Page 8 of The Bride Bet
Jasmine made it through the rest of the opening on autopilot. There were two glasses of champagne she didn’t taste, a dozen conversations she wouldn’t remember, a careful orbit of the room that kept her from even looking for Nate. By the time she and Eden slipped out a side exit into the valet line, her whole body was one steady ache, and her face hurt from the weight of the smile.
She didn’t speak in the car. Eden, mercifully, let her not.
At home, the gate rolled back in welcome. The house was waiting for them, quiet in the dark. At night her oasis felt even more like hers, the courtyard fountain lit from below, the pool flat and black at the back of the garden. Jasmine stepped out of her heels the instant the door closed behind them, and for a moment she nearly cried.
“Okay.” Eden dropped her clutch on the bench in the entryway and turned, arms folded. “We’re home. There are no photographers. You’re going to tell me what happened in that hallway, and you’re going to tell me right now, because I’ve beenabout to combust since the second you came back to that bar looking like you’d seen a ghost.”
“I need wine for this.”
“I’ll allow it. Talk while I pour.”
They ended up on the floor. Not on the enormous sectional Jasmine had let a designer choose. Not at the dining room table that seated ten. On the rug, backs against the couch, legs stretched out, a bottle between them, exactly as they’d sat a hundred nights before.
Jasmine told her. All of it. The hallway, the way Nate had blurted the whole thing out. The bet. The rival named Graham. The drunken brag. And then the offer.
“He said he’d give me the whole thing,” she finished, turning her glass slowly. “If I marry him. For a year. Make it look real. The full amount, no split. And then I walk away.”
Eden had gone very still. “The full amount being?”
“A hundred million dollars.”
The wine made it about halfway to Eden’s mouth and stopped.
“Ahundred—” Her voice cracked. “A hundredmillion? Dollars? American dollars? He said a hundredmilliondollars, and you told him to…” She set the glass down on the rug, careful. “Jasmine. Jasmine, look at me. Say the number again. Out loud. Slowly.”
“Eden—”
“Say it.”
“A hundred million dollars,” Jasmine said. And as she said it, she finally heard it. She understood more than the anger around the situation.
This was a real number. The kind that didn’t merely solve a problem. It dissolved the whole category of any problems ever related to money in a person’s entire life.
She thought of the math she’d done in the dark of her kitchen the night of the diagnosis. A mortgage on her house, a mortgage on her mom’s condo, both places always needing repairs. She thought of the audition next Monday. The producers who would smell weakness on her. The roles she’d have to turn down because she couldn’t get through a workday, and the slow loss of a career built entirely on the promise that she would never have a bad day. She could keep outrunning it for a year, maybe two. Five if she was lucky. And then she couldn’t.
And then she thought of her mother. The little table by the window with the terrible instant coffee, and the city spread out below the balcony of her condo. Her mother, who had driven her hours to auditions in high school. Who had worked her hands rough so that Jasmine could take acting classes.
Jasmine was well-off. For now.
But that could change. If she never acted again, she’d have to get another career, and nothing would pay as much as she’d made. It certainly wouldn’t be enough to pay for both her and her mom’s lives.
Not that her mom had ever asked for a single dollar, but Jasmine had given willingly, with great insistence, and she was proud that she was able to.
A hundred million dollars meant her mother would never want for anything again. No matter what happened to Jasmine’s body. No matter whether Hollywood remembered her name in five years. It meant the one thing Jasmine had ever truly wanted her success to buy: a floor under the people she loved that nothing could ever pull away.
With that money, she could never work a day in her life.
“It’s blood money,” she said quietly. “It’s the most insulting offer anyone’s ever made me.”
“It is.” Eden’s voice had dropped. The shrieking was gone. She’d known Jasmine too long to miss the change in her. “And you’re thinking about it.”
“I hate him. You understand that I genuinely hate him?”
“I do. I was there for the aftermath.” Eden reached over and took her hand. “Which is exactly why I’m not going to tell you what to do. But I’m also not going to sit here and pretend a hundred million dollars is nothing when it could allow you to do anything you want in life.”
The fountain ran on in the courtyard. A breeze moved through the open shutters, carrying the green smell of the garden and somewhere, faintly, jasmine. The flower she’d been named for, planted along the back wall.
A year of her life. A year of pretending to adore a man who had once forgotten she existed. A year of cameras and lies and living closely to the person who had taught her, at twenty-four, exactly how small she could be made to feel. Her pride recoiled so violently she felt almost sick.
