***
April blinked at her laptop screen.
Yup.
Marcus Caster-Rupp had definitely asked her to dinner.
Marcus. Caster. Hyphen. Rupp.
Not to repeat herself, but:Holy fuuuuuuuck.
The dude had graced countless magazine covers, biceps flexing. She saw him on her television screen every week, and had saved more than a few photos of him to her hard drive.
And he’d just... asked her out?
Wow.Wow.
If she were being picky about which of theGods of the Gatesactors she’d want to date, if only for a single evening, she’d definitely have chosen the guy who played Cupid, Alexander Woodroe, instead.
But Caster-Rupp was hot. No doubt about that. Not ridiculously muscular, but tall and lean and undeniably strong and fit. She’d been known to sigh over close-ups of his thick, veined forearms before, not to mention gifs of his first love scene with Dido, becausedamn. Thatass. Round and working and... delicious.
He was also undeniably beautiful. That knife-edged jawline could slice heirloom tomatoes. His cheekbones were pristine, his nose just battered and forceful enough to add character to his face. All lengths of stubble suited his handsome features andemphasized his perfect lips. As did a beard. As did a clean shave. It was ludicrous and unfair, honestly.
His lush, sandy-blond hair, just starting to silver at the temples, set off his cloudy blue eyes like—
Well, like a television star’s hair should set off his eyes.
He was a damn good actor too. A couple of seasons ago, his character had followed Jupiter’s stern order to secretly gather his fleet and leave Dido—the woman he’d loved and lived with for a year—in the middle of the night, with no warning or even a final word. Caster-Rupp had conveyed Aeneas’s naked grief and shame and reluctance with such skill, April had cried.
Then Aeneas had spotted the glow of Dido’s funeral pyre in the distance, across the choppy water, and understood the implications. Because of what he’d done, she was either dying or dead, and he couldn’t do anything to stop her or help. Dropping to his knees on his ship’s deck, his face crumpled in agony, he’d clutched his hair and bowed his head, his breath rough pants as he grappled with horror and self-loathing at his beloved’s fate.
At that, April hadn’t merely cried anymore. Sobbed, more like it.
She still thought he should have won a little gold statue for that episode.
In the actor’s capable hands, no one could deny Aeneas’s intelligence, his huge, lonely, scarred heart—or his reluctant, growing respect for and attraction to Lavinia in the last three seasons of the show.
But there was a reason April didn’t follow the dude on Twitter.
She didn’t think he’d ever said an interesting word in any interview she’d seen with him. And she’d seen plenty, because the Lavineas shippers hungrily pounced on any media coverage that might discuss their favorite pairing. Unlike Summer Diaz, thewoman who so ably portrayed Lavinia, though, Caster-Rupp never fed the fandom with insight or analysis or even a bare mention of the Aeneas-Lavinia relationship. Not that he mentioned the Aeneas-Dido relationship, either.
He kept things vague. Enthusiastic and one hundred percent generic.
After the first season of the show aired, most reporters simply gave up on interviews with him and just flashed a few of his biceps-flexing pics on-screen whenever they mentioned his character.
His ability to portray such intelligence on camera, such emotional depth, was a wonder. In real life, the man was all hair-flipping, cheerful vapidity, a walking, talking, gleaming, preening, Hollywood-pretty-face stereotype.
Not her kind of date, in short.
But spurning him, rejecting his kind gesture, in public would be churlish. And how could she call herself a Lavineas fan if she turned down the chance to talk with him?
Then again, maybe he was looking for a way out.
They needed to talk. Not in front of his two million followers, either.
She followed his account. Then she slid into his DMs, half expecting to find out shehadbeen hallucinating, or Twitter’s notifications had gone bonkers somehow and told her he’d followed her account and asked her out when he definitely hadn’t.
But up the DM screen popped.
