“Let’s just focus on keeping our cover airtight,” he reiterated.
“Airtight,” she repeated.
“Airtight.”
This had just gotten harder. They both knew it. Which meant they were going to have to put in some extra effort. Jasmine’s question about them becoming a real couple in some way had hisgears turning. He wasn’t sure exactly what she’d meant by that, and even though he wanted to know, he didn’t want to push the matter.
But he did have an idea. If they weren’t going to truly become a couple, maybe they could put some space between themselves, Graham, and any other minions he hired.
“I know what we should do,” Nate said.
CHAPTER 20
JASMINE
The decision was made quickly, the way decisions got made when the alternative was worse. Nate had suggested it that same morning, still in the kitchen, the coffee finally cold and abandoned between them. A property on the coast. Private road, private beach, no staff on site. Somewhere that wasn’t here, wasn’t the house on the ridge with its beautiful glass walls and sight lines that a man with a long lens could work from half a dozen angles.
“How long do you want to go there?” Jasmine had asked.
“A week. Maybe ten days. Long enough for things to quiet down and for Dove to get some positive coverage going that isn’t us standing outside your mother’s building.” He’d said it practically, the way he said most things, like it was a logistics problem with a logistics solution and the personal dimensions of it were beside the point.
She’d agreed because he was right, and because the thought of spending another night in this house knowing someone might be crouched below the kitchen window watching the light move through it was not something she was prepared to do.
It wasn’t as if she could simply walk away from everything. She had appointments, meetings. Some of those could be moved to online, though. The one thing that she would miss would be next week’s physical therapy session.
She’d live, though. She’d lived with fibromyalgia before knowing its name and knowing all the “proper” ways to manage it. She was feeling pretty decent, and she also knew that staying in the city, worrying about Graham sending others to spy on them, would cause her more stress and possibly result in a bad flare.
It was only later, back in her room with a bag open on the bed and the practical business of deciding what to pack for ten days at a coastal property, that the full weight of what she was doing hit her.
A beach house. Just the two of them. No Marisol, no chef dropping by to cook meals, no security team doing rounds at the gatehouse, no built-in structure of separate wings and separate schedules and the buffer of a very large house to retreat into when things got complicated. A week and a half of proximity that had nowhere to hide in it.
She’d been to Nate’s beach house exactly once before, years ago, briefly, and she remembered it as small and sun-bleached. Cozy in a way that had surprised her, given who owned it. The kind of place that didn’t announce itself.
Intimate, in other words. Unavoidably, architecturally intimate.
She held a sweater over the bag for a moment without putting it in.
She was still, she reminded herself, nipping. The feelings she’d identified over candlelit pasta and confirmed over her mother’ssofa and failed to fully extinguish despite her best efforts were still being nipped. Actively. With intention.
A beach house for ten days did not change the facts of the situation, which were that Nate was a man who took work calls at dinner, who had built his entire life around a company that would always come first, who had once forgotten she existed entirely and gone to a party instead, and who had entered into this arrangement for the same reason she had. This wasn’t about love, not even the beginnings of it, but pride and money and a bet.
Those were the facts. She needed to respect them.
And she also needed to protect her heart.
That settled — hopefully finally — she put the sweater in the bag.
The beach house was a couple hours south, down the coast on a private road that branched off the highway. She hadn’t been able to sleep the night before, thanks to a combination of anxiety, the persistent ache in her shoulders, and the knowledge that a private investigator had been crouching below her window. Instead, she’d spent the dark hours mostly staring at the ceiling and running through the list of things that could go wrong over the next ten days and coming up with an uncomfortably long answer.
She’d packed her medications. Both the ones she was comfortable with and the new one her specialist had added last week, the one that made her feel a bit like being underwater for the first hour after taking it. She’d packed her physical therapy resistance bands and the heat pack and the arnica gel that Eden had sent her after reading an article about natural anti-inflammatories. She’d packed three books, her journal, some candles, and the small Bluetooth speaker.
She wondered briefly if Nate would throw another fit over her candles and music and then remembered that it didn’t matter. She didn’t exist to please him.
She’d also packed, at the last minute, the green dress that hugged her curves just right. She didn’t examine why, only had the passing thought that Nate had never seen her in it.
Nate had loaded the car while she finished getting ready, bags in the backseat and a big cooler in the trunk. It was kind of odd, his doing these tasks like a normal person. It almost made her forget who he was out in the world — a billionaire, a man she’d spotted on a magazine cover at the airport, someone with a reputation for being ruthless.
Now, here he was, struggling to jam a tote bag of pantry items in next to the cooler.
