12. Nate
NATE
“What?” Jasmine asked, hovering on Nate’s front steps as he waited, leaning against his car.
He swallowed hard. “Nothing,” he said, even though the real answer was How can someone be this gorgeous?
She’d chosen a short, form-fitting dress for the movie premiere, their first public event as a couple.
The black beads on it caught the light from his entry’s gas lamps and made her shine like a mirror ball.
The high heels made her a good six inches taller, and her hair, piled in an updo with little tendrils kissing her neck, was somehow sexy and professional at the same time.
He’d seen beautiful women before. He’d dated a number of them, taken them to events not entirely unlike this one, stood beside them on carpets and smiled for cameras and felt essentially nothing beyond the low-grade satisfaction of a thing going according to plan.
This was different, and the fact that it was different was information he was choosing, for the moment, not to do anything with.
Nate cleared his throat. “Ready to go?”
She drew a deep breath, probably steeling herself for the night ahead, and accepted the open car door he offered her.
Getting behind the wheel, he drove down his long driveway. At the exit, the security guard waved at them and opened the gate to let them through.
“I’m still not used to all the security,” Jasmine murmured.
Nate laughed. “Your personal bodyguard is tailing us.”
Indeed, the black SUV was waiting outside the gate, and it smoothly pulled into traffic behind Nate’s vintage sports car. The driver would drop the bodyguard off at the event so that he could trail Jasmine the whole night.
“That’s different,” she said. “My house has a security system, yeah, but not around-the-clock security.”
“You might want to consider it,” he suggested.
She frowned. “That would make my place feel too…”
He glanced at her, trying to read her face in the passing streetlights. “What?”
“When I’m home, I can forget about the world,” she said.
He chewed that over. He understood it more than she probably expected him to.
The penthouse downtown was many things — efficient, well-located, a good return on investment — but it had never once felt like somewhere he could forget about anything.
It felt like an extension of the office, which was probably why he’d furnished it that way.
The house on the ridge was the closest thing he had to a place that breathed, and even that had felt more like a property than a home until recently.
Until candles on the windowsill and music from a speaker and a woman who had moved in and refused to be invisible in it.
“I get it,” he said. “I also see how famous you are, and if you get that superhero part, some crazies will be trying to stop by your house. I’ll send my security consultant over there, okay? Just for an inspection. This company is really discreet. You don’t even need to know they’re there.”
“Thanks,” she murmured, but her expression had shuttered.
He’d seemed to hit a sore spot, but he wasn’t sure what it was.
She’d said very little about her work in the week that she’d been living with him, so maybe she just didn’t like to talk about it.
Or maybe the mention of the superhero part had landed somewhere tender.
He’d noticed she went careful around certain subjects, the way you went careful around a bruise, not drawing attention to it, just making sure nothing pressed directly on it. Her work. Her mom.
Jasmine was good at making it seem like people were getting all of her, but Nate had learned the reality was different. She was an actress as much in her life as in front of the cameras.
He let the topic sit. The city moved past them, the lights thickening as they dropped toward the basin, and the silence in the car was the comfortable kind, or close enough to it.
He’d noticed they were getting better at those.
The hostile quiet of the first few days had loosened into something more like two people who had simply run out of things to argue about for the moment.
He wasn’t sure when that had happened exactly.
The premiere was at a theater in Westwood, the whole block cordoned off and blazing with lights by the time they arrived.
He could hear the crowd before he could see it, that particular roar that existed nowhere else, only at the intersection of fame and a red carpet.
He pulled up to the drop point behind a line of black cars and watched Jasmine’s posture change in the seat beside him: incremental straightening, the small lift of the chin, the way she became, by degrees, the version of herself that belonged out there.
He found it fascinating, honestly. The efficiency of it. Like watching someone tune an instrument.
“Ready?” he asked.
She turned to look at him, and the transformation was complete.
The woman who had ridden in comfortable silence beside him for twenty minutes was gone, and in her place was Jasmine Caulfield, who looked at him like she was very glad to be here and very glad it was him she was with.
And even though he knew it was performed, it still hit him somewhere below the sternum.
“Ready,” she said.
He got out first and came around and opened her door, and when she took his hand to step out, he kept hold of it. She didn’t pull away. They walked the carpet side by side, her hand light in his, and he let her lead the pace because she knew this particular dance far better than he did.
She was magnificent at it. He stayed a half-step back and watched her work, the way she angled herself for each bank of cameras, the ease with which she laughed at things reporters said, the way she reached for his arm at just the right moments to remind everyone he was there.
He shook the hands he was supposed to shake and answered the questions directed at him, but mostly he watched her.
There was something almost sad about how good she was at making people feel like they were getting the real thing when what she was actually doing was protecting it.
He wondered if she knew that he could see the difference.
He suspected she’d be annoyed if he told her.
A reporter asked how the engagement was going and Nate opened his mouth, but Jasmine got there first, leaning into his arm and saying they were blissfully happy and completely overwhelmed by all the love.
She said it with such ease that the reporter beamed and moved on, and Nate looked at the top of her head and thought, not for the first time, that he was very glad she was on his side.
They were halfway down the carpet when he saw Graham.
He stood just past the velvet rope with a drink in his hand and an expression of theatrical delight. Nate’s jaw tightened.
“Nate.” Graham extended his free hand. “And Jasmine Caulfield.” He turned the full wattage of his smile on her. “What a pleasure. I’m an enormous admirer.”
“Thank you so much.” Her smile didn’t waver by a degree. If she registered anything off about Graham, she gave no sign of it.
“I have to say,” Graham went on, his eyes sliding to Nate with a gleam in them. “When I heard the news, I was stunned. Nate Aaron, off the market. Some men have all the luck.”
“Some men make their own,” Nate said pleasantly.
Graham laughed. “Enjoy the evening.” He raised his glass in a small toast and stepped back, but not before his eyes moved between the two of them one more time in a way that wasn’t quite convinced. It was a look Nate recognized. Graham was wondering just how real this relationship was.
Had Nate actually convinced Jasmine to marry him in only a matter of days? Or was there some sort of trick here?
The deal hadn’t said anything about Nate buying Jasmine off — either for it or against it. If Graham were to find out, Nate would certainly argue that point, but he didn’t want to be put in that position. Better that Graham thinks the relationship had naturally evolved due to Nate’s charm.
They moved on. Nate steered them forward with a hand at the small of Jasmine’s back and didn’t look over his shoulder.
“Friend of yours?” Jasmine asked under her breath.
“The opposite.” He of course wouldn’t tell her here, surrounded by other people, that Graham was the other player in the bet.
“I could tell.” Her voice was even quieter.
“Don’t worry about him.”
“I’m not worried.” She smiled at a photographer to her left. “But you should probably put your arm around me. Just for a moment. Give everyone something to look at.”
He slid his arm around her waist, and she leaned into it. Somewhere behind them, Graham was likely watching, and for once Nate found he didn’t care about that particular detail as much as he probably should have.
What he cared about was that Jasmine fit against his side like she’d always been there, and that she smelled like flowers and something warmer underneath, and that she’d just handled Graham Holt in thirty seconds without breaking her smile once.
She hadn’t asked who he was or why the air had changed or what the look on Nate’s face had meant.
She’d simply read the room the way she read every room.
Completely, instantly, without appearing to try, and responded accordingly.
He reminded himself that was the deal. He reminded himself that she was very good at her job.
And Nate was feeling an echo of Graham’s statement. I’m an enormous admirer.