Had Nate sent someone ahead to air the place out? Most likely. He probably had a person for every task imaginable, everyone no more than a phone call away.
The place was nearly perfect, except there was one problem. Namely, there was only one full bedroom. There was, however, a loft with a twin bed that was accessible by a ladder.
They both looked at the ladder for a moment.
“I’ll take the loft,” Nate said.
“You’re six foot two.”
“I’ll manage,” he promised.
“Nate, you really don’t have to be chivalrous.”
“What kind of man would I be, making my bride-to-be take the loft?”
If only he knew how much those words were a knife turning in her heart.
Jasmine carried her bag to the main bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the ocean through the open window. She told herself very firmly that ten days was not very long and that she was going to be completely fine, and the fact that this place felt more like a home than anywhere she’d been since she’d left her own house was simply a coincidence and not information that meant anything at all.
CHAPTER 21
NATE
The beach house had one living room, one kitchen, one porch, the loft, and the one bedroom. Nate had known this before he suggested coming here. He hadn’t fully thought through what it would mean in practice.
What it meant in practice was that the avoidance system he and Jasmine established on the first day together required considerably more effort than the one at the ridge house, which had essentially run itself on square footage alone. Here, there was no square footage to hide behind. There was only the unspoken agreement that whoever needed the kitchen got the kitchen, and whoever needed the porch got the porch, and conversations were kept to the functional minimum.
It worked. Mostly.
The problem was that the house was small enough that he could hear her moving around in it. It was a constant distraction, pulling at the edges of his focus when he was supposed to be working.
It wasn’t that she was loud. She was just… there.
And somehow her simply being there was the most distracting thing she could ever do.
He heard her make tea in the mornings before he was up. He heard her on the phone to Eden sometimes, the low murmur of it carrying through the walls. He heard her laugh once, at something Eden said, bright and unguarded, the real one, and he sat very still at his desk until it stopped.
By the second night, he’d burned through his emails and run out of legitimate work to occupy himself with by one in the morning. He sat at the small desk in the corner of the living room with a book he wasn’t reading and listened to the ocean.
He heard her before he saw her. Footsteps from the bedroom, the soft sound of the kitchen tap running briefly, and then silence that stretched long enough that he turned a page without absorbing a single word on it.
She appeared in the doorway.
She had one arm wrapped around her middle, which he assumed at first was the cold. The coastal air came through the gaps in the old window frames, and even though the heat worked decently well, it still made the place drafty.
But then something about her face stopped him. He knew her tired face by now. This wasn’t it. This was something else, something sitting deeper than tiredness.
“Sorry,” she said, noticing him. “I didn’t realize you’d still be up.”
“It’s fine.” He closed the book. “There’s tea, if you want it.”
“I’m okay.” She came in anyway and lowered herself carefully onto the other end of the sofa, pulling a blanket from the backof it over her legs. She found a position and went still in it. Her whole body was stiff. Was she sick?
He picked the book back up and gave her the quiet. The ocean filled the silence between them, low and even.
After a while he said, “Still work stress?”
He said it without looking up. Not as a needle. Just an opening, left on the table for her to take or leave.
