Come A Little Bit Closer (The Sullivans #7)(11)

Valentina jolted back from him as if he’d burned her. She blinked at him from across the couch, looking as though she had abruptly surfaced from a dream. One that had surprised her—and scared her—in equal measure.

A beat from reaching for her again, Smith realized it was exactly what he couldn’t do. Not unless he wanted her to run. But just because he knew that didn’t mean it was any easier to shift his attention back to the puzzle and pick up one of the pieces.

His entire adult life, when Smith had seen something he wanted, he’d taken it. In many cases, it was given to him before he even had to reach for it. But he knew without a doubt that Valentina wasn’t like anything else he’d ever wanted: If he wanted her to trust him, he’d have to earn that trust moment by moment, truth by truth, smile by smile.

“Everyone has always said how well my mother dealt with losing my father,” he said slowly. “And she did. She has.” He slid another piece into place without even really seeing the picture before him. “But she’s never let herself love anyone again. She’s never even been with another man, as far as I know, in all these years.”

Valentina picked up her drink and drank it all down in one long gulp that had his eyebrows going up with surprise.

“Funny,” she said, “my mother’s just the opposite. She’s slept with every single man, every actor, who so much as looked at her or said she was pretty.” Her words were sharp, now, with pain she wasn’t bothering to hide. “But you know the funniest part about it?” She looked straight at him as she said, “I don’t think she loved any of them, either.”

When he saw pain in her clear, beautiful eyes, nothing could have stopped him from reaching for her again.

Nothing but the ring of the doorbell that had Valentina jumping entirely off the couch this time. Her face flushed with guilt as she looked between him and her empty margarita glass.

“I’m sorry, I never should have said any of those things to you. Especially about my mother. Please don’t say anything to Tatiana about—”

He took his final chance of the night to slide his hand over hers. “I promised you I wouldn’t hurt your sister, and I won’t hurt you, either.”

She stared at him, her pupils dilated again so that her eyes were entirely green for a moment, and he wasn’t sure if she believed him. And maybe she was right not to, because even though he now had an inkling of why she was wary about trusting a man in his profession, it was still so easy to imagine coaxing her upstairs to his bed, stripping off her clothes layer by layer, tangling her hair in his fingertips, and taking the rest of the night to explore her. To learn her most sensitive curves and hollows, to experiment with touching and tasting her until he knew precisely what would have her begging for more. Begging for him.

The doorbell rang again and he had to all but force himself to walk away to let her sister in. But throughout the rest of the night, as the three of them worked through promotion timelines and interview requests, with Valentina sitting as far from him as she could without raising her sister’s eyebrows, Smith couldn’t force away his desire for her...or the memory of just how good it had felt to hold her in his arms in front of the fire, his heart beating against their linked hands.

Chapter Five

Holding her cell phone up to her ear as she rang her sister’s agent, Valentina looked out the small window in her trailer-slash-office on the Gravity set. She’d expected winter in San Francisco to be cold, but from the way the heat of the sun was eating up the morning fog, it looked like it was going to be another perfect day outside.

She was hit with the urge to forget about work for a few hours and get out on the water in a kayak, or up in the mountains on foot to enjoy looking out over the gorgeous city they were working in. Over the past few years, Tatiana had taken acting jobs in beautiful cities all over the world, but Valentina had never considered moving to any of them. Until now. It helped, of course, that the house they were temporarily renting in the Noe Valley was incredibly cute. Regardless of how early she headed to the set, or how late she returned from it, someone was always out walking a dog or riding a bike. For a big city, San Francisco managed to be a perfect combination of the cosmopolitan and small town.

George Kauffman picked up. “Val, great to hear from you. Fill me in on everything. Especially the incomparable Smith Sullivan. Because if he’s as gorgeous as he was the last time I saw him, I honestly don’t know how anyone is getting a damn thing done on set.”

Valentina liked Tatiana’s agent a great deal. While he was incredibly slick when he needed to be, and was a master of negotiation, he didn’t feel compelled to wear his agent hat all the time. More than once the two of them had gotten a little tipsy celebrating one of Tatiana’s successes. The fact that he was g*y helped, too, if only because Valentina knew she’d never need to worry about whether her sister was safe with him. It was a large part of why she herself had let her guard down with him several years back.

Unlike, she thought with a twist of her lips, the way she constantly felt she had to add new layers of bricks to her walls whenever Smith was near.

Valentina was as sensual as the next woman, and certainly enjoyed sex when she found the time and the right man to have it with, but she’d never brought her sensuality into the workplace. Ever. Only, it seemed that whenever she and Smith were in the same room, no matter how hard she tried to focus on business, she couldn’t stop the heightened awareness that took her over one cell at a time, from her heart that beat too fast to the tips of the toes that curled in her shoes every time he so much as said her name.