20. Jasmine
JASMINE
The decision was made quickly, the way decisions got made when the alternative was worse.
Nate had suggested it that same morning, still in the kitchen, the coffee finally cold and abandoned between them.
A property on the coast. Private road, private beach, no staff on site.
Somewhere that wasn’t here, wasn’t the house on the ridge with its beautiful glass walls and sight lines that a man with a long lens could work from half a dozen angles.
“How long do you want to go there?” Jasmine had asked.
“A week. Maybe ten days. Long enough for things to quiet down and for Dove to get some positive coverage going that isn’t us standing outside your mother’s building.
” He’d said it practically, the way he said most things, like it was a logistics problem with a logistics solution and the personal dimensions of it were beside the point.
She’d agreed because he was right, and because the thought of spending another night in this house knowing someone might be crouched below the kitchen window watching the light move through it was not something she was prepared to do.
It wasn’t as if she could simply walk away from everything. She had appointments, meetings. Some of those could be moved to online, though. The one thing that she would miss would be next week’s physical therapy session.
She’d live, though. She’d lived with fibromyalgia before knowing its name and knowing all the “proper” ways to manage it.
She was feeling pretty decent, and she also knew that staying in the city, worrying about Graham sending others to spy on them, would cause her more stress and possibly result in a bad flare.
It was only later, back in her room with a bag open on the bed and the practical business of deciding what to pack for ten days at a coastal property, that the full weight of what she was doing hit her.
A beach house. Just the two of them. No Marisol, no chef dropping by to cook meals, no security team doing rounds at the gatehouse, no built-in structure of separate wings and separate schedules and the buffer of a very large house to retreat into when things got complicated.
A week and a half of proximity that had nowhere to hide in it.
She’d been to Nate’s beach house exactly once before, years ago, briefly, and she remembered it as small and sun-bleached. Cozy in a way that had surprised her, given who owned it. The kind of place that didn’t announce itself.
Intimate, in other words. Unavoidably, architecturally intimate.
She held a sweater over the bag for a moment without putting it in.
She was still, she reminded herself, nipping. The feelings she’d identified over candlelit pasta and confirmed over her mother’s sofa and failed to fully extinguish despite her best efforts were still being nipped. Actively. With intention.
A beach house for ten days did not change the facts of the situation, which were that Nate was a man who took work calls at dinner, who had built his entire life around a company that would always come first, who had once forgotten she existed entirely and gone to a party instead, and who had entered into this arrangement for the same reason she had.
This wasn’t about love, not even the beginnings of it, but pride and money and a bet.
Those were the facts. She needed to respect them.
And she also needed to protect her heart.
That settled — hopefully finally — she put the sweater in the bag.
The beach house was a couple hours south, down the coast on a private road that branched off the highway.
She hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, thanks to a combination of anxiety, the persistent ache in her shoulders, and the knowledge that a private investigator had been crouching below her window.
Instead, she’d spent the dark hours mostly staring at the ceiling and running through the list of things that could go wrong over the next ten days and coming up with an uncomfortably long answer.
She’d packed her medications. Both the ones she was comfortable with and the new one her specialist had added last week, the one that made her feel a bit like being underwater for the first hour after taking it.
She’d packed her physical therapy resistance bands and the heat pack and the arnica gel that Eden had sent her after reading an article about natural anti-inflammatories.
She’d packed three books, her journal, some candles, and the small Bluetooth speaker.
She wondered briefly if Nate would throw another fit over her candles and music and then remembered that it didn’t matter. She didn’t exist to please him.
She’d also packed, at the last minute, the green dress that hugged her curves just right. She didn’t examine why, only had the passing thought that Nate had never seen her in it.
Nate had loaded the car while she finished getting ready, bags in the backseat and a big cooler in the trunk.
It was kind of odd, his doing these tasks like a normal person.
It almost made her forget who he was out in the world — a billionaire, a man she’d spotted on a magazine cover at the airport, someone with a reputation for being ruthless.
Now, here he was, struggling to jam a tote bag of pantry items in next to the cooler.
“Here.” Jasmine stepped forward to help. “I think if we repack it, then…”
They took the cooler out and started over, managing to get everything back in with some room to spare.
“Teamwork,” Nate said with a grin, and it made her laugh.
Not only that, her stomach flipped with giddiness.
No, she told her body. Absolutely not.
They drove mostly in silence, the easy kind that had become their default on long drives.
The city fell away behind them, the traffic thinning, the light changing as they moved south and the coast appeared in flashes between the hills.
The ocean was gray-green and enormous, the kind of view that put things in proportion whether you wanted them there or not.
Jasmine watched it and felt some of the tension in her shoulders start to unknot, fractionally, the way it always did when the ocean was close enough to see.
She’d grown up landlocked in Arizona. The ocean had felt like a revelation the first time she’d seen it at seventeen, driving out to Los Angeles with her mother and every hope she owned packed into two suitcases.
She’d never gotten over it. She kind of hoped she never did, because it was nice to still have something in the world that brought her awe.
“You okay?” Nate asked, after about an hour.
“Just tired.” She turned from the window. “I didn’t sleep much.”
He nodded, eyes on the road. “Neither did I. The security team had the place on a tight watch last night, but every creak of the house I thought was an intruder.”
They didn’t elaborate. There wasn’t much to elaborate on.
The PI had been removed from the property.
The locks on the lower garden wall had been changed.
Graham’s name hadn’t been said out loud since the morning before, but it sat in the car with them regardless, a third passenger that neither of them was acknowledging.
The private road, when they reached it, was exactly as she’d remembered, narrow and unpretentious, running through scrub that smelled of salt and something green and wild.
The gate was weathered wood, nothing like the imposing iron of the ridge house, and when Nate punched in the code, it swung open, and she felt her chest ease open with it.
This was it. The two of them would be alone together for ten whole days, give or take.
She wasn’t sure if she was more excited or terrified by the prospect.
The house appeared around the last bend in the road, small and sun-bleached, sitting back from a stretch of pale sand that ran in both directions as far as she could see.
A covered porch across the whole front of it.
A path through the dune grass down to the water’s edge.
Afternoon light coming off the ocean in long flat planes.
She got out of the car and stood for a moment, just looking at it.
It was beautiful. The sound of the water reached her, low and constant. A bird was singing close by in the dune grass. The air was cold and salt-sharp, and she breathed it in and felt, for the first time in the last day, like an iron fist had loosened its grip on her heart.
“It’s lovely,” she said. “Just like I remember it.”
Nate came to stand beside her with both their bags, which she hadn’t asked him to carry. “I don’t know if I told you, but it was my grandmother’s, originally. She left it to me.” He didn’t talk about his past much, and there was reverence in his voice. “I’ve kept it the way she had it.”
She looked at him. He was looking at the house, not at her. She turned back to it too.
“Are you sure you want me here?” she asked quietly.
He looked at her with a furrowed brow. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean…” She searched for the right words. “This is a special place. You said that you’ve kept it the way your grandmother had it. I doubt you bring just anyone here.”
For a moment, he looked hurt. “I brought you here years ago.”
She shifted, uncomfortable. “Well, yes, but… things were different then.”
Memories of that weekend came back in flashes. The fire on the beach. Mixing cocktails on the patio. Waking up tangled in the sheets, his hands in her hair…
Heat rushed through her, and she quickly turned her gaze to her shoes.
“It’s fine.” He picked up the bags, seemingly oblivious to her shift in mood. Thank God. “Come on.”
He was already moving toward the porch steps, and she stood for one more second in the sea air before she followed him, thinking about a grandmother and a beach house left to a man who never seemed to slow down enough to receive gifts like that properly, and wondering if this was one of the places where he actually did.
Inside were low ceilings, pale wooden floors, furniture that was comfortable and old and had clearly been sat in by a great number of people over a great many years. A kitchen that smelled of wood and sea air and was stocked with considerably more care than she’d expected.
Had Nate sent someone ahead to air the place out? Most likely. He probably had a person for every task imaginable, everyone no more than a phone call away.
The place was nearly perfect, except there was one problem. Namely, there was only one full bedroom. There was, however, a loft with a twin bed that was accessible by a ladder.
They both looked at the ladder for a moment.
“I’ll take the loft,” Nate said.
“You’re six foot two.”
“I’ll manage,” he promised.
“Nate, you really don’t have to be chivalrous.”
“What kind of man would I be, making my bride-to-be take the loft?”
If only he knew how much those words were a knife turning in her heart.
Jasmine carried her bag to the main bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the ocean through the open window.
She told herself very firmly that ten days was not very long and that she was going to be completely fine, and the fact that this place felt more like a home than anywhere she’d been since she’d left her own house was simply a coincidence and not information that meant anything at all.