbit, and those two were a perfect example of that.

“ Buonasera, trottolina mia .”

I closed my eyes as I huffed out a laugh.

“Great,” I muttered. “Now you’re hallucinating him.”

A smoky chuckle alerted me to the fact that I was not .

When I twirled around, Seb stood in the doorway to the locker room, arms crossed over his chest as he casually leaned against the wall.

There was a smug, mischievous grin on his face like a teenage boy who had found himself in the girls’ locker room.

“How did you get back here?” I asked, a little breathless with surprise and a surge of arousal.

His mouth ticked higher on one side as he pushed off the wall and strolled languidly toward me. My throat ticked dryly as I swallowed hard, frozen in place by the look in his eye as he stood too close and raised a hand to brush a wayward wave out of my face.

“I walked,” he teased softly.

“But why? You’re here with your family.”

“I am,” he agreed easily. “My sister and her family have moved nearby, and my mother is in town to help with the children while they get settled. It was my turn to pick the restaurant, and I found I didn’t want to waste another day without seeing you.”

“Sebastian,” I murmured, transfixed by his intensity, the way those golden eyes seemed to burn through to the core of me and light it all on fire. “What are you doing?”

“Being honest,” he said with a flippant shrug that was at odds with the way he stared at me. “Is that so hard to believe?”

“Why now?” I asked. “When things are so complicated?”

He looked at the floor for a moment, shoving his hands in his pockets as if to restrain himself from reaching out to me. After a long pause, he looked back up at me through his thick black lashes, and his expression was ravaged.

“How do you give someone a heart that has already been claimed and broken?” he asked with raw sincerity. “How do you know if the pieces left inside your chest are even good enough to share?”

“Is this about Adam or Savannah?” I asked baldly because even though I wanted to fixate on the “me” part of the equation, his eyes were too haunted to focus on that.