“And then at around two o’clock I’m coming back from a meeting, I stop at the snack bar on my floor to get a coffee…”
Her chin had lifted. She was watching him.
“And there’s Gerald,” Nate said. “Right there on the counter next to the protein bars. Just sitting there. The woman who runs the bar had put a little bowl of granola out for him and was calling him baby.”
Jasmine stared at him. “You’re serious.”
“I sent a photograph to Radha. She didn’t believe me either.” He shook his head. “Apparently, he’d gotten into the ventilation system and traveled three floors before ending up at the snack bar. Which, honestly. Good instincts. It is the best floor for snacks.”
The laugh came out of her before she seemed to decide to allow it — bright and sudden and completely unguarded, the kind that crinkled the corners of her eyes. It lasted only a few secondsbefore she caught it, but it had been real. No performance in it at all.
Something in his chest settled quietly in response to that, like a door he hadn’t known was open easing shut.
“Did Gerald make it back okay?” she asked, and there was still a trace of it in her voice, the laugh just underneath the words.
“Safely returned. The woman from the snack bar walked him up herself. She seemed genuinely sad to see him go.” He paused. “She gave him the rest of the granola for the road.”
Jasmine shook her head slowly, still smiling down at the counter. It was a small smile, and it was tired around the edges, but it was real, and it was the first one he’d seen that hadn’t been built for an audience.
He picked up his phone again and didn’t make a thing of it.
“Good night,” she said eventually, sliding off the stool. She moved carefully, he noticed. Slowly, like she was trying to make it look natural.
“Good night,” he said. “Cabinet above the second bathroom sink.”
She paused in the doorway. “Thanks.”
He kept his eyes on his phone.
“Good night, Nate,” she said again, and this time it was almost warm.
CHAPTER 12
NATE
“What?” Jasmine asked, hovering on Nate’s front steps as he waited, leaning against his car.
He swallowed hard. “Nothing,” he said, even though the real answer wasHow can someone be this gorgeous?
She’d chosen a short, form-fitting dress for the movie premiere, their first public event as a couple. The black beads on it caught the light from his entry’s gas lamps and made her shine like a mirror ball. The high heels made her a good six inches taller, and her hair, piled in an updo with little tendrils kissing her neck, was somehow sexy and professional at the same time.
He’d seen beautiful women before. He’d dated a number of them, taken them to events not entirely unlike this one, stood beside them on carpets and smiled for cameras and felt essentially nothing beyond the low-grade satisfaction of a thing going according to plan. This was different, and the fact that it was different was information he was choosing, for the moment, not to do anything with.
Nate cleared his throat. “Ready to go?”
She drew a deep breath, probably steeling herself for the night ahead, and accepted the open car door he offered her.
Getting behind the wheel, he drove down his long driveway. At the exit, the security guard waved at them and opened the gate to let them through.
“I’m still not used to all the security,” Jasmine murmured.
Nate laughed. “Your personal bodyguard is tailing us.”
Indeed, the black SUV was waiting outside the gate, and it smoothly pulled into traffic behind Nate’s vintage sports car. The driver would drop the bodyguard off at the event so that he could trail Jasmine the whole night.
“That’s different,” she said. “My house has a security system, yeah, but not around-the-clock security.”
“You might want to consider it,” he suggested.
