“I’d rather you—”
She held it to her lips, and then the other woman—Shivani—produced a box of matches, and the cigarette was chivalrously lit, and it was all very Hollywood.
“Times of great stress require it,” Gigi told him conspiratorially. “But really, I quit in ’79. Now, then. What was your name?”
“Erm,” he said, “Jacob.”
“Fabulous, fabulous.” She took a deep drag. “Jacob, sweetheart, are you in any way mistreating my little dumpling of a granddaughter?”
In the corner, Joy stiffened. “Gigi.”
Meanwhile, Shivani—a middle-aged woman with a waterfall of black-and-silver hair—rolled her eyes. “Oh, Garnet. You ham-handed battering ram.”
“You say the sweetest things, dear.”
At which point, Jacob managed to gather the wits that question had knocked out of him. “Am I what?”
“Well,” Gigi said after another dragonlike exhalation, “I was dragged up here on the belief that my dear little muffin had gotten herself into some sort of trouble, or at the very least fallen in thrall to an unsuitable sort. Yet here we are, and you seem a perfectly reasonable man, and Eve—well, I could be confused, but I do believe Eve has dumped us all here to wait for her while she serves cake to strangers. Which suggests to me, darling, correct me if I’m wrong, that she simply works here, as opposed to anything more sinister.”
“It’s—it’s—it’s high tea,” Jacob managed. Sinister? Why in God’s name would anyone suspect something sinister? He was about to ask as much when Eve appeared in the doorway and beat him to it.
“What on earth are you talking about, Gigi?” she asked, and he practically fainted with relief at the sight of her. Because Jacob knew exactly how he would behave if any other group of posh, smoking arseholes appeared at his B&B and started looking around like he had something to hide, asking rude questions and generally making nuisances of themselves; he would shout a bit and curse a bit and throw them out on their arses.
But this was Eve’s family, and she cared about her family, and it seemed painfully clear that they cared about her. She’d ended up here because she was ashamed of disappointing them. They mattered. And he loved her. Which meant that Jacob was caught between his general—and growing—irritation, and the desire to be, well . . . not hated. Which wasn’t a place he’d often found himself, since entering adulthood.
He didn’t fucking like it.
But he’d stay here awhile longer, for her.
“And what are you all doing here?” Eve demanded, coming in and closing the door behind her. “Better yet, how are you here? I didn’t tell anyone where I was.”
Her entrance seemed to spark energy into the room. Everyone rose to their feet, with the exception of Gigi, who was busy lounging around and smoking, and her darling Shivani, who was busy sighing and rolling her eyes. And also seemed to have secured a steaming flask of tea from somewhere. At least one of Eve’s relatives was sensible.
“Well,” said one of the sisters—Chloe, if he’d followed Gigi’s vague points correctly. “Do you remember, Evie-Bean, when you and I drove to the ballet in Birmingham, but we got lost and Danika came to get us? You turned your location on, so she could find us. And, well, none of us ever thought to turn it off.”
Eve opened and closed her mouth like a fish before blurting, “You stalked me?”
“She had to.” That was Eve’s mother, Joy, who was looking vaguely tortured and wringing her hands. “Your father and I know we were harsh, before. But you vanished into thin air and refused to tell anyone where you were.”
“So you decided to turn up here and—and heresy me?” Eve demanded.
“I think you mean harass, darling,” interjected the other sister, Danika. “And no, that isn’t why we’re here. Not entirely. We were going to leave you to it, but then Chloe and I got slightly . . . worried.”
“Worried? Why?”
There was a pause, and a few more wary looks in his direction, before Chloe spoke. “At first, every time we called or texted you’d tell us about this awful new job and how horrible your boss was.”
Jacob tried not to wince. She’d said at first, after all, and he supposed he deserved that.
“Then, all of a sudden, you were never free to talk because you and your boss were terribly busy,” Chloe went on awkwardly. “With all sorts of . . . after-hours meetings, and then last night you sent us a, erm, voice note.”
“What voice note?” Eve asked, her face a picture of confusion. But he saw the moment she realized what they were talking about. Jacob remembered it, too.
Eve had been sitting in her room, talking to her phone, and he’d come in demanding to know what she was doing. And then he’d dragged her off to his room.
Ah, shit.
“We thought you might be in some sort of sex cult,” Danika said baldly. “Those happen, you know.”
“A sex cult?” Eve squeaked. “At a bed-and-breakfast?”
“Well,” Gigi piped up, “clearly their worries were unfounded, because it looks as though there’s only you and Jacob, and sex cults typically require multiple members. Unless that strapping young man from outside is also involved, in which case, bravo.”
“Mother,” sighed Eve’s dad in weary tones.
“What, Martin? I’m not taking this lightly, you understand. I’m simply examining the facts.”
Joy spoke sharply over everyone. “The point is, we had no idea what was going on, so we’re here to check on your well-being. That’s all. We had intended to give you space, wait for you to come home next week—”
“Next week?” Jacob interjected. He hadn’t meant to speak aloud, but—well, that was wrong. Pretty much everything said in the last ten minutes had been wrong, but also understandable. This statement, however, stuck out like a sore thumb. Eve couldn’t have been planning to visit home next week, because next weekend was the Gingerbread Festival.
“Or was it the week after?” Joy waved her hand. “I don’t know. Whenever you were coming back to begin the event-planning job. But you know you have a tendency to pick up, erm, less than suitable men, darling, so we thought we’d better nip up here just to check nothing was getting out of hand.”
Event-planning job. Jacob supposed he should be focusing more on the fact that Eve’s mother had just called him less than suitable—or had she simply insulted Eve’s general life choices? One of those. And usually, he’d be incredibly pissed by either option. But his brain was a little stuck on the phrase event-planning job, trying and failing to absorb it, to move past it, to make it make sense.
He looked at Eve, waiting for her to clear things up. Instead, she avoided his gaze and told her mother, “Jacob isn’t unsuitable, Mum. He’s exceedingly—good. And very—accomplished. And far cleverer than—” She spluttered awkwardly. “Oh, never mind. The event planning begins after next weekend.”
“The what?” Jacob asked, his voice harder than he intended. Couldn’t help it. He felt suddenly twisted and prickly, and—awkward and foolish and caught unawares. All the things he most hated to be.
Because apparently, Eve was leaving, and he was the only person in this room who didn’t know about it.
Eve’s dad, Martin, glared at Jacob with surprising force. “Do you know, son, I’m not sure how this conversation is any of your business.”
Jacob stood up straighter, feeling himself ice over. “I’m Eve’s employer. Her whereabouts during our busiest season are certainly my business.”
“Well,” Martin shot back, “our Eve has a lucrative opportunity in event planning beginning in September, so perhaps you won’t be her employer for much longer.”
Those words plunged Jacob into ice water. He ground his teeth practically to dust, trying to hold on to the leftovers of the day’s happiness—but he couldn’t. He couldn’t. Because all of a sudden, he was uncertain, he was an outsider in his own safe haven, and the woman who should be with him—the woman who should always be with him—was
planning to leave. Had been planning to leave all along, he realized. When he turned to look at her, the guilt was written all over her face. Her brows were drawn tight together, her eyes huge and shimmering, her teeth sinking into her lip. He wanted to go over there and put his arms around her, to comfort her.
He wanted her arms around him. He was so cold. She was so warm. She’d fix it.
Except right now, she was the problem. She was the one who’d made him a fucking fool.
“Jacob,” she said cautiously, “after I interviewed here, I agreed to plan a party for an old friend.”
“Plan a party?” Joy repeated. “Don’t downplay your achievement, darling. Your father and I were beyond impressed when Mrs. Lennox let us know you’d be planning Freddy’s twenty-first. She had me on the phone for half an hour yesterday morning alone. You’ve done very well.”
“I wasn’t due to start,” Eve said, still looking at him, “until after the festival.”
And there it was. The final confirmation. Jacob’s throat felt tight, his stomach roiled, his skin stretched thin and painful over his bones. Of course she’d been planning to leave. What had he thought—that this perfect hurricane of a woman would blow into his life and actually stick around? Fall in love with him? Instead of blowing right the fuck out again?
He shouldn’t be surprised she was disappearing so soon. Jacob was easy to leave behind; he’d learned that very early on. What hurt—no, what made him furious, so furious his eyes prickled with it and his blood burned him from the inside—was the fact that she’d almost convinced him she might stay. Why had she done that? Why had she done that? And why had he wanted her so bad after all of five fucking seconds? He should know by now that other people didn’t work like him, weren’t intense like him, but she was so right and so familiar, he’d just—
“Fuck,” he muttered, and suddenly he couldn’t bear to stand in that room in front of all those people, all those strangers. He stormed past Eve and slammed out into the hall, drawing alarmed looks from two guests heading up the stairs.
Heart pounding, breaths coming a bit too fast, Jacob pulled himself together and offered them a smile that felt more like baring fangs. Their alarm didn’t fade. Actually, they seemed to head up the stairs a bit faster.
“Fuck,” he repeated, and then the door behind him opened and Eve was there.
Her fingers fluttered up to his shoulder. “Jacob—”
“Don’t touch me.” Her hand felt like a boulder. He jerked away and whirled around to face her, forcing himself to ignore the expression on her face.
The expression that said she was crumbling.
Clearly, his interpretations couldn’t be trusted when it came to this woman. Clearly, he always got her entirely, overwhelmingly wrong.
“Why?” he demanded. “Why would you—” He didn’t even know what to say.
“You didn’t give me the job.” Her words were rushed, fumbled, as she fiddled frantically with the ends of her braids. “At first. I—you didn’t—before I hit you, you didn’t give me the job. So then Florence called me, and she did give me a job. But I had to stay because I hit you, and you needed help. So I thought I’d just stay here until the festival was over. The job—”
“I don’t give a fuck about the job,” he roared, and in that second, it was absolutely true. “You—” You said you wanted me. You were supposed to be with me, not make plans behind my back and stay here out of obligation. Were you still going to leave, after last night?
He couldn’t ask. He couldn’t ask, because experience dictated that the answer would be yes.
But only children whined when they were left, and only children waited, night after night, for the ones they loved to change their minds. Jacob was not a child anymore. Nor was he some pathetic thing to be abandoned and beg for an explanation. He wasn’t pathetic at all.
Even if he had been foolishly, hopelessly in love with this woman, dreaming of a future, while she’d stumbled into his bed and been ready to stumble right back out.
He took a deep, deep breath, and felt like himself again. Felt like he was in control.
“Jacob,” she said softly. “Don’t. You’re . . . don’t.”
He knew exactly what she meant, but he ignored her. It was far better to be like this, to be distant and safe, than to be—whatever she’d made him. Far better indeed. “I appreciate your commitment to your work here,” he said coldly, “and I understand why you felt responsible, after what happened. But I don’t need you.”
She rocked back a step, her inhalation sharp. “I’m saying this all wrong, aren’t I? I know I am. Jacob, I wasn’t going to leave. I’d changed my mind. Okay? I wanted to stay. Here. At the cottage.”
Jacob’s shriveling heart leapt at those words, tried to run right for her—but it slammed into a wall of experience. He screwed his eyes shut because he couldn’t process all this and look at her, too. She was so beautiful and so precious and so obviously placating him, saying whatever it took because she could see him shattering and her soft heart couldn’t take it. Saying exactly what he wanted to hear. Just like she had all along.
It had been a lie all along.
Opening his eyes, he echoed flatly, “You’d changed your mind.”
“Yes.” The word came out in a rush, more air than substance.
“Did you tell anyone?”
She stared. “I—what?”
“Did you tell anyone?” he repeated, his spine like steel, his stomach roiling. “Like your sisters, or, I don’t know—whoever hired you to plan this party? Did you really make the decision? Or did you start to feel bad, and think about staying, and now this is happening and you need to fix it so you’re just speaking those thoughts out loud?”
“I . . .” She stuttered, blinking rapidly, looking so crestfallen it actually broke his heart. Or maybe something else was breaking his heart right now. It was hard to tell.
“You need everything to be sunshine and rainbows,” he said. “You don’t want me to be pissed. You don’t want me to end this.” Because he could see that. He’d be a fool not to see that. Eve looked ready to cry, which was really fucking with his resolve. There was something young and raw in his chest snarling and clawing at him, demanding he let this whole mess go and just have her any way he could get her. That he hold the fuck on to this.
But Jacob knew how holding on ended. It ended with the other party letting go and pushing him firmly—embarrassingly—away. He was thirty years old and he knew what he needed. He needed honesty, he needed simplicity, he needed not to be ambushed by situations like this because his relationship was a moment of pity that had spun out of control. And most of all, he needed someone who would stay. Someone just like him.
So he made himself cold, cold, cold. What a shame this frost didn’t bring numbness. “You don’t need to worry about me. I don’t need you,” he repeated. “I have never needed you, Eve.” I have never needed anyone. “And honestly, I’m pleased you have another option. Perhaps you’ll be better suited to your . . . party planning than you are to what you do here.”
Her jaw hardened, those beautiful eyes narrowing. “I’m good at what I do here, Jacob.”
He couldn’t bring himself to lie on that score, not knowing how she worried about failure. Even though he shouldn’t care, at this point. “Yes, you’re good. But that doesn’t make you irreplaceable.” He felt a bit sick, saying that, but he couldn’t not. Eve’s life here was replaceable to her, after all.
Although she wasn’t reacting that way. Not quite. She jerked back at his words as if he’d slapped her, and then she took a step forward with her hands curled into fists and said, “Really? So if I just—left. You’d be fine. That’s what you’re saying?”
She must know the answer was absolutely not, but he wouldn’t humiliate himself by saying it out loud. He looked her up and down, as detached as he could manage. Her T-shirt today said BEE SWEET, the words surrounded by embroidered little bees. But he’d tried sweet, and he’d ended up st
ung.
This whole time—this whole fucking time, she’d been here out of obligation. And whatever had changed between them, it hadn’t changed enough, not in the ways that mattered. Not in the ways that said out loud and without doubt, This person is mine.
He would’ve screamed that in the street for her, and he knew it was irrational, but it was also him. And he couldn’t change that.
“I was fine without you before,” he said, “and I’ll be fine again.”
The words should’ve felt like satisfaction. But as she flinched away from him, as she turned on her heel and stormed back to her family, as they gathered her belongings and bundled her into a car and drove her far, far away . . .
Jacob couldn’t shake the nagging feeling he’d just thoroughly fucked himself.
Chapter Twenty
It was funny how much could change in twenty-four hours.
According to the clock in Jacob’s office, it was a little past 1 A.M., and he was absolutely certain that this time yesterday he’d been dizzily blissful with Eve. Or maybe just sleeping next to Eve, which was basically the same thing. Either way, he’d been happy, totally unaware that he and Castell Cottage both were a temporary obligation. That he was making a fool of himself. That the feelings he incited in others would never reach the senseless heights of his own emotions.
But today there was no bliss, and no delusion, either. He’d spent all fucking day storming through Castell Cottage to remove signs of Public Enemy Number One, scrubbing the kitchen from top to bottom and putting things back on the high shelves instead of the ridiculously low ones her adorable—her annoying—shortness had required, washing his sheets and also any sheets Eve herself had washed because they all retained a faint scent of vanilla (he’d checked), and so on and so forth.
After all that, he should be sleeping like the dead, but he couldn’t so much as nod off—not with a certain weight missing from the left side of his mattress. He was determined not to miss Eve, but his body hadn’t quite caught up. Fucking typical. Fucking infuriating. So here he was, sitting in his office, staring at spreadsheets until his eyes bled. Funnily enough, it wasn’t improving his mood.
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