“He really did. As for myself, that’s classified information.”
She laughed while he tapped through her music app and added who knew what to their queue. When he passed the phone back, the tip of his middle finger grazed the curve where her palm flowed into her wrist, and Eve had to clamp down on this outrageous full-body shiver. Friends, she told her nervous system firmly. We are friends.
Her blood continued to pulse hot and stormy through her veins, regardless. Good Lord. Jacob, poor, unaware soul, was leaning back against the cushions and cracking open a packet of crisps. Meanwhile, here she was feeling her knickers get damp. It was depraved. And also kind of hot. Wait, no—bad Eve.
“Hang on,” he said, going momentarily still. “Are those biscuits? Are there biscuits in the snack pile?”
“You like biscuits?” She hadn’t been sure.
“I fucking love biscuits. My first hotel job, I—” He broke off with an embarrassed little wince before pushing through with a grin. As if he was mortified, but he knew she’d like this, so he’d say it anyway. “I was sacked for eating the complimentary biscuits.”
“What?” Eve’s gasp was so mighty it probably drained half the oxygen from the room. “Jacob! I can’t believe you stole. I can’t believe you’ve been sacked, ever in your life.”
“It wasn’t stealing!” he said. “Well, it was, but I didn’t mean it to be stealing. I was fourteen!”
“You were working at fourteen?”
He shot her an arch look. “You’re doing that spoiled brat thing again.”
“Oh, yes, sorry.” She waved the question away. “You were morally bankrupt at fourteen?”
“Hey.”
“What? That’s what I heard.”
“Fuck off, Brown,” he grinned, and then he leaned forward to snag a biscuit. She let the rising beat of Ravyn Lenae’s “Sticky” bounce the happy bubbles in her tummy higher, while Jacob bit into a gingersnap, chewed with a slow frown, then examined the plate. Finally, he asked, “Where did you get these?” Because he was a man who noticed things, such as the lack of logo stamped into the biscuits and the crisper, more buttery taste that came from being freshly baked.
“I made them,” she said.
He looked at her sharply, his head held at the lupine angle that meant he was assessing or investigating. What, she wasn’t sure, until he took another bite out of the biscuit and said, “Well, fuck.”
“What?”
“It never occurred to me until now. I could’ve been forcing you to make biscuits all this time.”
“Oh, yes, add to my to-do list, you absolute slave driver.”
“Maybe we could serve these at the festival.”
“Not very breakfast-for-dinner-y,” she reminded him mildly, “and Pemberton might get a bit pissed off if we muscle in on their gingery turf.” But she was smiling because if Jacob wanted something of hers for the B&B, that meant he liked it. A lot.
“Oh. Yes. Hm. All entirely valid points,” he allowed. “I suppose the sugar is going to my head. But adding sweets to the menu—we should think about that. It may be breakfast for dinner, but it is still dinner . . .”
“And I make a gorgeous sponge cake, which is the sort of talent one should never waste,” Eve finished, nodding slowly. “Thank you for the compliment, darling.”
“Er, I don’t think I compli—”
“Cracking idea, really. I could bake a few cakes—they’re easy enough to finish in advance and they’d make for a pretty display. £2.50 per slice, and we draw in the pudding lovers and the foodies who’d rather snack from each station than commit to an entire meal.”
Jacob stared at her, looking mildly astonished. “I . . . well . . . yes. That’s a very sound strategy.”
She arched an eyebrow. “Try not to be so obvious about your surprise. I can be clever sometimes, you know.” The words felt slightly foreign in her mouth, more spur-of-the-moment bravado than actual belief—yet once they were out there, Eve found she didn’t want to laugh them off. In fact, they were sort of . . . true. She could be clever. She’d just proved it, hadn’t she?
Maybe. Gosh, what a thought.
Jacob, meanwhile, was rolling his eyes. “I know you can be clever,” he said in long-suffering tones. “I hired you, didn’t I?”
“Barely,” she snorted.
“You persuaded me into it, then. Which is more evidence of your cleverness.”
“Because you’re sooo difficult to outsmart,” she snickered, at which point Jacob picked up a pillow and whacked her with it. So she picked up a pillow and whacked him right back, and in the midst of all that delicious immaturity, she barely had time to glow over their conversation.
It still stuck with her, though.
Clever, clever me.
* * *
Hours after that sweet, surprise text, the sun had fully set and the moon had finally risen. The night sky was star-studded, the breeze through the open window smelled like cool grass, and Jacob felt a little drunk. But he’d felt this kind of drunk before—the spontaneous, can’t-stop-grinning kind where, for once, he didn’t care too much—and he knew what had caused it.
The woman sitting beside him, solemnly waving an empty Pringles tube in the air like it was a lighter at a concert.
“What are you doing?” he demanded, mostly because he couldn’t fucking wait to hear it. He wanted inside her confetti-strewn head every chance he got. It was the only foreign country he could remember wanting to visit.
Now, when had that happened?
Maybe on Wednesday, when he’d asked what she was muttering to herself as they walked down the hall, and she’d said she was ranking his signature scowls from 1 (Disdainful Glare) to 10 (Torturous Stare of Imminent Death).
Or maybe it had started before then. He wasn’t sure, suddenly. So it was a relief when she scattered his thoughts with her response. “I’m getting into the solemn spirit of ‘Hometown Glory.’ Great pick, by the way. Hey, do you think anyone’s ever gotten their dick stuck in a Pringles tube?”
Christ, the shit she came out with. And what a fuckup he must be, because when she said this barely sexual nonsense so matter-of-factly—when she made silly dick jokes or winked after outrageous double entendres—he always found himself shifting in his suddenly tight jeans.
Like now.
He leaned over to grab a glass of water from the side table, which had the added benefit of hiding his groin from her view. Not that he was hard. That would be ridiculous. If he could maintain his control while lying in bed with her—while the moon turned her skin silver-dark again, and her T-shirt (TOO SOUR TO BE YOUR SWEETIE) had ridden up to reveal the swell of her bare belly—then he could maintain his control over a question about Pringles.
He sipped his water, relished the cool slide down his throat, and settled beside Eve again. “I think anyone who’s big enough to get stuck in a Pringles tube has better places to put it,” he said finally.
“Jacob.” She turned sparkling eyes in his direction. “You absolute size queen.”
“Er . . . what is—?”
Eve waved an urgent hand. “Shh, shh, I like this part.” She grabbed her phone and turned up the music. A dreamy expression took over her face and all the breath trickled out of her. She’d been doing this periodically—shutting him up at the crescendo of this or that song, closing her eyes and humming along like she felt it. Like every note ran through her blood and some hit her heart harder than others. Since Jacob could be obedient, when he felt like it, he shut his mouth and watched her in the moonlight—watched her tip her head back, watched those wide, warm eyes slide shut, watched a dreamy little smile curve her lips.
What he didn’t expect was for her to sing instead of hum.
He’d heard Eve sing before. Of course he had. She sang all the time, especially when she wasn’t wearing her AirPod—repetitive snatches of this chorus or that refrain, tongue-twister lines she repeated over again, instruments she imitated with unnerving accuracy. If anyone as
ked him, Hey, does Eve Brown sing? he’d roll his eyes and say, Only all the fucking time.
But he would’ve been wrong. Because apparently, all those other times, she hadn’t been singing at all: she’d been playing. She’d been messing around. She’d been entertaining herself absent-mindedly, kind of like a knife-wielding assassin spinning a blade harmlessly between her fingers instead of filleting you alive in twenty seconds.
She wasn’t playing this time.
This time, Eve opened her mouth and moonlight came out. Like the silver-dark of her skin, like pearlized smoke, like the siren he’d heard that night in the garden because for God’s sake, Jacob, she’d been the voice in the garden, obviously. The voice so sweet and sharp at the edges, so husky and effortlessly strong—strong enough to easily seem fragile—that he’d assumed it was just his imagination.
She drew out the last, long note in the chorus like silk between her fingertips, and then she gave a breathless little laugh, opened her eyes, and took a bite out of her Mars Bar like nothing had happened. If Jacob was cool, he’d probably act like nothing had happened, too. Jacob was not cool.
“What the shit was that?”
She chewed chocolate and caramel and wrinkled her nose. “I don’t know. Nothing. You’re not going to be weird about it, are you?”
“Do you know who you’re talking to?”
She snorted, then slapped a hand over her mouth. “Look what you’re doing. I almost spat Mars Bar at you, and then you might have died. You might have gone into antigerm shock and died.”
He kind of wished the thought of her spit freaked him out. If it did, the idea of swapping various bodily fluids with her might stop lurking at the edge of his consciousness.
And shit, now he’d faced the thought, he couldn’t pretend it wasn’t there anymore: he wanted to kiss Eve Brown. Very, very badly. In a few different places.
But not while she was eating a Mars Bar. A man had to have his limits.
You will not kiss her at all. Sensible, starched Jacob rose from the ashes of himself and corrected tonight’s giddy, contact-high, Eve-addicted Jacob with a stern look and a sharp tone. There would be no kissing. It wasn’t proper or practical and there were ten thousand issues of consent, and anyway, what would happen after the kiss? Jacob knew what he’d want to happen: when he liked a woman enough to kiss her, he liked that woman enough to keep her, too.
But there were social scripts to be observed beyond fondness > physical contact > emotional commitment, and even if those scripts had never felt natural to Jacob, he’d learned them well enough to copy. So. No kissing and claiming. It wasn’t fashionable, and if you did it too quickly, you wound up with a woman who was more interested in what you could do with your tongue than she was in your sudoku skills or your conversation. The kind of woman who left.
None of which mattered in this situation, because a man simply could not claim his chef. Aside from anything else, it would take him straight back to the ten thousand issues of consent.
“Oh dear,” Eve was saying, “you have. You have gone into shock and died.”
Jacob realized he had been silent for far too many seconds. “Stop talking rubbish. When were you going to tell me you could . . .” He trailed off for a moment, uncomfortable with every description of her voice that came to mind. They all seemed too gushing, or too distant, or too inadequate to describe a talent that felt embedded into her soul. He didn’t want to treat this as a party trick when, apparently, singing as if she should be on a stage was just Eve. In the end, he vaguely motioned to her throat and finished awkwardly, “When were you going to tell me you could do that?”
“When it became something that matters, which—oh, look, it hasn’t.”
“Eve,” he said, “everything about you matters.” And then he briefly but seriously considered ripping out his own tongue.
Chapter Thirteen
Everything about you matters.
Eve might have fainted—might have swooned into a pile of dust, kind of like she did when she reached the romantic declaration part of her favorite horny fanfics—if it weren’t for the rest of Jacob’s little speech.
“We’re friends now,” he said. “Friends share, correct?”
Ah. Yes. Friendship. That was how she’d ended up lying in bed beside him under a gorgeous night sky, her skin fizzing with the electricity of his quiet, contained nearness and her mind veering into forbidden territory every five minutes. Friendship. Obviously. Hm.
“It didn’t seem relevant,” she said at last. “So I like to sing. You know that. What else is there?”
“You can’t tell me,” he said, “that it’s not important to you. When you sing like that. It has to be important to you.”
She knew what he meant. People had their things, right? You could be shitty at this or that, but everyone had at least one thing, and they loved their thing, and they were proud of their thing. She’d been proud of her thing, too, until she’d tried to make it her life and failed. Now it was just . . . there. Part of her, a pleasure, but a reminder, too, when she was in the worst of her moods.
Whatever Jacob read in her silence, or saw in her face, it made him shake his head and put a hand on her shoulder. That hand seemed so heavy, so hot, she was surprised it didn’t slide right through her bones like a knife through butter. “Don’t,” he said.
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever you’re thinking. Don’t. There isn’t much that takes the smile out of you like this, so whatever’s on your mind can’t be good.”
His words were a soft and tender shock, bare of all sarcasm or dry critique, like he’d taken off his clothes just to show her his naked skin. Like maybe he was waiting for her to do the same.
Not that this topic was half so serious as her melodramatic mind always made it out to be. As proof of that fact—for him, for herself—she huffed a sigh and stared at the stars as she spoke. “I used to think I would perform. Always, you know? That it would be my future. Because I was so good—everyone swore I was good—so that had to be my destiny. But good isn’t all it takes. Especially when you look like me.”
“You look perfect,” he said, the words quick and razor-sharp with their certainty. They caught her unawares, like a flash of lightning in the dark. When she turned her head to look at him, he wasn’t blushing or figuring out how to take it back. He was watching her steadily, as if he’d known she’d instantly try to poke holes in his statement, and he refused to let her. “You look perfect,” he said again, each word falling like a petal onto a tranquil lake.
She smiled, then, because he deserved it. And a little bit because . . . well, because he seemed to mean it, which fluffed her up inside like cotton candy.
Jacob Wayne thought she was perfect.
And, beneath all the barbed-wire keep-your-distance ice-god bullshit, she thought there was no one sweeter in all the world than him.
“Thank you,” she said. “But you realize plenty of other people disagree.”
“I don’t give a fuck about other people.”
“Neither do I,” she said honestly. When it came to her appearance, Eve had long since learned that giving a shit about others’ opinions meant slipping under an ocean of negativity. So she’d decided a while back that she was beautiful, and her body was lovely, and she would accept no other judgment on the subject. “But I used to. Back when I wanted to be the star of the show so badly, I cared a lot. You see, I was always rather shit at school. I was slow on the uptake and I didn’t test well and my memory—let’s not even talk about it. So I told myself, you know, it didn’t matter, because I wasn’t meant for that sort of thing. I was meant to be a star. I got so convinced that I just stopped trying. I was never going to be smart like my sisters, and I was never going to need it, so I might as well give up.
“But then I finished secondary, and my parents sent me to a performing arts college, and I wasn’t . . . I wasn’t the best. I’d convinced myself I just had to wait, and I’d eventually be the best at s
omething. But I’d been wrong. I didn’t hit the right emotional marks, and my memory issue was a problem, script-wise, and I was terrible at being told what to do. And then, on top of it all, there was the look.” She pressed her lips together and flicked a glance at Jacob because, well, this part was so excruciatingly awkward to speak about. Some people wanted to pretend they didn’t understand, as if her prettiness negated all the other things she was, and all the ways those other things didn’t fit in with society’s expectations.
Then there were the people who acted like it shouldn’t hurt, being rejected by the status quo like that. As if, because it came from a twisted place of inequality, it shouldn’t have any hold on her. Which was a nice idea in principle, but Eve found it mostly came from those who’d never been personally crushed by the weight of all that disapproval.
Jacob wasn’t reacting like one of those people, though. He was simply sitting quietly, watching in silence, letting her speak. Because he was like that, when it mattered. He was like that.
“The look,” she said again. “I didn’t have it. I was too fat and too dark and not entirely symmetrical, so I had to be the evil background character or the comedic relief or whatever. People told me to pay my dues and change things from the inside, and I saw others doing that. But I didn’t want to. And none of us should have to. So I left.
“And I think that was my first taste of failure. I didn’t entirely blame myself—I couldn’t, all things considered. But it was still so . . . bitter.” She could taste it now, on the tip of her tongue, a thousand flavors piled high—from all the classes she’d once escaped by fantasizing about her star-studded future, to the day she’d thrown her gnome costume at that uptight director and walked out. And even though the gnome thing gave her a little aftershock of satisfaction, it just wasn’t enough.
“I probably should’ve kept trying, somehow. It was what I really, really wanted, after all. But I was so exhausted. I loved it, but I was done.” And then the rest of her failures had started. “Being done meant going back to the real world. New A levels, university, choosing a career path. My parents were understanding and supportive, my sisters were always on my side, and I had—God, Jacob, I had every fucking option. Sometimes I feel ashamed, I had so much in front of me. And I didn’t want any of it. I couldn’t do any of it. I went back to school and I failed in a thousand different ways. My parents practically cheated my way into university but I failed my first year. And I’d tried, Jacob. I actually tried.”
Act Your Age, Eve Brown Page 16
