He realized with a jolt that he’d jumped out of bed and rushed down here to throw her out without even making himself presentable first. He was roaming the halls of Castell Cottage in gray jersey and flannel, which meant he’d come to work inappropriately dressed, which made him undeniably unprofessional. Even worse, Eve Brown was looking at him like he was an adorable but endangered baby animal, which was especially annoying, for some reason.
Shit. Shoving a self-conscious hand through his hair, Jacob set his jaw and steeled his spine. He was already down here, and he wouldn’t be climbing those fucking stairs without a ten-minute breather and a cup of tea, so he might as well act natural.
But this disaster, just like everything else wrong with the world, was completely Eve’s fault.
Coating himself in ice like armor, he said stiffly, “I’m fine.” The no thanks to you part was unspoken, but he hoped she sensed it. “You and I need a word.”
Literally just one word: Go.
“Well, that sounded appropriately omniscient,” Eve muttered. Then she paused, shaking her head. “Or is it—?”
“I know what you meant,” Jacob snapped.
“Really.” She gave him a skeptical look, then rolled her eyes and lifted the plates. “Look, if you don’t need anything—I’ll be right with you, but I need to serve these before they get cold. No one likes cold tomatoes, Jacob. Be reasonable. All right?” Before he could begin to formulate a response to that, she’d swept off into the dining room.
Leaving him and his annoyance with the uncomfortable feeling that they’d just been dismissed.
And with the—admittedly obvious—realization that he was late for breakfast. He’d slept in by his own standards, and now, according to his watch, it was 6:44. Breakfast had already begun without his supervision.
Jacob rushed into the kitchen, expecting chaos, chaos, more chaos, and a flagrant disregard for the health and hygiene posters he’d stuck to the walls. You know: filth, disorganization, rats scurrying toward the open pantry, maybe. At least a small microwave fire. Instead, he stared in shock at a kitchen that appeared to be . . . absolutely fine. Exactly as it should be. Clearly in use, but safe and orderly all the same.
Well. That was a bit fucking anticlimactic.
Eve had even opened the dining hatch, a feature that provided an authentic behind-the-scenes glimpse for guests and one that Mont had steadfastly refused to use. I’m not a fucking fry cook anymore, he’d bitched, and I look like a twat in this apron. Blah, blah, blah. Well, apparently Eve had no such concerns, because the window was rolled up and Jacob had a direct view into the dining room.
A direct view of her, actually. She sailed into his line of sight, approaching one end of the mammoth dining table with that infuriating smile. Although, now Jacob saw the smile directed at guests, he had to admit its obnoxious beauty and objective cuteness had some benefits. Feeling himself bamboozled by the thing was unsettling, but watching it have the same effect on Mrs. and Mrs. Beatson wasn’t all bad.
He stared, semimesmerized, as she fetched salt and pepper for the couple from two feet down the table—as if they couldn’t reach it themselves. He frowned, genuinely perplexed, as she poured tea for another party like the three of them didn’t have six clearly functional hands. He glowered with increasing annoyance as Eve whipped around the room being infuriatingly, impressively, undeniably helpful.
It was like she saw people’s needs before they’d even noticed themselves. Which was, obviously, an excellent skill for a hospitality employee to possess.
But goddamn it, he wasn’t supposed to think this kind of thing. He wasn’t supposed to think anything complimentary about Eve. She’d fractured his bloody wrist, for fuck’s sake. Had anyone else broken Jacob’s arm, and therefore messed with his ability to carry out key aspects of his daily routine—push-ups, sudoku, et cetera—he’d be fuming for at least a week.
And he was angry with Eve. He was. Even if he also, suddenly, remembered the tremor in her voice when she’d knelt over him on the road, offering an entirely insufficient apology. Bugger that tremor, and bugger her.
By the time she returned to the kitchen, Jacob was determined to despise her the same way he did everything: thoroughly.
“What is going on here?” he demanded as she entered. He kept his voice low so the guests couldn’t hear, stalking over to her as she approached the sink.
“What’s going on where?” she asked lightly, rinsing the clean plates she’d brought back and . . . stacking them in the dishwasher correctly.
For some reason, this only pissed Jacob off further. “Here, damn it. Here! What is with all this—this—” Order, perfection, prowess. Any of those words would apply, but he didn’t want to say them. In the end, he whisper-hissed, “How the hell do you know what you’re doing?”
Eve blinked those long lashes, then smiled, so quick and sharp it flashed behind his eyelids like lightning. “Oh, I see. So the bug that’s crawled up your arse this morning is down to the fact I’m not crashing and burning yet?”
Yet, she said. Something about that word snapped against his skin like a rubber band. But Jacob was quickly distracted by his own embarrassment, because her accusation was technically correct and it made him sound ridiculous. “Well,” he ground out, “obviously I’m pleased that you’re doing—actually, you know what, fuck that.” He stopped, then said sharply, “How well you may or may not be doing is irrelevant, because you shouldn’t be here at all. I didn’t hire you.”
She set down the last plate and turned to face him, eyes narrowed and hands on her hips. “You were going to.”
“You don’t know what I was going to do.”
“Mont told me,” she shot back.
Making a mental note to smack Montrose later—twice—Jacob powered through. “Any decisions I may have come to before you hit me with your car were invalidated the moment you hit me with your car.”
Eve had the grace to look awkward. “Er, yes, sorry about that.” She turned and hurried over to the stove, grabbing a box of eggs. “The thing is, I thought helping out while you were under the weather might go some way toward atoning for that grieving mistake.”
Jacob scowled at the back of her head. There was nothing worse than someone making a valid point during an argument he intended to win. “Look,” he began. But then Eve moved toward the pantry, grabbed a fresh loaf of bread, and shut the pantry door . . . with her hip.
And good God, what a hip.
Jacob’s jaw clenched as several muscles in his body tightened without permission. His eyes glued to Eve’s back of their own accord, focusing on the place where her knotted apron strings grazed the strip of bare skin between her borrowed T-shirt and her jeans. “Don’t do that,” he growled. Really, it was a growl. Like a dog. Jacob immediately wanted to shoot himself.
She turned around, a line appearing between her eyebrows. “Do what?”
And now his choices were: either to say out loud Don’t move things with your body that belongs to you, or to pretend he’d made an involuntary noise as part of a concussion-related seizure. “Nothing,” he muttered, biting the inside of his cheek. “Look, I’m . . . glad things are going well down here. And that you started breakfast, and so on.”