The Bride Bet (Vows and Veils #6)

1. Nate

NATE

The Vault didn’t advertise. It didn’t need to. Tucked behind an unmarked door three floors above Sunset Boulevard, it admitted only the kind of men who could buy the building if the mood took them, and tonight Nate Aaron wished he’d never come.

He sat in the far corner, where the light pooled low and amber, a glass of scotch in hand. A cigar smoldered untouched in the ashtray beside him. He’d ordered it for the ritual, but he’d always disliked the taste.

It had been one of those days. He’d handled all of it, the way he handled everything. You didn’t build something from nothing without learning, in your bones, exactly how easily it could become nothing again.

Across the room, two women had been glancing at him for the better part of ten minutes. One of them had a phone out now and was pretending to be scrolling on it with the camera lens pointed at him.

Had they seen his latest interview? Tech’s Boldest Bet, the cover had read, his own face on every airport newsstand in the country. Jaw set. Arms crossed. He hated the photo.

He turned his shoulder a few degrees, lifted the scotch, and willed himself invisible.

It didn’t take.

“They put you on the cover of a magazine, and now you can’t even enjoy a drink in peace.” The voice was warm and casual, and Nate knew whose it was without looking. “Tragic. How do you survive it?”

He let the silence stretch before turning.

“Graham.” He made the name flat. “I’d say it’s good to see you, but you’d know I was lying.”

Graham Holt laughed and dropped into the chair opposite, signaling the waiter without looking at him.

He unbuttoned his jacket as though he’d built the place himself.

They’d known each other a decade and called each other friends in interviews, which neither of them was.

Graham was handsome in the way that meant he knew he was — which Nate found annoying.

“You look like hell,” Graham said cheerfully. “Markets giving you a hard time? I heard about Frankfurt.”

Of course he had. “Frankfurt’s fine.”

Nate didn’t feel like talking about his betting app empire. Not tonight. Not with this man.

“Sure it is.” A glass arrived for Graham, something pale and expensive he hadn’t had to name. He swirled it. “You always did sweat over the small stuff. That’s your problem. You feel every dollar. Me, I sleep like a baby.”

It was an old needle, and it still found the vein.

The worst thing about Graham was how often he was right.

Nate had lost to him more times than he could count — a yacht once, a horse, a humiliating amount of money on a single hand of cards in Monaco.

Not because Graham was smarter. Because Nate, when he was riled, didn’t know how to fold.

The same instinct had made him rich. It had also, more than once, made him a fool, and Graham had been there on a number of those occasions.

They traded the usual fire dressed up as small talk — a deal here, an acquisition there.

Nate felt the day’s tension start to loosen, not because the company was good but because the sparring was familiar.

He was two scotches in and almost relaxing when Graham’s eyes drifted up to the muted television behind the bar and stopped.

“Now that,” Graham said, “is a reason to live. Boy, I’d love just one night with a woman like that.”

Nate followed his eyes.

The screen showed a red carpet somewhere else in Los Angeles.

A wash of busy bodies and velvet rope, and at the center of it all, turning slowly for the photographers, stood a woman in deep emerald silk.

Dark hair swept off one shoulder. A smile that was both dazzling and entirely unbothered.

The text beneath read Jasmine Caulfield.

Something pulled tight under his ribs. He looked away, then back, and it didn’t go.

“Caulfield,” Graham went on, oblivious. “God. They don’t make many of those. I’d burn this whole building down for one dinner.”

The smart thing was to say nothing. Nate knew it even as he opened his mouth. “We dated, actually.”

As soon as he said the words, he wanted them back immediately. It wasn’t the kind of thing he bragged about. He wasn’t the kind of man who used a woman’s name like that — or he hadn’t thought he was, until Graham brought out the part of him that always wanted to score the point.

Graham turned slowly. “You. And her.”

Well, damn. He was too far in now.

“Few years back.” Nate’s jaw was tight. “Briefly.”

“No.” Graham grinned, delighted. “No, I don’t buy it. A woman like that, and you? You haven’t been able to keep a woman around for more than a few months. She wouldn’t pick up if you called. She wouldn’t know your name.”

Nate’s jaw tightened. “She’d know it.”

“Hundred million says she wouldn’t even take the call.”

It was a joke. It was the kind of absurd number they threw around for sport, the way other men bet a beer. Nate should have laughed and let it die.

But instead, perhaps stupidly, he set his glass down. “You really want to bet that? Because I guarantee she’d do more than answer the phone.”

Graham went very still. “Go on.”

“Same hundred million.” Nate leaned forward, elbows on his knees. “I’ll marry her.”

For a full second, Graham said nothing. Then the laugh came back, bigger than before, and he slapped the arm of his chair. “You’re drunk.”

“Maybe.” Nate wasn’t, not really. That was the problem. “But you’ve never once seen me back down from a bet, have you?”

That landed. They both knew it was true, and they both knew it was the worst possible thing about him.

Graham looked at Nate for a long moment, then up at the screen, then back.

Nate could almost see him working out the risks and rewards.

Either Nate humiliated himself trying, or he handed over a fortune, or — impossibly — he pulled it off, and Graham got to be the man who’d dared him to.

Every outcome was a story Graham could tell for years.

“One year,” Graham said, holding out his hand. “You have one year to marry her. If you do, I owe you a hundred million. If you don’t, you owe the same to me.”

Nate looked at the hand. He wondered if he’d lost his mind. He thought of Jasmine six years ago, before the silk and the flashbulbs, laughing at something he’d said across a small table. He thought of where he’d been the night everything had gone wrong, and what he’d let her sit alone believing.

He told himself she couldn’t possibly still hold it against him. Why would she? So much time had gone by. That had to be water under the bridge by now.

This bet was a shoo-in.

Nate took Graham’s hand and shook it.