5. Nate
NATE
The restaurant doors swung shut behind Jasmine and her friend, and Nate stood on the carpet and realized he had absolutely no idea what to do next.
It wasn’t like he’d expected Jasmine to be happy to see him. Not at all. But he also hadn’t expected the vitriol she’d thrown his way.
The woman acted like she hated him.
Which… he supposed she must.
And now he felt like a fool for thinking that convincing her to date him and then eventually accept a marriage proposal would be easy. Right now, she wouldn’t even look twice at him.
A photographer was calling his name now, and Nate felt heat crawl up the back of his neck. Graham would hear about this by morning, and the story would be funnier every time he told it. Nate’s pride, the thing he’d built his whole life around protecting, was being peeled off him in strips.
He’d lost the first round. Charm had been the play, and charm had failed.
So he did the only thing left to a man who didn’t know how to fold. He went all in.
He pushed through the doors after her.
Inside, the restaurant was a wall of noise, heat and bodies, a hundred important people pretending delight at seeing one another, but all of them secretly gauging what the other person could do for them.
In this town, nothing mattered more than who you knew.
The room had been built to dazzle. A ceiling hung with thousands of filament bulbs, a marble bar was already crowded by beautiful people, waiters threaded the chaos bearing trays of tiny foods, and the air was thick with perfume and money.
Nate scanned the room, pulse loud in his ears, and caught a flash of bronze silk near the far end of the bar. It was Jasmine, leaning to say something to her friend, the friend laughing, the two of them in their own quiet pocket of the night that he had no right to disturb.
He disturbed it anyway. It was, after all, what he did.
He started across the room, working out his next move with each step.
He could keep playing the original angle: flatter her, charm the friend, work the long game over weeks.
But the long game required time he didn’t have and the goodwill he’d already torched.
There was only one card he hadn’t played, the one a man like him never showed.
The truth.
Jasmine broke away from the bar with a glass in her hand and turned down a corridor toward the back, away from the crowd. Nate saw his chance and took it.
In the hallway, she stopped to check her phone. When she heard his footsteps and looked up, her face shut down.
“You have got to be—”
“I lied to a man last night and bet him a hundred million dollars that I could marry you.”
It came out of him in one breath, graceless, before she could finish, before he could lose his nerve. Her mouth stayed open around the unfinished word. For the first time all night, Jasmine looked like she had nothing to say.
So he kept going, because at this point it couldn’t hurt. It could only help.
“His name’s Graham. He’s a— It doesn’t matter who he is. We were drinking. You came on the TV, and I bragged that we’d dated, and he didn’t believe me, and I…” Damn, this sounded bad.
Because it was.
Nate dragged a hand through his hair. “I said I could get you to marry me. We shook on it. Bet a hundred million dollars. And I came here tonight to charm you into it, and I can see now that was idiotic. You clearly hate me, and you have every reason to, so I’m not going to insult you by pretending otherwise.
I’m just going to tell you what this actually is. ”
She slowly set her glass down on a narrow console table, not looking at him.
“The money,” Nate said. “I don’t need it.
I don’t even want it. If you do this — if you marry me, for a year, make it look real, you take the whole hundred million.
All of it. Not a split. The full amount.
I get to win the bet, you get set for life, and we both walk away when it’s done.
” He spread his hands. “That’s it. That’s the whole truth.
I’ve got nothing else to offer. No angle. No spin. Just that.”
The silence in the hallway was enormous. Behind the wall, someone laughed, bright and far away.
He searched her face for something, anything, and found an anger that burned with its own fire.
“Let me make sure I understand,” Jasmine said, and her voice had dropped to something soft and dangerous.
“You left me sitting alone in a restaurant like an idiot so you could go drink champagne with people who mattered more than me. And now, six years later, you come find me on the worst week of my…” She stopped.
Recovered. “You track me down to a party, to inform me that you got drunk and made me a prize in some game between two men who can’t stand each other.
And the pitch is that I should sell you a year of my life so you can beat your friend. ”
“He’s not my friend. And it’s not—”
“I don’t care what he is or isn’t.” She stepped in close.
He could smell her perfume and her anger.
“You have spent your whole life thinking everything’s for sale if the number’s big enough.
People included. Me included. And you stood out there on that carpet and watched me say no, and your takeaway was that you simply hadn’t named a high enough price yet. What am I to you, a prostitute?”
That landed somewhere he wasn’t braced for. He opened his mouth and found he was only gulping for air. “I… Sex wouldn’t be involved. It wouldn’t be— No, you have it wrong. We wouldn’t—”
“Here’s my counteroffer.” She picked up her glass, looking beautifully composed once again. “Take your hundred million, and your bet, and your stupid face, and stick it where the sun don’t shine.”
She walked past him close enough that the dress brushed his sleeve, disappearing back into the party. He was left in the dim hallway, feeling hollowed out.
He’d shown her the only honest card he had.
And she’d looked at it and walked.
For a long moment, Nate didn’t move. He’d lost deals before. He’d lost to Graham a dozen times. But this was a different kind of losing, the kind that didn’t sting his pride so much as something further in, something he hadn’t used in so long he’d forgotten he still had it.
He straightened his jacket, because that was the one thing he reliably knew how to do, and went back out into the light.
The party swallowed him, everyone too busy with the conversations they were already in to notice him.
Jasmine and her friend were nowhere to be seen.
Nate took a glass of something amber from a passing tray and stood at the edge of the bright, roaring room, and let the truth settle.
It was over. No marriage, no charming her around, no clever second approach.
In the morning he would call Graham. A hundred million dollars would slide out of his accounts and into the hands of the one man he could not stand to lose to, and Graham would have something else to gloat about for the rest of their lives.
Nate braced for the sick lurch the loss of the money should have brought. It didn’t come. And that was what unsettled him most. The hundred million barely registered against the other weight, which was the fury in Jasmine’s eyes.
He’d assumed she had easily moved on, that his absence from that dinner hadn’t been more than a slight ding in the bodywork of her life. But now he saw that wasn’t the case. He’d hurt her in the way only a person you truly cared about could.
And he felt like the worst person alive for it.
He set the glass down unfinished and walked out into the warm night. The marriage was dead. The bet was as good as paid. And the worst of it was the knowledge that the money would prove the cheapest part of the bill.