She put the phone face-down on the table.
“Good news?” Eden asked.
“Schedule for the film’s pre-production.” She managed a smile. “The table read is two weeks after the wedding.”
“Oh my gosh.” Eden’s voice had gone warm. “This is so exciting!”
“It is,” she agreed.
And it was. She held onto that. Under the aching hips and the complicated feelings and the dress chosen too quickly in a boutique that smelled of other people’s joy, there was a role that was hers, a character she already loved, a version of the future that belonged entirely to her and to no one else. That was real. That was something nothing else in life could touch.
She straightened in her chair because her back was complaining and sitting up helped, and because she’d been slumping for long enough.
“Tell me more about Daniel,” she said.
Eden’s face did the glowing thing again, and Jasmine smiled at her and let the afternoon be what it was.
CHAPTER 19
NATE
Nate was in that shallow layer of sleep just before waking, the one where you’re still mostly under but the sounds of the house start coming through, when he heard it.
Jasmine’s voice, sharp and sudden, cutting through the quiet of the early morning in a way that had him out of bed before he’d fully registered what he’d heard.
He moved fast through the house, bare feet on the cool tile, following the sound to the kitchen. Jasmine was standing at the far end of the island in a robe, one hand braced on the counter, her other arm outstretched, pointing at the window above the garden. Her face was white.
“There’s someone out there,” she said. “By the hedges. I saw him through the window.”
Nate was already at the glass.
The garden was gray and still in the early light, the pool flat, the hedges along the property’s lower edge dark and unmoving. For a second he saw nothing, and then he did. A shape thatwas wrong, crouching low where the hedge met the stone wall. Something catching the light. Glass, or a lens.
A photographer.
One had never snuck onto his property before, but things were different now. He had a movie star living with him, and so it made sense that paparazzi would do whatever they could to sneak past his security.
Maybe Nate should have felt fear, but instead all he felt was anger. Anger that someone dared intrude on the sanctuary of his home, anger that this man had scared Jasmine.
Nate was through the side door before he’d made a conscious decision about it.
The garden was cold and damp underfoot and he crossed it at a run, covering the distance between the house and the hedge before whoever was down there had time to fully register that someone was coming. The shape startled, lurched upright, and ran. The man went along the base of the wall toward the property’s eastern edge, headed for the utility gate that the maintenance team used.
Nate was faster. He’d played sports badly but had run well his entire life, the kind of runner who had no technique and a great deal of determination. He caught the man at the gate, getting a hand around his collar and pulling him back hard enough that they both went down on the gravel path in an undignified heap.
The man was in his fifties, thickset, wearing green and brown clothes that had probably been meant to help him blend with the shrubbery. He had a camera around his neck, a long lens, and the look of someone who was extremely unhappy about the current situation but was trying not to show it.
“Get off me,” he said, his voice all muffled. Crazy as it was, he had the nerve to act like Nate was the one in the wrong here.
“Stay down,” Nate said.
He didn’t say it loudly. He didn’t need to. The man stayed down.
Nate’s security team arrived from the gatehouse two minutes later. They secured the man, called the police, and walked Nate back toward the house.
“We just found the bushes hacked through,” Gerry, one of the guards on duty, said. “He came in at the northeast corner. He must have been working on those bushes for hours.”
“Then we need to expand the fencing there,” Nate said, more mad with himself than anyone else.
