Page 6 of The Moon & His Tides
Porca miseria, the need to fuck her wet, rough, and messy until she was ruined with orgasms, and I’d laid waste to her perfection, thrummed through me nearly too powerfully to ignore.
“Well?” I barked out.
She smiled only slightly, but it was smug, nonetheless. “I see that the ever-charming Sebastian succumbs to grumpiness when he’s nervous.”
My teeth ground together until a muscle in my jaw spasmed. “Hardly. If I’m grumpy, it’s because I should have been off the clock an hour ago.”
“We both know you can count this as overtime. Don’t be mean and spoil my fun, Sebastian. I was just about to tell you what I thought of your screenplay. Aren’t you at all curious?”
I glared at her faux innocent expression even as I loved her playfulness. “Of course, Mrs. Meyers, it’s not as though you practicallyforcedme to give you my words. Why wouldn’t I want your very solicited opinion?”
She bit her lip in mock apology, but I knew it was to hide her smile. “Excellent. Well then, quite simply, I loved it.”
My eyebrows shot into my hairline. “Do not play with me, Savannah.”
“I’m not playing, not about this,” she said, all teasing gone. “Tell me, you’re meant to play the lead, aren’t you?”
I shrugged churlishly but lifted my chin in confirmation.
“I see it,” she said softly, her gaze pressed like soothing hands to my cheeks. “The intensity and the passion and the faux swagger all undercut by a soft heart.”
“What do you know of my heart?” I retorted.
Her lashes fluttered over her eyes like curtains caught in a breeze, and I realized that she was showing me everything in that gaze, a panoramic view of her soul. “Sebastian, you’re an artist.” She gently rustled the papers as she picked them up.“I just spent the past ninety minutes reading it, and now, I’m holding it in my hands.”
I swallowed thickly and rubbed at the back of my neck.
“Do you have work as an actor?”
“Si,” I answered, forgetting myself for a moment. “I’m over at Finborough Theatre doingBury the Dead.”
She pursed her lips in thought for a moment before she straightened her shoulders. “I’m sure you know that my husband is a very well-regarded actor here in England.”
I snorted. To say that her husband was “very well-regarded” was such a typically British understatement. After I’d learned I would be driving his wife, I’d done my research. I’d watched him through the silver screen for years, but finding out more about his life had been a revelation.
Adam Meyers’s story had been open to public consumption since he was a boy. He’d been born to a family of nobility that had long ago lost their estate but not their brand of wealth or elegance. He’d been a top student at Eton, which is where he met and became best friends with the princes of England, Arthur and Alasdair Whitley-Fairfax, and hobnobbed with the crème de la crème of British society before he’d gone on to study business at Oxford University. When Arthur enlisted in the navy, Adam had too. After four years in the service, they had both emerged as men, but surprisingly, while Arthur had resumed his princely duties, Adam had turned to acting. Unsurprisingly, his fame was assured before he took his first step on the London stage as the youngest ever Hamlet to be cast in the West End, but it was secured the moment after the curtains closed and he received the first of many standing ovations.
If Cosima thought I was gifted, Adam Meyers was a messiah.
So, yeah, I understood that Adam Meyers was “very well-regarded.”
“I may be Italian, but I haven’t been living under a rock for the last decade,” I told her.
“So dramatic, it’s a wonder I didn’t guess you were an actor from our first meeting,” she scolded me. “Well, what most people don’t know is that Adam’s secret weapon is me.”
“You?”
“Yes,” she said, sitting up straight like a straight-A student preening under attention from her teacher. “Me. We met when he was working on his first film, and ever since then, I’ve scouted his projects for him. You see, I have an eye.”
“An eye,” I repeated, amusement washing away my anger.
“Yes.” She pouted. “You don’t believe me, but you see, I’m a modern-day muse.”
“Oh, I don’t doubt that,” I said, my eyes moving over her loveliness. “You certainly inspire me.”
She rolled her eyes, and I loved that I’d broken through her porcelain doll shell to see the spirited woman beneath it. “Focus, Sebastian. I’m trying to tell you that not only do I love this screenplay but I’m also in a position to do something about it.”
My heart stopped, then restarted with a painful, stuttering thud.
