Act Your Age, Eve Brown

by Talia Hibbert

  “Fuck off,” she muttered and shoved him away. Her brand-new pajamas were ruined. Her braids were swirling around in algae. Her mouth still tasted of tuberculosis or fungus or something equally terrible, and when she tried to step back, her shoe sort of . . . squidged in something, and the something gave way, and suddenly she was sinking.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Jacob said and grabbed her again. Now she was back against the wall of his chest.

  “Why,” she gritted out, “is the water up to my neck, but only up to your . . . boob area?”

  He stared down at her. “Because we are different heights, Eve.”

  “I know that!” She scowled, then blinked. “Er, Jacob, are you shirtless?”

  “Let’s not discuss it.”

  “Bloody hell.” She hadn’t noticed before, in the shadows, but it was difficult not to notice now, with his bare skin pressed against hers. She prodded experimentally at his abs. “Bloody hell.”

  “Stop that,” he snapped. “Do you think we could get out of here now? There’s . . . algae on me.” Apparently he found that even more abhorrent than she did, because he shuddered. It was a full body movement, one that seemed involuntary—and pressed the aforementioned abs against her tits. Which might have been enjoyable if he hadn’t muttered darkly, “Slime. Can’t stand slime.”

  Actually, even with the mutterings, it was still enjoyable. How dare Jacob of all people have this . . . television body?! He must have made a deal with the devil. She’d seen evidence in the kitchen of him eating microwaved spaghetti Bolognese for dinner. Men who ate nice food like spaghetti Bolognese were not supposed to also have abs. There was a balance to the universe that had to be observed and he was shamelessly flouting it.

  “Well, not to be ungrateful,” she shot back, unreasonably irritated, “but why on earth did you jump in? You’re injured, you clod.”

  He gave her a severe look and said stiffly, “Obviously, I came in to rescue you.”

  “Rescue me? It’s a pond, Jacob.” Still, the word rescue fizzed through her mind with all sorts of soft and pleasant meanings.

  “And you’re a disaster. I’m surprised you didn’t slip under and crack your head open on a rock and drown on my property and send my insurance through the roof. Or something like that.”

  “Oh, insurance.” She laughed. “That’s why you jumped in to rescue me?”

  “Obviously,” he bit out.

  Funny how she didn’t believe him. Jacob’s attitude was rather like a barbed-wire fence: designed to rip you to shreds if you got too close, but only to protect something special.

  No matter what he said, injured men who were obsessed with cleanliness didn’t jump bodily into ponds over insurance. No, people did things like that because they were secretly halfway nice, even if they didn’t want anyone to notice.

  But if she pointed that out, he might sputter his way into an embolism. So instead, Eve kept her smile hidden, rolled her eyes, and pulled away from his chest. His hard, naked, shockingly well-muscled . . . ahem. His chest. “Whatever. Come on, then. Let’s get out.”

  “Gladly,” he said. Then he waded through the water with sickening ease, plopped his left forearm on the banks, and heaved himself up one-handed. Eve watched the entire maneuver very, very closely, for research. In the conveniently broad shaft of moonlight glowing down on them, she observed—for science!—the following:

  Jacob’s biceps and shoulder muscles, tightening and shifting beneath his skin as they worked.

  The long, lean line of Jacob’s torso emerging from the water, his abs dripping wet, beads of moisture trailing down the sharp V leading into his pajama pants.

  The curve of his arse and bulge of his thighs through the aforementioned, soaking-wet pajama pants as he scrambled fully onto the ground.

  For science. Obviously.

  He stood, then turned around and blinked, as if surprised to find her still in the pond. “Oh. Er. Didn’t we decide to get out of there?”

  “Yes,” she agreed, “but as you’ve previously mentioned, you and I are different heights. And possess different levels of upper-body strength. And so on.”

  Snorting, Jacob sat down on the banks with a wince. She tried not to think about his various Eve-inflicted bruises. He propped his elbows up on his knees and leaned forward, arching an eyebrow. “Does this mean you need my help?”

  “No,” she said automatically.

  He arched another eyebrow. And, if she wasn’t mistaken, the corner of his mouth tilted into what might be a smile. “No?”

  “No,” she repeated. “But. Well. I just thought, since you’re so concerned about your insurance, and whatnot, that you might like to oversee my exit from the pond—”

  “Oversee,” he echoed, and this time his smile was unmistakable. There were teeth involved. Strong, white teeth, with slightly turned-in incisors. She couldn’t speak for a moment, at the unexpected sight of his grin—wolfish and unrestrained and mildly sarcastic.

  Then she swallowed and pulled herself together. For heaven’s sake, she was in a pond. Now was not the time to mentally wax lyrical over the smile of a man she barely even liked.

  “Yes,” she said, “oversee. Without your uptight—um, I mean, masterful intervention, I could easily make some sort of mistake and fall and hit my head and die.”

  Jacob snorted and shook his head, but he was still smiling as he reached out a hand. “All that to avoid asking for help? No wonder you went to a performing arts school. You’re even more of a drama queen than I am.”

  Eve pressed her lips together as she bobbed toward that outstretched hand. “Clearly I’m not that much of a drama queen,” she muttered, her attention focused on not slipping again. “Or I wouldn’t have failed.”

  She barely realized she’d said those words out loud before Jacob reacted. Cocking his head in that sudden, predatory way of his, he asked, “Failed?”

  Oh dear. Ohhh dear. Why in God’s name had she said something like that? The fall must have shaken her brain loose. Or perhaps it was the pond-based bacterial infection currently multiplying in her lungs. Eve shrugged, though he probably couldn’t see the action, since she was underwater in the dark and everything. Then she reached out and grabbed his hand.

  Their fingers actually squelched as they interlocked. Disgusting. Definitely disgusting. Except for the breadth of his palm, and the long delicacy of his fingers, and the firmness with which he held her, as if nothing on earth could make him let go because he simply wasn’t a letting go sort of man. Those things were . . . not disgusting. Not quite.

  He was silent, for a moment, staring at their joined hands, probably thinking about that hideous squelch. Then he shook himself slightly and looked at her again. “How do you fail at drama? Well, I know how I failed at drama. I hated it. Also, my acting was more wooden than a plank. I should’ve been chucked out after my first class, except Aunt Lucy made me take it as an elective to improve my confidence.” All this came out in an absent-minded stream before he snapped his mouth shut and looked askance, as if he had no idea why he’d said such a thing. Maybe they’d both been infected with some kind of loose-tongue disease, or maybe over-sharing was a natural side effect of interacting with another human being in the dead of night.

  Eve fought a smirk. “Improve your confidence, hm? Did it work?” She could just imagine a younger Jacob, doubtless twice as irritable and ferocious, refusing to talk to the other children because he found them all incredibly dull. And his aunt, deciding this was an issue of confidence, nudging him toward a class he hated with the best of intentions.

  Or maybe that wasn’t right at all. Because now she was imagining a different younger Jacob, eyes huge behind his glasses, hair like duckling fluff, standing rigid at the back of a class while everyone else paired up and pretended with an ease he couldn’t quite access. And her heart sort of . . . squeezed.

  Jacob scowled and shook his head. “No, it didn’t help, because drama is soul-destroying. For me, anyway. I would’ve assum
ed it came quite easily to you.” He untangled their hands, the same hands Eve had almost forgotten were joined. The connection had started to feel natural at some point, much like their bickering.

  “Need more leverage,” he explained when she jumped a little, and then his hand slid down her forearm and wrapped around her elbow. “So,” he continued, planting his feet. “How did you fail at drama?”

  “The same way I fail at everything,” she said breezily, wrapping her own hand around his forearm. “With pastiche.” She had the vague idea she’d misspoken, but Jacob didn’t correct her, and then her thoughts were sweeping off, anyway, too fast for specifics to matter. Eve had been searching for a foothold in the edge of the pond, but she froze as the connotations of her other words sank in.

  I fail at everything.

  It was technically true: she’d bombed school, every one of her professional dreams had died, none of her friends cared enough to hold her braids back while she threw up, and her last boyfriend had believed vaccines were a front for a government tracking system based around injectable microchips. She quite literally failed at everything, from meaningful employment to sound relationship choices. But she certainly wasn’t in the habit of admitting that out loud, and especially not to her employer.

  “Erm,” she added after the mother of all awkward pauses. “Not that I’m going to fail you. I mean, this job. Or anything.”

  Jacob looked down at her seriously. “That hadn’t even entered my mind.”

  “Oh.” Tentatively, she smiled.

  “Until you brought it up.”

  “Oh.” Her smile was replaced by a scowl—until she caught sight of his smile in the moonlight, another subtle tilt of the lips, a wicked gleam in his eyes. “Oh! You bastard.”

  “You’re not supposed to call your boss a bastard. Pull.” As if following his own instructions, he began to heave Eve upward. She squawked and grabbed a fistful of grass with her free hand, until he barked, “Do not fuck up my lawn.”

  Scoffing, she let go and grabbed his calf instead. “Fine. And I will call my boss a bastard when he teases me with such a ruthless lack of concern for my sensitive soul.”

  “I don’t tease,” Jacob said, his voice low and strained as he dragged her bodily from the pond. For a moment, Eve thought of those same words in a different context. They flashed through her, hot and glittering and entirely inappropriate. “And,” he went on, “I don’t give a damn about your sensitive soul.”

  “Clearly,” she shot back. She was almost out of the pond now, her upper body completely clear. Jacob’s muscles were straining and his jaw tight, yet somehow he managed to balance lifting a woman who clearly weighed more than him—one-handed!—with trying not to tumble back into the pond himself. It was slow, but it was steady, and Eve had the sneaking suspicion that despite her own best efforts to clamber out, she wasn’t doing much to help.

  “Look,” he said, the word a rasp. “There are many ways to fail—”

  “Trust me, I’m aware.”

  “And very few of them are actually controllable. Life has too many moving parts.” He managed to sound resentful of the very nature of human existence, which Eve found impressive despite herself. “So when it comes to this job, and failing, or succeeding, there’s really only one thing you can promise me. And,” he added sharply, “you will promise.”

  “What?”

  His response couldn’t be more surprising if he’d delivered it while butt naked and standing on his head. “Try for me, Eve. That’s all. Just try.”

  She stared. Had she misheard him? King of High Standards and Anal-Retentive Rules? “That’s . . . all? That’s all you think it’ll take, for me not to fail.”

  “Why not? You’re a relatively smart woman—”

  “Relatively!”

  “Relatively. No common sense, but other than that: smart.” Eve wanted to be offended, except he was wearing that tiny smile again. So she found herself trying not to laugh instead of ripping him a new arsehole.

  Only Jacob could make relatively smart sound like a genuine and unreserved compliment.

  “You’re also a good cook,” he went on, “and I get the sense that you try to be a nice person, when you’re not running people over. Plus, you’re . . . determined. I can work with determined. I can respect determined. I can trust determined. So, yes, I think trying will do it. That’s all I need from you.”

  Trying. Just trying. She should probably still be hung up on that part, but instead she found herself echoing with obvious surprise, “Respect?”

  “Yes, Eve. I respect you just fine.” He met her gaze as he gave one last, good pull.

  Eve was just thinking that perhaps she didn’t hate Jacob after all—and perhaps, even more shocking, he maybe possibly didn’t entirely hate her—when she found herself free from the pond and flying through the air. That flight ended when she bumped into Jacob, knocking him backward and probably breaking several of his already bruised ribs.

  “Fuck,” he barked.

  “I’m so sorry!” As quickly as she could, Eve shifted her weight onto her hands and knees, hovering over him. She bent her head to . . . inspect him for damage, or something, God, she didn’t know. But at the same time, Jacob pushed himself up on one elbow, and she thought for a moment they were going to bump heads, but somehow they both managed to stop moving—

  Which left their faces less than an inch apart.

  She assumed that was his face, anyway. She couldn’t quite see, with the fall of her hair surrounding them and blocking all the moonlight. But she could feel his breath ghosting against her cheek. He smelled like toothpaste and fresh lemons. And pond, yes, but it was the lemons that had her attention. Something about it, or the heat of him, or his closeness, made her feel slow and stuck, like she’d just waded into honey.

  “Sorry,” she repeated softly. The word was a barely there breath.

  Then he pulled back a bit, or tilted his head, or something, and she could see him now. He had warm, summer-sky eyes, although he wasn’t smiling. Not at all. His mouth was a soft, slack pout, lips slightly parted as if he’d just been kissed. Such a sweet mouth, now that she looked at it, for all the sharp things it said.

  “Are you sure you didn’t come here to kill me?” he asked.

  “Quite sure.”

  “But you’d be so good at it. You half murder me on a regular basis completely by accident.”

  “Shut up,” she said. “I’m trying to admire your mouth and you are ruining it.”

  “Admire my—?” He choked a little bit. Choked, and blinked rapidly, and then, if she wasn’t mistaken in the moonlight—he blushed.

  For such a hard-hearted arse, he certainly blushed a lot.

  And for such a smart woman—because Eve was smart, she had decided—she sure made a lot of bad decisions around him.

  I’m trying to admire your mouth? Why on earth had she said that? Was she high? Were there shrooms growing in that pond and had she managed to . . . to huff them, or whatever one did with such things?

  Flushing with mortification, she scrambled backward and hopped to her feet, brushing the dirt off her knees. “Ha. You should see your face.”

  A muscle in Jacob’s jaw ticked as he stood. “Has anyone ever told you your sense of humor is shit?”

  “You have told me.”

  “I was right.” He turned on his heel and stalked back toward the house.

  “Where are you going?” she called, shifting awkwardly—and wetly—on the grass.

  He shot a look over his shoulder. “To clean up.”

  She waited.

  He sighed and stopped walking. “You should probably come and drink some Coke at the very least. If you die of pond disease, my insurance will be even higher.”

  “Coke?”

  “To kill whatever was in that water you swallowed. It’s a thing,” he said stiffly, and started walking again.

  Fighting a smile, she rushed after him. “You know, if you’re so worried about insurance
, you should probably put a fence around that pond.”

  “It doesn’t need a fence, Eve. Only you would fall in.”

  Chapter Nine

  They took turns in the shower.

  Eve went first, of course. He wasn’t going to send her home soaking wet and filthy—and anyway, Jacob needed to think, and he couldn’t do that if she was roaming around unattended. Better to shove her into the bathroom, to hear the lock click, to lean against the door and quietly lose his mind while safe in the knowledge that Eve was contained to one room only. So that’s exactly what he did.

  Of course, what he’d meant to lose his mind about was his current situation: shirtless, covered in algae, forced to share a bathroom with an employee he couldn’t stop staring at. So many layers of inappropriate and uncomfortable and just not right. He should’ve been turning this awful night over in his head for hours.

  Instead, Jacob leaned against the bathroom door and heard the rush of water over what must be Eve’s naked body, and lost his mind in an entirely different way.

  Admiring your mouth. Fuck. Fuck. He wanted to ask himself what that meant, but even to a serial overthinker there was only one possible answer. It was very straightforward, really. She liked his mouth. She’d claimed to be messing about, but Jacob didn’t believe her. He didn’t know why. He was hardly an expert in reading people—quite the fucking opposite.

  But still, he didn’t believe her. He just didn’t.

  So this, then, was the state of things: Eve liked his mouth, disliked the things that came out of it, and was currently naked in his shower.

  That last part wasn’t meant to be relevant, but he couldn’t stop thinking about it.

  Jacob was staring at the wall, tapping the fingers of his left hand against his thigh in a rapid rhythm, when the lock behind him clicked again. He had just enough time to straighten up and turn around before the door swung open to reveal Eve. There she stood in nothing but a towel—one of his towels—her shoulders bare and glistening with water, her braids piled on top of her head and dripping wet. The scent of lemon hung about her like a cloud, and something low in his gut clenched like a fist. She’d used his soap. There were three different kinds of body wash in the shower, just in case Jacob ever felt like changing things up, but he rarely did, so the lemon one was way emptier than the mint or the raspberry. She must have seen that, she must have noticed that, but she’d used the lemon anyway.