Page 37 of The Bride Bet
“Here.” Jasmine stepped forward to help. “I think if we repack it, then…”
They took the cooler out and started over, managing to get everything back in with some room to spare.
“Teamwork,” Nate said with a grin, and it made her laugh.
Not only that, her stomach flipped with giddiness.
No, she told her body.Absolutely not.
They drove mostly in silence, the easy kind that had become their default on long drives. The city fell away behind them, the traffic thinning, the light changing as they moved south and the coast appeared in flashes between the hills. The oceanwas gray-green and enormous, the kind of view that put things in proportion whether you wanted them there or not. Jasmine watched it and felt some of the tension in her shoulders start to unknot, fractionally, the way it always did when the ocean was close enough to see.
She’d grown up landlocked in Arizona. The ocean had felt like a revelation the first time she’d seen it at seventeen, driving out to Los Angeles with her mother and every hope she owned packed into two suitcases. She’d never gotten over it. She kind of hoped she never did, because it was nice to still have something in the world that brought her awe.
“You okay?” Nate asked, after about an hour.
“Just tired.” She turned from the window. “I didn’t sleep much.”
He nodded, eyes on the road. “Neither did I. The security team had the place on a tight watch last night, but every creak of the house I thought was an intruder.”
They didn’t elaborate. There wasn’t much to elaborate on. The PI had been removed from the property. The locks on the lower garden wall had been changed. Graham’s name hadn’t been said out loud since the morning before, but it sat in the car with them regardless, a third passenger that neither of them was acknowledging.
The private road, when they reached it, was exactly as she’d remembered, narrow and unpretentious, running through scrub that smelled of salt and something green and wild. The gate was weathered wood, nothing like the imposing iron of the ridge house, and when Nate punched in the code, it swung open, and she felt her chest ease open with it.
This was it. The two of them would be alone together for ten whole days, give or take.
She wasn’t sure if she was more excited or terrified by the prospect.
The house appeared around the last bend in the road, small and sun-bleached, sitting back from a stretch of pale sand that ran in both directions as far as she could see. A covered porch across the whole front of it. A path through the dune grass down to the water’s edge. Afternoon light coming off the ocean in long flat planes.
She got out of the car and stood for a moment, just looking at it.
It was beautiful. The sound of the water reached her, low and constant. A bird was singing close by in the dune grass. The air was cold and salt-sharp, and she breathed it in and felt, for the first time in the last day, like an iron fist had loosened its grip on her heart.
“It’s lovely,” she said. “Just like I remember it.”
Nate came to stand beside her with both their bags, which she hadn’t asked him to carry. “I don’t know if I told you, but it was my grandmother’s, originally. She left it to me.” He didn’t talk about his past much, and there was reverence in his voice. “I’ve kept it the way she had it.”
She looked at him. He was looking at the house, not at her. She turned back to it too.
“Are you sure you want me here?” she asked quietly.
He looked at her with a furrowed brow. “What do you mean by that?”
“I mean…” She searched for the right words. “This is a special place. You said that you’ve kept it the way your grandmother had it. I doubt you bring just anyone here.”
For a moment, he looked hurt. “I brought you here years ago.”
She shifted, uncomfortable. “Well, yes, but… things were different then.”
Memories of that weekend came back in flashes. The fire on the beach. Mixing cocktails on the patio. Waking up tangled in the sheets, his hands in her hair…
Heat rushed through her, and she quickly turned her gaze to her shoes.
“It’s fine.” He picked up the bags, seemingly oblivious to her shift in mood. Thank God. “Come on.”
He was already moving toward the porch steps, and she stood for one more second in the sea air before she followed him, thinking about a grandmother and a beach house left to a man who never seemed to slow down enough to receive gifts like that properly, and wondering if this was one of the places where he actually did.
Inside were low ceilings, pale wooden floors, furniture that was comfortable and old and had clearly been sat in by a great number of people over a great many years. A kitchen that smelled of wood and sea air and was stocked with considerably more care than she’d expected.
