Reading his expression accurately, Jasmine groaned and dropped her head into her hands.
“Even if he saw in my room,” Nate argued, needing to convince himself as much as her, “it wouldn’t have told him anything. There was nothing that could say for sure we aren’t sharing a bedroom. You could have gotten out of bed before me.”
She stared at him for a long moment. “But you’re still worried.”
He swallowed hard. “Yes. I’m still worried. Graham obviously suspects something fishy is going on, which means he won’t stop digging.” He raked his hand over his face. “I should have seenthis coming. Should have expected he would do something like this.”
“The officer said he may not have gotten anything usable.” She was trying to sound optimistic but doing a poor job of it.
Nate set his mug down. “That’s different from definitely didn’t. And even if Delaney came away empty today, that’s not the whole problem.” He looked at her steadily. “The problem is that Graham hired someone. Which means he’s past suspicion. He’s past sitting on his side of the table waiting to see what happens. He’s moving in on us, and men like him don’t stop until they get what they want.”
The kitchen was very quiet. The fountain in the courtyard ran on outside, the way it always did, the sound carrying in through the window that Nate was already planning on upgrading with even better locks.
Jasmine looked at him, and he looked at her, and neither of them said the obvious thing because they were both thinking it too clearly to need to say it out loud. They were six weeks from the wedding. They had a story built carefully over weeks of magazine covers, red carpets, dinners, and one genuinely good afternoon in her mother’s kitchen, and all of it was only as strong as the thing Graham couldn’t find.
The truth.
And, at the end of the day, what was stronger than the truth?
If he kept looking, and he would keep looking, Graham would eventually find something. A gap in the story. A record that didn’t match. A person who’d been paid for their silence but hadn’t been paid enough.
People could always be found. That was the other thing they both knew, without saying it.
“We need to move up the timeline,” Jasmine said.
“We already moved it up.”
“Then we need to move everything else faster. The announcement, the details, everything public-facing. The more of a paper trail we have, the harder it is to—” She stopped. Pressed her lips together. “The wedding’s in six weeks. That’s six weeks of him having someone watching this house. Watching us. Looking for the crack.”
“I know.”
“So what do we do?”
Nate didn’t have a perfect answer. That was the honest truth of it, and he was too tired from coming down off the adrenaline rush to dress it up. What he had was the same instinct he always had when someone was coming at him from an angle he couldn’t fully defend. The instinct that said the only way through was forward, faster, louder, until the story you were telling was so large and so established that the one they were trying to tell couldn’t find any air.
“We do exactly what we’ve been doing,” he said. “We don’t give him the crack. Not in public, not in private, not anywhere.” He looked at her. “Which means the next six weeks have to be airtight.”
She held his gaze for a long moment. “What are you saying? That we, what? Actually become a couple?”
He opened his mouth and then closed it. “What? No, that’s?—”
“Sorry.” She waved her hand and looked away. “I’m not thinking straight. I’m spooked. Of course we’re not doing that. What would that even mean?”
He tried to study her face, and though she kept it turned away from him, he could see her cheeks had turned pink. “Are you okay?”
“Of course,” she said, so swiftly she nearly cut him off. “Are you?”
“I’m spooked too. I don’t want to lose this bet.”
“Same.” She sighed.
He looked at her for a longer moment. “This superhero franchise will be big, though. Multiple movies, right? Do you really need the money from this bet? Your value will only go up after the first movie comes out.”
Jasmine worked her mouth around, looking like she wasn’t sure how to answer that.
Nate scrubbed his face. “Sorry. I guess I had to take my turn asking something silly.”
She barked out a laugh, and he couldn’t help but notice it seemed forced.
