Page 49 of The Bride Bet
And now she had nothing.
CHAPTER 26
NATE
Jasmine sat on the arm of the sofa with her phone in her lap and her face blank. She looked like she was in shock.
“The studio fired me,” she said, her words flat. “They said I’m too much of a liability now.”
Nate’s chest tightened, and his hands balled into fists. Anger filled him — anger at Graham, at all the people who were reporting on this story and feeding into it. He was pissed that it was harming his name, but he was doubly pissed over what it was doing to Jasmine.
He was the one who’d made the bet. And he understood now that she’d accepted the deal as a backup in case her health meant she had to quit acting. Now everything was falling apart.
“They’ll reverse it,” he’d said. “Once this settles, once we put out a statement and the story shifts, they’ll?—”
“They won’t.” She said it quietly. No heat in it. “That’s not how it works. The studio has moved on. They’ll recast inside a week, and the new person will have already signed by the time any statement we put out lands.”
“You don’t know that.”
She looked at him with an expression that was patient and exhausted in equal measure. “I know this industry.”
He’d tried a different angle. “I overheard some of it. Marco said you’re still one of the most respected?—”
“Marco is paid to say things like that.”
“It’s also true.”
“Nate.” She stood up from the sofa arm. “Please stop.”
He stopped. He stood in the middle of the living room and watched her move to the window and look out at the courtyard. He felt the fundamental gap between their two situations. His name was everywhere, yes. The coverage was unflattering, yes. There would be meetings and statements and a period of managing the narrative.
But Nate would be fine. He knew he would be fine. His company was not contingent on his personal reputation in the way that her career was contingent on hers. He was a tech billionaire who’d made a reckless bet. The world would shake its head and move on, and someone would probably make a podcast about it. In six months it would be a story he could tell at dinners with a self-deprecating laugh, and people would find it charming.
Jasmine was an actress who had agreed to marry a man for money. The world wasn’t going to shake its head and move on from that one. Not quickly. Not without cost.
“I’ll make it right,” he said. “I’ll put out a statement today. I’ll take full responsibility. I’ll?—”
She turned from the window. “How? What statement fixes this?” There was something in her voice now, a thinness to it, the first crack in the composure. “What do you say that makes the studio un-drop me? What do you say that changes what every journalist out there is writing about me right now?”
“I’ll tell the truth. The whole story.”
“The truth is that I agreed to a fake marriage for a hundred million dollars.” She looked at him steadily. “That’s the truth. People are saying I’m a gold digger. Some of them probably that I’m a prostitute. No version of the truth helps me.”
He had nothing for that. Because she was right, and he knew she was right. People did not forgive women easily for things like this. In fact, they relished the witch hunt.
The meeting with Marco and her publicist happened at three, moved to a video call. Nate was not invited, which was appropriate and which he understood entirely. He sat in his own wing, worked through his emails, answered his lawyers, spoke to Dove, and did all the things there were to do. And every hour or so he looked at the door to Jasmine’s wing and thought about knocking.
He didn’t knock.
She came out at six. She’d changed into jeans, a plain shirt, her hair down. She had her phone in one hand and a look on her face that told him the meeting hadn’t produced the outcome anyone had hoped for.
“How did it go?” he asked.
“About how you’d expect.” She went to the kitchen and poured a glass of water, then stood at the counter with it. “The publicistthinks we can reshape the narrative over time. Marco thinks the same. Nobody’s saying it out loud, but what they mean is that it’ll take a year at minimum and a lot of carefully managed appearances, and I’ll probably have to take a smaller project to start with to show I’m still working and haven’t disappeared.”
“That’s manageable.”
She looked at him over the rim of the glass. “I had a franchise, Nate.”
