Page 21 of The Bride Bet
“Two months,” he confirmed. “We tell the press we couldn’t imagine waiting any longer. Half the world will find it romantic. The other half will assume you’re pregnant, which will give the tabloids something to chase for a while, which actually helps us.”
Despite herself, despite her headache and her tired feet and the low anxiety humming under all of it, Jasmine almost smiled. “That’s cynical.”
“That’s accurate.” But his response wasn’t unkind.
She looked at the ceiling for a moment, at the dark beam running across it. Two months. A wedding that was hers to plan, with every resource available to her that she’d never had before, for an event that would mean nothing. She’d always thought the planning of it would be the joyful part. The flowers and the venue and the dress, all of it chosen with someone who looked at her the way she’d always hoped to be looked at. Instead, she’d be choosing it all for an audience, and the only person whose opinion would matter was the one standing across from her thinking about it strategically.
“Fine,” she said. “Two months.”
His expression shifted into relief. “I’ll have Dove start on the announcement in the morning. As for the wedding, you can be in charge.”
It both was and wasn’t what she wanted. Honestly, if she were to plan a wedding, she’d prefer to do it with the man she loved. But considering their circumstances, this seemed like the next best option. At least the choices would be hers. The flowers, the venue, the dress that the whole world would see and comment on and remember. Those would be real, even if the thing they were celebrating wasn’t.
“Within reason,” she said.
“Within very generous reason,” he amended, and the dryness was back, and she almost smiled again.
“Good night, Nate,” she said, pushing off the doorframe.
“Good night.” He was already turning back toward the main part of the house, the long habit of a man who was more comfortable in motion than in stillness.
Jasmine closed the hallway door that led to her rooms and sat on the edge of the enormous bed in the dark for a moment, her heels dangling from one hand, the headache still tapping quietly above her eye.
Two months.
She thought of her mother.Whatever you decide, baby. You will not do a single hard thing in this life alone.
She’d made this choice, but was it the right one? The question had a way of surfacing at exactly this hour, when she was too tired to argue it back down. What if she met someone else in the year she and Nate were married? She wasn’t looking, hadn’t been looking, but life had a way of producing the right person at exactly the wrong moment.
What if she had trouble keeping up the charade through the long stretch of months ahead? They’d managed a magazine interview, one premiere, and a handful of dinners, but a marriage was a different kind of performance. It was every morning. Every ordinary Tuesday. Every moment when the cameras weren’t rolling and there was no script to follow, and she had to simply exist with a man who still owed her an apology she hadn’t asked for and wasn’t sure she even cared about.
What happened between her and Nate years ago was starting to feel like water under the bridge.
But what was happening now… It was big. Important.
What if it cracked? What if she said the wrong thing to the wrong person, or Nate’s rival dug deep enough to find what he was looking for, or some detail slipped through the careful net they’d constructed around the truth? The thought opened into something dizzying. Not only would she lose the money, but she would also lose her reputation and her career. Both, at once, with no path back. There would be no coming back from a scandal like that, no quiet rehabilitation, no second act. This town did not do second acts for women who had humiliated themselves publicly. It simply replaced them.
The fear of it sat cold in her chest for a long moment, and she let it. She’d learned that fighting it only gave it more room to grow. Better to look at it directly and then make the deliberate choice to set it down.
The reward was too good. It made the risks worth it.
Jasmine knew the numbers. She’d done the math in the dark of her own kitchen the night of the diagnosis, the night everything had shifted. A hundred million dollars didn’t just solve her problems. It dissolved the whole category. It meant her mother’s condo was safe regardless of what happened to her body, regardless of what Hollywood decided about her in five years or ten. No chronic illness could take that away from her. No bad season, no dry spell, no part she was too sick to take. The money was a wall between her family and every worst-case scenario she’d ever laid awake imagining, and she was two months away from it.
She was going to plan a wedding that wasn’t real, in a house that wasn’t hers, for a hundred million dollars and the safety of everyone she loved. It was the right choice. She knew it was the right choice.
She just hadn’t expected it to feel quite so much like loss.
It was the dress, she decided. It was the thought of a dress chosen alone, tried on alone, brought home to a house where there was no one to show it to who actually cared. That was the part that snagged. Not the ceremony itself, not the vows she’d have to mean without meaning them. The dress. The small, private version of the thing that would never be witnessed.
She set her heels on the floor. Reached for the clasp at the back of her dress. Thought briefly of the garlic bread story she’d invented for Carla’s interview, the coastal drive, the cooking dinner, the whole beautiful fiction of it. Then she pushed all of it aside and went to find some painkillers, because the headache was still there, and the physical was in two days, and she needed to sleep.
The rest of it would wait until morning.
CHAPTER 14
JASMINE
Jasmine’s biceps burned, but she pulled herself up to the bar for another chin-up. Releasing the hold, she hit the ground in a crouch.
