Page 38 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)

ADAM

I had often imagined meeting Sebastian’s family properly.

What kind of people had helped formed such a man, such a masterpiece?

It was a question that had kept me awake at night many nights in the wake of his leaving me—of me demanding he do so.

He had spoken of them so often, the women in his life, and with a ferocity of love and loyalty that often left me feeling slightly, even childishly, jealous.

I wanted him to feel that way about me even though the idea also petrified me.

Of course, his entire family wasn’t present at the table. His twin sister, Cosima, was holed up in England, about to give birth to triplets, and his eldest sister, Elena, was at home in New York City with her husband and three children.

But meeting Caprice, Giselle, and Sinclair was wonderfully insightful.

They teased Sebastian playfully but mercilessly about his stardom, a cowlick in his hair that caused a lock to fall constantly across his forehead, and his unique ability to state the year a film had been made and its director, from blockbuster to totally obscure.

I had read somewhere that teasing was a sign of love and intimacy, but this was perhaps the first time I understood how that could be true.

Linnea joined in as if she had been born into the family.

She had that magical ability to be at ease in any situation, so comfortable in her own skin that it did not occur to her to doubt herself.

I wondered if it was a result of growing up with a famous mother who had also mostly abandoned her, in contrast to the wild love and stability she had experienced in Maui with her father and uncles.

By the time Chef Devereaux brought out dessert—a citrus confection of lemon meringue, raspberry coulis, yuzu mousse and dark chocolate curls—Linnea was even bantering with Daniel Sinclair, a man known professionally to be as cool and aloof as they came.

I was, unfortunately, ridiculously charmed by the entire evening, but particularly by the two people who had so quickly become the center spokes of my life.

Sebastian and Linnea.

So, after Sinclair tried to pay for the bill only to discover that I had taken care of it on a trip to the toilet and then tried to argue with me senselessly about it, I found myself agreeing to go with the group to Sinclair’s night club, Temptations.

We all piled into an enormous SUV Sinclair had ordered after saying goodbye to Caprice, who declared herself too old to party into the wee hours of the evening, and suddenly, I was pressed tightly between Seb and Linnea.

My throat went dry at the feel of them lined up against either side of me and the spicy, ocean salt taste of them both on my tongue.

After so many inventive experiences in the back of the Rolls-Royce in London, cars had become a strange aphrodisiac for me, not to mention the two people beside me.

The savagery of the desire that barrelled through me was almost terrifying, a bloodlust, a ravening that called me ripped into their clothes like a beast and rut until they both felt and smelled like mine.

“All right?” Sebastian asked in a typically British manner that reminded me of our time together in London.

We were so close that his nose brushed the hair over my ear as he spoke, and a shiver bit into my spine and shook it like a rabid dog.

I clenched my hands on my thighs.

Why had I agreed to wine with dinner?

I almost never drank anymore. Maybe a celebratory glass of champagne or a very cold lager on a hot summer’s day, but mostly I was sober.

Alcohol had been my crutch in those bleak years after Savannah and Seb had left me, and when I pulled myself, with Chaucer’s help, out of that dark place, I had resolved never to let booze derail my life again.

Yet here I was, buzzing just slightly but still enough to crank up the volume of the wicked fantasies whispering in the warm dark of my subconscious.

“Perhaps I should take Linnea home,” I said carefully, the words clicking against my teeth like ice cubes.

Seb reared back as far from me as he could, and I realized I wasn’t the only one who had been lulled into a false sense of security by the lovely evening.

“You can leave,” Linnea said lightly, but her hand curled around my thigh, yellow nails digging just shy of painfully into my flesh. “But I am going dancing with Sebastian, Giselle, and Sinclair.”

“By all means,” Sebastian said, changing tactics to align with hers, his voice dropping into a smoky tenor. “Leave Linnea with me, Adamo . I am happy to see her home and to bed safely at the end of the night.”

Visions of their long, lean bodies tangled in sheets erupted like fireworks behind my closed lids. Linnea was so curious, and Sebastian had always been adventurous, an eager student himself. What had he learned in ten years that he might apply to a night of sin with her?

I swallowed thickly.

“Very well,” I said. “Though I should warn you, I am a very good dancer.”

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.

“I guess that answers that, eh, Meyers!” someone shouted.

The smile that curled my mouth was thin and curved like the edge of a dagger. I hated these vultures, but they served a purpose. By morning, Linnea and I would be all over the place, and Oscar’s trite interview about his time as my chauffeur and that smiling selfie would be half-buried beneath us.

We caught up to Giselle and Sinclair, following them inside the dark mouth of the club and through a series of doorways until we emerged into a cavernous hall that must have once been a warehouse.

Now, it was transformed by massive chandeliers that tinkled and swayed with the bass of the heavy, pulsating music, and the black velvet fabric that hung in swathes across the walls and ceilings.

Everything was sumptuous. The floor reflected back in the antique mirrored bar.

The servers all wore sultry uniforms of black hot pants or trousers with suspenders and sleeveless white button-ups.

“Wow,” Linnea said, blinking owlishly.

Sinclair chuckled. “My clubs are about excess.”

I watched a lower-level VIP section balcony where a rapper I admired was surrounded by a coterie of women dancing for him while he drank from magnum-sized gold bottles of champagne.

Another scene was a buffet of desserts glinting like jewels as a bachelorette party feasted, toasted, and shimmied together in shades reminiscent of a summer sunset.