Quickly, he looked back out at the city. His jaw was set. He made sure of it.
“Perfect,” the photographer said from somewhere to his left.
Dove sent the digital proof that evening, a selection of images for approval before the piece went to print. Nate was at the kitchen island when the email arrived. He opened it and scrolled to the images and stopped. The couple in the photographs was at ease with each other. They leaned without thinking about it.
In the last image, taken in the half-second after the kiss, the man was looking down at the woman. A man that Nate didn’t recognize. He looked… happy.
He forwarded the email to Jasmine without a note. She replied four minutes later.
They’re good.
He typed back.No going back now. When this hits newsstands, we’re in for the full thing. Every camera in the city. Every question.
The reply came in a minute later.
I know,she wrote.It’ll be worth it in the end.
He read it twice. He couldn’t tell if she meant the money, or something else. He wasn’t entirely sure she could either. He set the phone down and looked at the last photograph one more time, the one where he was looking at her, and then he closed the email and went back to work.
CHAPTER 11
NATE
The magazine chose the picture that had been taken the second after Jasmine kissed Nate. Because of course they did. He looked like a man in love.
Which he wasn’t. Not one bit. Rather, he was a man who admired the woman in front of him. Despite her coldness to him, he’d seen her true abilities shine that day, and he couldn’t help but respect her for it.
Forwarding the link to the magazine cover to Graham, Nate added a note.Get ready to pay up.
Chuckling to himself, he opened the front door of the house and slipped his phone into his pocket. He’d spent the last couple nights at the house instead of the penthouse, feeling like he needed a break from the chaos of downtown.
The place was big enough that he and Jasmine didn’t run into each other too much. Actually, he found that he kind of liked the background noise of another person in his space. Plus, her candles weren’t too bad once you got used to them.
Walking into the kitchen, he found her sitting at the island, hair in a ponytail, her posture slumped.
“No candles out here?” Nate teased. “I’d have thought?—”
He stopped at the sight of her downturned lips, the tears in her eyes.
Sitting up straight, she quickly and furiously wiped at her face.
“Sorry.” Her voice was level, or close enough to it. “Ignore that.”
He didn’t move from the doorway. “What’s wrong?”
She looked up at him with an expression that was almost surprised, like the question hadn’t been one she was expecting. Like she’d braced for a different version of him to walk through that door. “Nothing. Work stress.”
“Work stress,” he repeated.
“Yes.” She put her phone face-down on the counter and straightened her ponytail, the gesture of a person pulling themselves back together. “It’s nothing. Are you hungry? Your chef came and meal-prepped. There are things in the fridge.”
She was already moving, already redirecting, and he recognized the maneuver because he’d used it himself more times than he could count. Here is a different subject. Please take it. He was usually grateful when people did. He took the out nine times out of ten, because other people’s private pain was not his department and he’d never pretended otherwise.
He pulled out a stool and sat down at the island. “What kind of work stress?”
She paused at the refrigerator door. Just briefly, a half-second, and then she opened it. “The usual kind. Nothing that will affect the arrangement.”
The arrangement. That was what she called it when she wanted to remind them both of the terms. He’d noticed she reached for the word whenever things got too close to something real. He couldn’t blame her for it. He did the same thing with different language.
