19. Nate
NATE
Nate was in that shallow layer of sleep just before waking, the one where you’re still mostly under but the sounds of the house start coming through, when he heard it.
Jasmine’s voice, sharp and sudden, cutting through the quiet of the early morning in a way that had him out of bed before he’d fully registered what he’d heard.
He moved fast through the house, bare feet on the cool tile, following the sound to the kitchen. Jasmine was standing at the far end of the island in a robe, one hand braced on the counter, her other arm outstretched, pointing at the window above the garden. Her face was white.
“There’s someone out there,” she said. “By the hedges. I saw him through the window.”
Nate was already at the glass.
The garden was gray and still in the early light, the pool flat, the hedges along the property’s lower edge dark and unmoving. For a second he saw nothing, and then he did. A shape that was wrong, crouching low where the hedge met the stone wall. Something catching the light. Glass, or a lens.
A photographer.
One had never snuck onto his property before, but things were different now. He had a movie star living with him, and so it made sense that paparazzi would do whatever they could to sneak past his security.
Maybe Nate should have felt fear, but instead all he felt was anger. Anger that someone dared intrude on the sanctuary of his home, anger that this man had scared Jasmine.
Nate was through the side door before he’d made a conscious decision about it.
The garden was cold and damp underfoot and he crossed it at a run, covering the distance between the house and the hedge before whoever was down there had time to fully register that someone was coming.
The shape startled, lurched upright, and ran.
The man went along the base of the wall toward the property’s eastern edge, headed for the utility gate that the maintenance team used.
Nate was faster. He’d played sports badly but had run well his entire life, the kind of runner who had no technique and a great deal of determination.
He caught the man at the gate, getting a hand around his collar and pulling him back hard enough that they both went down on the gravel path in an undignified heap.
The man was in his fifties, thickset, wearing green and brown clothes that had probably been meant to help him blend with the shrubbery. He had a camera around his neck, a long lens, and the look of someone who was extremely unhappy about the current situation but was trying not to show it.
“Get off me,” he said, his voice all muffled. Crazy as it was, he had the nerve to act like Nate was the one in the wrong here.
“Stay down,” Nate said.
He didn’t say it loudly. He didn’t need to. The man stayed down.
Nate’s security team arrived from the gatehouse two minutes later. They secured the man, called the police, and walked Nate back toward the house.
“We just found the bushes hacked through,” Gerry, one of the guards on duty, said. “He came in at the northeast corner. He must have been working on those bushes for hours.”
“Then we need to expand the fencing there,” Nate said, more mad with himself than anyone else.
He’d prided himself on the security of his home, but apparently it was more fallible than he’d known. And it had put Jasmine in danger. What if the creep had been outside her bedroom? Taken pictures of her naked?
Jasmine was waiting at the side door. She’d put shoes on. She’d also made coffee, which he didn’t realize until she handed him a cup without a word when he came back through the door.
“Thank you,” he said.
She nodded, her eyes moving past him to where the security team had the man seated on the low garden wall. “Who is he?”
“Don’t know yet, but he came in through a bush in the corner of the property.”
Her lips drew thin.
“It’s my fault,” Nate said. “I should have—”
“There’s no way this is your fault,” she cut in. “Don’t give yourself a hard time over it.”
He gave her a tight smile, appreciating her words. She’d never defended him before — even from himself — and it touched his heart.
The police arrived twenty minutes later.
Two officers who were professional and unhurried and had clearly been to properties like this before on calls like this one, which was both reassuring and vaguely depressing.
They spoke to the man at the garden wall at length, and Nate watched from the kitchen doorway while one of them came back with the information that they’d run his ID.
The man’s name was Roy Delaney. He was licensed, the officer said, with the emphasis of someone conveying something significant. A private investigator, not a photographer. Had been for nearly twenty years.
Nate and Jasmine exchanged a glance. A private investigator? A photographer made sense, but this new information put them in way over their heads.
Nate set his coffee cup down on the counter with more care than the moment required.
“Who hired him?” Jasmine asked. She was standing beside Nate now, close enough that he could feel the tension in her without touching her.
The officer looked between them. “He’s not saying. Which is his right, technically. There’s no law requiring him to disclose his client.”
“He was trespassing on private property,” Nate said.
“Yes, and we’ll be charging him accordingly.
But the client’s identity stays protected unless he chooses to disclose, and right now he’s not choosing to.
” The officer paused. “He didn’t get much, from what we can tell.
The lens cap was still on when you caught him.
He may not have gotten anything usable, but we’ll be checking his camera to make sure. ”
Nate thanked him. He watched the officers walk Delaney to their car from the front stoop, then stayed at the open door until the car had moved down the drive and the security team had closed the gate behind it. Then he turned back to the kitchen.
Jasmine was sitting at the island now, both hands around her mug, her eyes on the middle distance. The morning light was coming in through the window that Delaney had been crouched below, soft and ordinary and indifferent to everything that had just happened.
“Well,” she said.
“Well,” he agreed.
Nate poured himself more coffee he didn’t need and stood at the counter and thought.
A private investigator. Not a photographer chasing a story about the wedding, not a fan who’d found the address somehow. A licensed PI who’d been on Nate’s property before six in the morning with a camera and the discipline to keep his client’s name out of his mouth when the police arrived.
That was professional. That was organized.
Behind this PI was someone who had hired carefully and briefed thoroughly, someone who understood that the value wasn’t in the confrontation but in the evidence, and who had enough at stake to pay for the right person and enough patience to wait for the right moment.
There was only one person Nate knew who operated that way.
He looked at Jasmine. She was already looking at him. He watched her arrive at the same place he’d just arrived, watched it move across her face — the connection made, the conclusion landed.
“Graham,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
“Has to be.”
She absorbed that. “He can’t prove anything with whatever the PI might have seen. Not that he would have seen anything. The most he could have seen was that we have different bedrooms, but I didn’t see him at mine. And my curtains were drawn all night long. Were yours?”
Nate cringed at that. He never drew his bedroom curtains. They faced the swimming pool, where no one could see in, and he liked the sunrise waking him up.
Reading his expression accurately, Jasmine groaned and dropped her head into her hands.
“Even if he saw in my room,” Nate argued, needing to convince himself as much as her, “it wouldn’t have told him anything. There was nothing that could say for sure we aren’t sharing a bedroom. You could have gotten out of bed before me.”
She stared at him for a long moment. “But you’re still worried.”
He swallowed hard. “Yes. I’m still worried. Graham obviously suspects something fishy is going on, which means he won’t stop digging.” He raked his hand over his face. “I should have seen this coming. Should have expected he would do something like this.”
“The officer said he may not have gotten anything usable.” She was trying to sound optimistic but doing a poor job of it.
Nate set his mug down. “That’s different from definitely didn’t.
And even if Delaney came away empty today, that’s not the whole problem.
” He looked at her steadily. “The problem is that Graham hired someone. Which means he’s past suspicion.
He’s past sitting on his side of the table waiting to see what happens.
He’s moving in on us, and men like him don’t stop until they get what they want. ”
The kitchen was very quiet. The fountain in the courtyard ran on outside, the way it always did, the sound carrying in through the window that Nate was already planning on upgrading with even better locks.
Jasmine looked at him, and he looked at her, and neither of them said the obvious thing because they were both thinking it too clearly to need to say it out loud.
They were six weeks from the wedding. They had a story built carefully over weeks of magazine covers, red carpets, dinners, and one genuinely good afternoon in her mother’s kitchen, and all of it was only as strong as the thing Graham couldn’t find.
The truth.
And, at the end of the day, what was stronger than the truth?
If he kept looking, and he would keep looking, Graham would eventually find something. A gap in the story. A record that didn’t match. A person who’d been paid for their silence but hadn’t been paid enough.
People could always be found. That was the other thing they both knew, without saying it.
“We need to move up the timeline,” Jasmine said.
“We already moved it up.”
“Then we need to move everything else faster. The announcement, the details, everything public-facing. The more of a paper trail we have, the harder it is to—” She stopped.
Pressed her lips together. “The wedding’s in six weeks.
That’s six weeks of him having someone watching this house. Watching us. Looking for the crack.”
“I know.”
“So what do we do?”
Nate didn’t have a perfect answer. That was the honest truth of it, and he was too tired from coming down off the adrenaline rush to dress it up.
What he had was the same instinct he always had when someone was coming at him from an angle he couldn’t fully defend.
The instinct that said the only way through was forward, faster, louder, until the story you were telling was so large and so established that the one they were trying to tell couldn’t find any air.
“We do exactly what we’ve been doing,” he said. “We don’t give him the crack. Not in public, not in private, not anywhere.” He looked at her. “Which means the next six weeks have to be airtight.”
She held his gaze for a long moment. “What are you saying? That we, what? Actually become a couple?”
He opened his mouth and then closed it. “What? No, that’s—”
“Sorry.” She waved her hand and looked away. “I’m not thinking straight. I’m spooked. Of course we’re not doing that. What would that even mean?”
He tried to study her face, and though she kept it turned away from him, he could see her cheeks had turned pink. “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” she said, so swiftly she nearly cut him off. “Are you?”
“I’m spooked too. I don’t want to lose this bet.”
“Same.” She sighed.
He looked at her for a longer moment. “This superhero franchise will be big, though. Multiple movies, right? Do you really need the money from this bet? Your value will only go up after the first movie comes out.”
Jasmine worked her mouth around, looking like she wasn’t sure how to answer that.
Nate scrubbed his face. “Sorry. I guess I had to take my turn asking something silly.”
She barked out a laugh, and he couldn’t help but notice it seemed forced.
“Let’s just focus on keeping our cover airtight,” he reiterated.
“Airtight,” she repeated.
“Airtight.”
This had just gotten harder. They both knew it.
Which meant they were going to have to put in some extra effort.
Jasmine’s question about them becoming a real couple in some way had his gears turning.
He wasn’t sure exactly what she’d meant by that, and even though he wanted to know, he didn’t want to push the matter.
But he did have an idea. If they weren’t going to truly become a couple, maybe they could put some space between themselves, Graham, and any other minions he hired.
“I know what we should do,” Nate said.