“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 assumed 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.