Page 52 of The Bride Bet
“You’re delusional.”
“I’ve been called worse.” He sat forward and closed the document on his laptop. He wouldn’t be reading it tonight. “I’ll be in touch about the wiring details. Mine or yours, we’ll see.”
He ended the call before Graham could say anything else.
Then he sat in the quiet of the kitchen for a while, phone face-down on the counter, and thought about what he’d just said. Not the part about the bet. That was reflex, the same instinct that had always made him refuse to fold. He’d worry about the hundred million when it came to it.
He thought about the other part.Our story isn’t over.
He hadn’t said that for Graham’s benefit. He’d said it because it was true, or because he needed it to be true. But what did it matter? What he did know was that he wasn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet.
He thought about everything Jasmine had said before she left. She’d been right about most of it. He didn’t enjoy admitting that,but he’d spent enough of his life being honest with himself in private to do it properly when it mattered.
She’d been right about the bet, about the emails, about the gap between what he’d risked and what she’d lost. He’d told her she’d known the risks, which was technically true and humanly unforgivable. Her knowing what could happen wasn’t an excuse for how people were treating her.
Nate was good at building things. He’d built a company that was taking over the betting world. He was good at identifying what was broken and fixing it. He was good at the long game.
What he wasn’t good at was the personal stuff. Understanding people’s needs and meeting them.
But was that really an excuse for him to stay shut away in his stupidly large house for the rest of his life? To not go out there and take risks, open his heart?
He didn’t need to travel the whole world to know that Jasmine was special. He’d let her slip through his fingers twice now, and if it happened a third time, he would kick himself until the day he died.
She was not a deal to be closed. She was not a problem to be solved or a narrative to be managed.
He’d been an idiot. He knew it and was sorry for it, and their time at the beach house had been the best ten days of his entire life. He didn’t want to go back to the version of his life that had existed before a woman had moved her candles into his east wing and refused to let his house be a tomb.
He picked up his phone. He didn’t call her. That wasn’t the right move, not yet. Not while she needed the space she’d asked for.But he held the phone and let the intention settle in him, solid and clear, the way the best decisions always felt before he acted on them.
He was going to win her back. Not with a strategy, not with a number, not with anything that could be put in a contract or shaken on in a bar. Just with the truth, told by a man who had finally run out of reasons to protect himself from it.
CHAPTER 28
JASMINE
Brendan the real estate agent shook Jasmine’s hand at the front door, said the house was “absolutely stunning,” and then proceeded to walk through it with a clipboard and a measuring device while Jasmine stood in the kitchen.
She already felt like a stranger in her own home.
House, she corrected herself, because once she moved out of Los Angeles, this would no longer be her home.
She’d called the agency four days after she’d come home. It had taken her that long to stop sitting in various rooms of the house feeling sorry for herself and start doing the practical things. It was how she’d been raised and was the only reliable cure for despair.
The mortgage was the immediate problem. Without the franchise, without the salary that would have come with three sequels and the kind of guaranteed work that let you breathe easily for a decade, things looked different. She wasn’t broke. Not yet. But paying the mortgage depended on her working, and Jasmine had effectively been canceled. Marco had faith theycould build something from the ashes, but the more Jasmine thought about it, the more shame she felt.
Sure, she could do the charity work, make appearances. Maybe write a memoir spinning herself as the victim — a suggestion from her publicist that made Jasmine cringe.
But then what? Her career would never return to what it had been, and she would always walk through this city with shame on her shoulders.
So why not sell the house and leave? She didn’t yet know where she would go. Perhaps back to Arizona. Or somewhere new. Somewhere cheaper.
She’d invested well, and if she combined that with a job — maybe teaching acting — she could live a simple and comfortable life. A good chunk of money from the sale of her house would go to paying off her mom’s condo, and Jasmine could use what was left over to buy something smaller in a cheaper area.
It was a good plan. A scary plan.
But it also felt like the best choice available to her. This town had chewed her up and spit her out, and she wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
The trouble was that the house was also the place she loved most in the world.
