“I made friends with a boy in the Congo. We stayed there longer than usual. I think something was wrong with the truck.” Jacob shrugged, the movement smoother than it should be. The way Eve was looking at him made this topic easier. She didn’t gawk at him like he was a lab rat, or act like he’d been raised by rock stars and failed to appreciate it. She looked like she understood a little bit and wanted to understand even more.
His left hand flexed at his side.
“Anyway,” he said firmly. “It’s late.” And it was. His eyelids felt weighted, his mind a little hazy, even as his blood fizzed with electricity in her presence. “You really need to go home.”
“Ah. Hm. Yes.” Her steady serenity was replaced by a sheepish expression that did not bode well. “About that—and don’t interrupt me this time.”
Jacob stared. “Pardon?”
“Just . . . don’t interrupt me, because every time I try to explain this you cut me off, and if I don’t let it out soon I’m going to lose my nerve.”
“What are you—?”
“Shhhh,” Eve said. “Just shush.” Then she stepped around him and opened the door to his sitting room, the room he never actually sat in. He’d turned it into a kind of gym, cramming his weight bench and his running machine in there—not that either were much use to him now, since he’d fractured his wrist.
And since, apparently, his weight bench was being used as a clothes hanger.
Jacob stared, slack-jawed, through the open door at what should be an unoccupied and organized sitting room. There were clothes on his equipment. There was makeup sitting on top of his old television, the one he never watched. And his battered pullout sofa was now a battered bed, strewn with his spare winter duvet and his cushions.
“What. The. Fuck.”
Eve flashed a nervous smile and waved her hands. “Surprise! I live here!”
Surprise. I live here.
Jacob turned slowly toward her. “I beg your pardon?”
Her smile faltered. “Oh my God, you look like you’re going to murder me. Don’t you dare murder me.”
“I have to confess,” he said faintly. “I’m considering it.”
“Well, don’t! My mother is a lawyer, you know.”
Was she, now? Interesting. He’d assumed, based on the accent, that Eve came from the kind of family where women didn’t work. He’d also wondered if she might be secretly pregnant, and therefore disgraced and cast out, which would account for her slumming it over here in his B&B. But now he looked at the room she’d apparently been squatting in, and he decided that whatever had brought this particular princess into his life must be far worse, because . . .
“What sentient human person would voluntarily sleep on that sofa bed? It’s practically springless.”
She ignored his question. “Mont told me to sleep in here. You know, to keep an eye on you—with the concussion—and also because I had nowhere to stay and the B&B is booked up to the eyeballs, which, well done, by the way. And really, it’s more convenient if I live here anyway, what with the early hours, and all, and clearly I’m no trouble since you didn’t even notice I was here, so—”
“Hang on,” Jacob said sharply, a thought occurring to him. “Have you been using my bathroom?”
“Only a little bit,” she said. “Like, the teeniest, tiniest bit. While you were asleep. And I cleaned up after myself so you wouldn’t even know I was there. But also because I’m a superconsiderate roommate.”
He looked at her. “Tell me the truth. Have you ever had a roommate before? Ever? Shared a bedroom with a sibling, bunked in college, anything?”
There was a pause. “Well, no,” she said. “But I do share a floor with my grandmother and her girlfriend.”
I share a floor with my grandmother and her girlfriend. I share a floor. With my grandmother. And her girlfriend. “Where did you come from?” Jacob demanded. “Some kind of palace? Some kind of elderly lesbian palace?”
“Gigi isn’t a lesbian. She’s pansexual.”
Jacob stared at Eve, then stared at the sitting room. “You know what? I’m too tired for this. I’m going to bed.”
She beamed. “So you don’t mind? I can stay?”
“Yes, I absolutely do mind, and no, you absolutely can’t stay. We’ll figure something out.” He wasn’t entirely sure what, but something. She couldn’t sleep next door to him, for Christ’s sake. That just . . . wasn’t right. Wasn’t safe. Or something. Somehow. “Christ, I can’t believe you’re on the sofa bed. I should’ve thrown that thing out ages ago. If it weren’t for—”
“I know, I know,” Eve said. “If it weren’t for your many injuries and the space you need for your arm, you’d be a gentleman and switch beds with me.”
Jacob snorted. “Would I fuck. No, I was going to say—if it weren’t for the fact that I poured all my money into this bloody business, I’d have already replaced the damn thing.” He shook his head and turned, leaving her to it. His own bed was calling him like a siren song. Even if he did feel slightly guilty at the thought of her lying on that monstrosity.
Like she said, it wasn’t as if they could swap. He had to sleep with his cast propped up on a pillow.
So why don’t you share? It’s a big bed.
Jacob froze, then forced himself back into motion. Get. Out. Before you say or do something incredibly terrible.
“Whatever,” he managed, hoping he sounded exactly as bored and unaffected as he should be. “You want to sleep here, then sleep here. Just don’t wake me up.”
“Well. Charming. Absolutely charming.”
“No one,” he said over his shoulder, “has ever accused me of that.”
Chapter Ten
The gingerbread meeting, as Eve had begun to think of it, happened two days later. Eve had fallen into a steady routine: she made breakfast, cleaned up, and spent a while calling her sisters or reading Mia Hopkins or painting tiny ladybirds on her fingernails. Then she went back to the kitchen, made and served afternoon tea, gossiped with the guests a bit while Jacob hovered broodily and disapprovingly in the background, before retiring for the evening.
It wasn’t exactly thrilling, but it certainly wasn’t terrible. Actually, Eve was rather enjoying herself.
Today, though, her new routine broke down somewhere post–afternoon tea. Instead of disappearing back to his office once cleanup was over, Jacob hung about by the thundering industrial dishwasher and said, “Meeting’s tonight.”
Eve blinked. “Pardon?”
“The—”
“Oh, the gingerbread meeting! I’d quite forgotten.”
“I know you had,” he said, sounding incredibly long-suffering. “That’s why I’m reminding you. Again. And stop calling it the gingerbread meeting. It is the meeting of the Pemberton Gingerbread Festival Committee.”
“Right,” Eve said slowly. Sounded dull, dull, dull. Then a thought occurred, and she brightened. “Will there be free gingerbread to keep us going?”
Jacob sighed. “I’ll meet you out front at six.”