Page 4 of The Sun & Her Burn (Impossible Universe Trilogy #2)

LINNEA

“ Y ou still smell like salt.”

I sighed as I accepted my glass of sparkling water from the bartender, a man named Harry who’d taken me on a few dates last spring, hiding my sigh behind the lip as I took a much-needed sip.

“The waves were too good to pass up this morning,” I admitted even though Cynthia already knew that was where I had been.

She always knew.

Cynthia Gadon did not like me very much, but she had taken me on as an agency client as a favor to my mother, who was one of her oldest friends. Even though it was obvious she wished she could drop me, she wouldn’t. Not now, when this favor absolved her of visiting Miranda in her current state.

“You were late for the audition,” she informed me.

I tried not to roll my eyes. “Is that what they told you? Because I was early, and the only reason I couldn’t get into the room on time was because the casting director’s son wouldn’t let me through the doors until I agreed to go out with him.”

Cynthia bared her veneers at me, pale mauve-painted lips peeled back like a chimp’s. “You should have just agreed, Linnea. Why do you always have to make things more difficult for yourself?”

“More difficult for myself?” I echoed slowly, rage curling my fingers into claws around my glass. “How is it that men behaving badly is my problem?”

“The Me Too movement is over,” Cynthia started to lecture me, as she always did whenever I brought up issues like this at my auditions or on the rare project I landed. “You need to get your shit together and be professional.”

I closed my eyes and forced myself to take a deep breath so I wouldn’t bite her head off.

“I take it they didn’t ask me to come back for a second round?” I asked blandly even though the thought sucked.

It wasn’t like I was thrilled to be in a series of commercials for a national burger chain, but Miranda and I needed the money desperately.

As the tabloids had claimed eighteen months ago, “how the gold digger hath fallen.”

When my mother, Miranda, was diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia, her husband at the time—Paul, number five, a tech millionaire who was six years younger than Miranda herself—promptly divorced her and left her to care for herself.

Only Miranda had not cared for herself for a single moment in her entire forty-five years of life.

So, when she called panicked and weeping to say she needed my help, what was I going to do? Turn down the only mother I’d ever had?

Dad said I owed her nothing. She had given me half my DNA, but little more.

I didn’t exactly agree. Miranda Hildebrand loved me as much as she had the capacity to love anyone, which was to say, not very much.

There was no doubt in my mind that she had a narcissistic personality disorder, so everything in life related to her and her desires.

When I was younger, her British husband had decided he wanted them to be a perfect little family, complete with her estranged American daughter.

So Miranda had hauled me out of public school in Maui, where I lived with my dad and uncles, to a posh private school in London.

For just shy of two years, she had tried her best to be a mother, but her husband, Wyndam, had actually been the better parent.

When I left in tears the night after my high school graduation, I never expected to see Miranda again, and I was not disappointed by the prospect.

Yet here I was, haggling with a woman who disliked me about a gig in a national burger commercial just to pay for Miranda’s bills.

“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 no way I 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 ominous thawp .

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 to bury you, 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 for Waking 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.

He winked. “I can make time for my favourite American girl.”

“Still full of shit, I see,” I said with a raised brow.

His laughter drew the attention of everyone in the restaurant who was not already watching us. It was a rich, melodious chuckle I felt coil warmly in my gut.

The tabloids sometimes referred to him as silly epithets like “Sex God” and “Italian Stallion.”

I could understand why.

“You never were charmed by me, were you?” he murmured, his hands still gently grasping my upper arms. “It’s good to see that hasn’t changed.”

“Still irreverent as ever,” I promised.

Behind me, someone cleared their throat.

Sebastian’s gaze followed the sound over my shoulder, and he frowned. “Excuse me, I’m being incredibly rude. You’re here with someone.”

“Cynthia Gadon,” my former agent said, stepping closer so that she bumped me with her shoulder as she extended her hand to Sebastian. “It’s a pleasure to meet you. I must say, I am a huge fan of your films.”

His eyes sparkled as they slid to me. “Ah, it’s good to meet a real fan.”

I rolled my eyes at him, and he flashed me that toothy white grin that would have been wolfish if it wasn’t so appealing.