Page 58 of Hidden Gem
“Honestly, no idea. My experience with ambergris is like two decades old. I don’t know if it’s still in demand. I googled it earlier, and there’s a website we can use to contact potential buyers.”
“Wow. Anything else you’d like to add before I turn off the camera?”
To her shock, Jason dropped the fork on the table, grabbed the phone and pulled Marnie into his arms. Turning on the reverse camera, he lowered his stubbly cheek on her shoulder and grinned into the lens. “I just want to add that I’ve fallen hard for this woman. Look how cute she is!”
Marnie let out a nervous chuckle, trying to hide from the camera, but Jason caught her chin and lifted it up, forcing her to look at the screen. “No! Look. Look how cute you are. Look how cute we are together! I just want you to see it.”
Marnie blinked, tears bursting into her eyes. “You’re so cute,” she said, trying to smile. “I think I’m falling for you, too.”
Her admission came from somewhere deep, a confession so flammable a spark could have blown up the whole lighthouse. But she couldn’t take it back. She loved this man. Against her better judgment. Against all reason.
Jason turned off the phone, dropped it on the table and pulled her into a hot kiss that tasted of tears. Her tears. He moved from her lips to her neck, closing her into a hug so tight it may have rearranged her internal organs.
“I want to stay here, with you, forever,” he whispered. “I’ll buy this bloody lighthouse.”
“I thought you weren’t into property investment,” she mumbled against his chest.
“I’ll lease it for a hundred years. I don’t care. I just want to stay here. Sleep. Eat. Be with you.” The desperation in his voice made her shiver.
“What about your work? What about empty homes?”
Jason released her, brushing curls off her face. “I could always pop in every now and then, try to keep things moving until we make some progress. But I wouldn’t go for another term. This is it. I could go back to teaching, maybe part time. I could live off my investments. I want to show you...”
He opened his laptop sitting on the wide windowsill and brought up a screen with incomprehensible display of charts, numbers and diagrams. The numbers updated constantly, changing between green and red. “This is what I do when I can’t sleep. I trade cryptos.”
She stared at the screen, then at him. “What, like Bitcoin?”
“Bitcoin, and the alt coins. I’ve become pretty good at sensing those trends. It takes a bit of effort, but...” He shrugged, almost apologetic.
“Isn’t that risky? You could lose everything.”
Jason shook his head. “I play the long game. I don’t do leverage bets or anything like that. That’s gambling.”
“Leverage what?”
“I mean I don’t bet on whether something goes up or down. I just invest. Even if it goes down, I still have my coins. I’m not in a hurry, so I wait for the right time. Every now and then, I cash out my gains, put them in gold and silver. I already have seven times what I invested.”
Marnie leaned in to study the screen. She couldn’t make any sense of it, other than the jagged line going up and down like crazy. She’d heard this was the most volatile market you could possibly get into. “Are you sure this isn’t the reason you’re not sleeping at night?”
He gave her an uncertain smile. “Pretty sure. I was doing this way before the last election.”
“And that’s when you stopped sleeping?”
He closed the laptop lid. “Yeah, around that time. This job... everything that we had to do... It’s not sitting well with me. That’s why I’m working on this. It’s my exit strategy.”
“Are you really thinking of quitting?” She couldn’t believe it.
“I’m not coping. Look. I need to tell you something.”
His solemn expression gave Marnie chills.
He grabbed her by the hand and led her upstairs. “It’s less gloomy up here.” He gestured at the beach panorama behind the windows, the afterglow of the sunset still hanging on the horizon. “Also, I left my charger in here.”
He plugged his phone into the charger, and they sat on the navy bed spread. Nausea welled up in Marnie’s stomach. She dug her fingers into the blue cotton, focusing her eyes on the small model lighthouse on the windowsill, and his phone, plugged into a charger right next to it. That’s as far as she could look.
“I want to be completely honest with you.”
