“No.”
It came out flat and quiet and absolutely final. She kept the festive face on for the cameras, kept her body angled and pleasant, and let only her eyes do the cutting.
He stalled. The charm flickered. “I just thought?—”
“I don’t know what you thought.” Still smiling. Still gorgeous for the lenses. Her voice pitched low enough that the noise of the carpet swallowed it before it reached anyone but him. “I genuinely can’t imagine. But whatever it is, the answer’s no, and you’re standing in my light.”
A muscle moved in his jaw. Good. He should feel rejected. Let him feel, for one second, a fraction of what it was to be caught flat-footed and humiliated with no warning at all.
“It’s been six years,” he said, lower now, almost gentle, and that was somehow worse than if he’d been smug. “I was hoping we could?—”
“It’s been a long day, Nate.” She hated how natural his name still felt in her mouth. “And you don’t get to be the thing that makes it longer. We don’t know each other anymore. We barely did then.”
She turned before he could answer and walked toward the brass doors on legs that screamed and a spine held perfectly straight. Eden materialized at her side, slipping Jasmine’s clutch back into her hand, eyes enormous.
“Was that,” Eden whispered. “Was that who I think it was?”
“It was nobody,” Jasmine said.
But her pulse was hammering, and her palms had gone damp inside her gloves. And the worst part, the part she wouldn’t tell Eden, was that beneath the anger, beneath the exhaustion, some small idiotic part of her was still humming from the half-second before she remembered to hate him.
She stepped into the cool dark of the restaurant, let the doors swing shut on the lights and the noise behind her, and breathed.
“Tell me there’s a bar,” she said.
“There is absolutely a bar,” said Eden, steering her toward it. “And you’re going to tell me everything.”
CHAPTER 5
NATE
The restaurant doors swung shut behind Jasmine and her friend, and Nate stood on the carpet and realized he had absolutely no idea what to do next.
It wasn’t like he’d expected Jasmine to be happy to see him. Not at all. But he also hadn’t expected the vitriol she’d thrown his way.
The woman acted like she hated him.
Which… he supposed she must.
And now he felt like a fool for thinking that convincing her to date him and then eventually accept a marriage proposal would be easy. Right now, she wouldn’t even look twice at him.
A photographer was calling his name now, and Nate felt heat crawl up the back of his neck. Graham would hear about this by morning, and the story would be funnier every time he told it. Nate’s pride, the thing he’d built his whole life around protecting, was being peeled off him in strips.
He’d lost the first round. Charm had been the play, and charm had failed.
So he did the only thing left to a man who didn’t know how to fold. He went all in.
He pushed through the doors after her.
Inside, the restaurant was a wall of noise, heat and bodies, a hundred important people pretending delight at seeing one another, but all of them secretly gauging what the other person could do for them. In this town, nothing mattered more than who you knew. The room had been built to dazzle. A ceiling hung with thousands of filament bulbs, a marble bar was already crowded by beautiful people, waiters threaded the chaos bearing trays of tiny foods, and the air was thick with perfume and money.
Nate scanned the room, pulse loud in his ears, and caught a flash of bronze silk near the far end of the bar. It was Jasmine, leaning to say something to her friend, the friend laughing, the two of them in their own quiet pocket of the night that he had no right to disturb.
He disturbed it anyway. It was, after all, what he did.
He started across the room, working out his next move with each step. He could keep playing the original angle: flatter her, charm the friend, work the long game over weeks. But the long game required time he didn’t have and the goodwill he’d already torched. There was only one card he hadn’t played, the one a man like him never showed.
The truth.
