“You put too much pressure on yourself, Nicholas,” Madalena sighed. “Get a good look at him now; everybody does. He expects it, I suspect. You’re gonna get closer to him than anyone else around here ever will,” she added. And wasn’t that the root of the problem, Nicholas thought, somberly. “Better get over it now, while you’re still at arm’s length. He might lose some of that attitude once he’s in the water with you.”

The script had several nude scenes. Nicholas had dismissed them as a regular day’s work. Then he had learned whose mouth he would kiss, and who would touch him—so intimately. And things inside his head had gotten a hell of a lot messier.

Theoretically, sex scenes were about the least sexy scenes one could film. Nicholas had shot plenty of them in the past. Nudity did not trouble him; he’d kissed enough people onscreen to shrug off the intimacy of it. The technique—the skill—was in looking believably sensual while fighting off the intense foolishness of gooseflesh and wearing a skin-colored sleeve over one’s cock. The best way to achieve this, he had found, was to hold himself at a distance from his costar, and manage, however awkwardly, to laugh with them: make the whole thing a day’s trip down insanity lane.

He doubted he could laugh with Chris Lavalle.

He was a young Apollo, too lovely and too magnetic to be real. You couldn’t laugh with someone like that: you could only worship them or scorn them.

As though summoned by the thought, Lavalle turned across the Place Colette and met his gaze, despite the sunshine in his eyes, despite the distance between them. Nicholas’s hand stilled around his coffee cup.

He had remarkable grey eyes. He was a cliché of a Frenchman, charming and remote.

“He’s coming over,” Madalena observed, chin upon her hand.

“No; is he?” Nicholas muttered.

Christian Lavalle, having at last shaken off his posse—who remained hovering, though thankfully distant—came to a stop beside their table. He gave them a smile: cordial, diplomatic. He met Nicholas’s eyes for a moment, then moved on to Madalena with a polite confusion that soon melted into polite disinterest.

“Hello,” he said, in a soft voice. “Shall we get on?”

His English was stilted, as with non-native speakers who learned it early on but never fully grasped the measure of the language. His voice was overly formal, and oddly accented, a little deferential.

“Get...on,” Nicholas repeated.

Lavalle shrugged. “They have told me to meet Priya at Le Renard d’Or.”

Priya, Nicholas thought, with vague disbelief. Priya Chaudhuri. Their director. He glanced at Madalena, who helpfully said: “The Golden Fox. The bar I told you about.”