The morning sat around them and the city spread below the ridge exactly as it always had, but Jasmine had a feeling that everything in their world was suddenly different.
“We have a problem,” he said.
CHAPTER 25
JASMINE
The call lasted four minutes. She knew because she watched the clock on the dashboard.
He said very little. A few yeses. One question she couldn’t hear the answer to. At the end, he said “When?” in a voice that was very controlled, and then he hung up and sat with the phone in his hand and looked straight ahead through the windshield.
“There are leaked emails,” he said. “Between me and Dove. They contain the full terms of the arrangement. The fake relationship, the timeline, the money.” He paused. “All of it.”
The words landed one at a time, each one needing a moment. When Jasmine finally processed what he was saying, the world tilted on its axis.
“Leaked, as in everyone knows?” she asked. “They’re on the internet?”
His jaw ticked. “Exactly.”
A wave of nausea rolled through her.
“How?” she asked, her voice pitching, her alarm spiking.
“I don’t know yet. Someone on Dove’s end, possibly. Graham has resources, and he’s been looking for a thread since the beginning.” His jaw was tight. “He found one.”
She looked down at the phone in her lap. The notifications had been building since they’d come through the gate. Now she turned it over.
Forty-one notifications. Seventeen missed calls. A string of texts from Eden that started with her name in capitals and ended with a string of messages that were so rapid they looked like one long run-on sentence.
She put the phone face-down again. “We need to go inside.”
The house was exactly as they’d left it ten days ago. Marisol had kept it perfect, the surfaces clean, the fountain running in the courtyard, everything in its place. It looked the same, but Jasmine stood in the center of the living room and felt like a stranger in it. Which was the opposite of how she’d felt an hour ago, which was the opposite of how she’d felt at the beach house, and the distance between those versions of the morning was so vast she couldn’t see across it.
Nate turned on the television, and Jasmine instantly wished he hadn’t.
The story was everywhere. Every entertainment channel, every news ticker, every talking head savoring it. It didn’t take long to understand the general spin everyone was giving the story.
Nate Aaron, tech billionaire, made a bet. Boys will be boys. A rich man doing rich man things, reckless and absurd, the story told with a kind of indulgent eye roll that stopped well short of condemnation.
Jasmine Caulfield, actress, agreed to marry him for a hundred million dollars. The coverage did not use the same indulgent eye roll.
“Gold digger” was the word one anchor didn’t say but arranged the sentence to imply. “Greedy” was the word another one did say, twice, with emphasis. A third had found a photograph of her from three years ago at a charity gala, diamonds at her throat, laughing at something off-camera, and was using it as the visual backdrop while describing the terms of the agreement in a tone that suggested she had committed a crime rather than signed a contract.
She picked up the remote and turned it off.
The silence that replaced it was worse in its own way.
Her phone buzzed. Marco.
She answered before she’d decided she was ready to. “Hey.”
“Tell me it isn’t true.” His voice was careful and tight, the voice he used in situations where he already knew the answer and was hoping to be surprised.
“It’s true.” She sat down on the arm of the sofa because her legs apparently weren’t working anymore. “The terms are what they’re saying they are. I’m sorry you’re finding out like this.”
A silence. “Jasmine.”
“I know.”
