Page 38 of The Moon & His Tides
Only Adam laughed at my gesture and clucked his tongue as he opened the car with the remote and flipped the driver’s door open. “No one drives this car but me, Sebastian.”
“I’m the driver,” I said redundantly. “Why else would you want me with you today?”
“The company?” he suggested blandly as he sank into the leather interior, and I crossed to the passenger side albeit reluctantly. When I entered the leather-scented interior, he looked at me, brow arched. “The visual appeal, perhaps.”
My mouth curled into a smile unbidden. “Flattery won’t get you far with me. I’ve been told I’m handsome all my life.”
“I’ll have to be more inventive, then,” Adam declared as though I’d challenged him. “Has anyone ever told you that you have eyes the colour of sunlight caught in amber?”
I blinked.
But he didn’t wait for a response, checking his mirror and pulling the car deftly out of the small courtyard and through the gates into the street.
I continued to stare at him as he easily navigated the car through the chaos of early morning London traffic. Questions bubbled up my throat and lodged like gravel at the back of my tongue. I wanted to ask whyme? How did I get so lucky to catch the eye of one of the most famous actors in the world? What did he see in me that made him take the risk to bring me into his home and bed?
“You’re being awfully loud over there,” he said after an indeterminable period of time.
“I have some questions.”
His laugh was low and smooth. He flipped open a pair of Gucci sunglasses and pushed them on to his face, obscuring those expressive green eyes I relied on to read him. “Well, we have about forty minutes before we reach our destination, and at my own behest, we’re trapped in a car together so, feel free to ask.”
“Anything?” My heart pounded harder behind my breastbone at the thought of limitless access.
I didn’t know why I was like this, so hungry for invasion, so eager to dig deeper and deeper like a tick burrowing beneath the skin. But I wanted to know everything about the people who intrigued me, the ones I might one day love or love still. No detail was too minute or trivial for my interest.
And here was Adam Meyers, my boyhood idol, offering himself up on an Aston Martin platter.
He hummed. “I reserve the right to refuse to answer, but there’s no harm in asking. Savannah said you signed the NDA when you began driving for her.”
A little reminder I wasn’t to share anything I learned.
“Okay, then.” I settled comfortably into the supple leather seat, spreading my thighs wide and cracking my knuckles in a way that made Adam smile. “Let’s start easy. Where are we going?”
“Pinewood Studios.”
I waited, but he didn’t elaborate so I said, “And that would be for what reason?”
A flash of a grin. “You said flattery wouldn’t get me far with you, so really, I’d rather not say.”
“Adam.”
“Sebastian.”
“Come on,” I said with a laugh. “I take back what I said then; tell me why you’ve asked me to go to a production lot with you.”
I could feel his gaze slide to me for a second behind the dark lenses of his glasses. “You know, I read your script.”
My entire body froze at once, breath arrested mid-inhale in my lungs, thick as syrup, joints locked, molecules suspended. I’d known there was more in this “arrangement” for me than just the promise of passion, that Savannah wanted to launch me the way Helen had launched a thousand ships on Troy.
But the idea of Adam reading my script, a project I’d laboured over for the last three years, one built on the dreamsand terrors and idols of a young man growing up under the oppressive gaze of the Mafia in impoverished Naples, made my spine seize.
It was sovulnerable.
A kind of… assault on my confidence and my soul I hadn’t been braced for.
Vaguely, I recalled that he’d already told me about reading my script, but in the heat and bewilderment of that first confrontation at Finborough Theatre, I hadn’t really grasped it.
When Savannah had forced me to leave the town car so she could read my words, I’d been in a state of shock, but also in a space without stakes. She wasn’t in the industry and in my ignorance, I hadn’t assumed she had any stock or say in it. So it’d been a pretty woman, a wonderful woman I lusted after voraciously, reading my script. Uncomfortable, yes, but not paralyzing.
