Those words were so similar to Eve’s own (occasional, totally depressing) thoughts, she almost fell over in shock. “Good to know I’m not the only one with terrible taste in men,” she muttered. “Or whoever it is you . . .”
“Women,” he supplied crisply. “And I don’t have terrible taste. That’s simply the way things turn out, sometimes. Happy endings aren’t as common as car crashes.”
Eve blinked. She shouldn’t want to cling to the romantic opinion of Jacob Wayne, of all people, but—gosh. “That’s an attractive idea,” she said ruefully. “That bad relationships are just probability.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Yours aren’t?”
So he assumed she had bad relationships. She couldn’t feign outrage, since she’d once dated a white guy who’d said Wha gwan, rastaman? to her father. “I make bad choices,” she explained with a teasing smile, because teasing smiles softened everything. They were her safety net. Was she joking? Was she deadly serious? Who could tell? “In case you hadn’t noticed, I’m a part-time hot mess.”
Jacob’s lips quirked. “Part-time?”
“Yep. My other hours are spent as a sparklingly responsible Castell Cottage employee.”
“You’re damn right they are.”
“Sophie—I—you . . .” A tragic pause floated through the vent, dragging Eve’s thoughts back to the drama next door. “Six weeks and five days?”
“Oh, I’m sorry—did you think ten to fifteen minutes of pumping away in silence was doing it for me? Did you imagine I was coming really quietly and in absolute stillness? I’ve been seriously considering having it off with my electric toothbrush, Brian.”
Jacob made a strangled sort of noise and dropped the glass cleaner. He almost caught it—except he reached out to do so with his right hand, so the bottle slipped from his grasp yet again.
On a reflex, Eve fell to her knees and caught it a foot away from hitting the ground. Kind of like a superhero catching a baby or something equally impressive. It was quite satisfying, avoiding disaster instead of causing it. Beaming, she looked up—
And found her face directly in front of Jacob’s dick.
Although she probably shouldn’t think of this area as Jacob’s dick. That was sexy romance novel talk, and this was not a sexy romance novel situation. She should think of it as, like, his groin, or the fly of his jeans, or something equally unsexy and non-dick-related. She stared for a moment at the outline of that heavy shape just below his belt, and narrowly resisted the urge to lick her lips. Not because of his di—groin. Just because her mouth was suddenly, unexplainably dry. Must be all the excitement.
“Get up,” he whispered, an urgency in his voice that she’d never heard before. Not even when she’d tumbled into that duck pond. “Get up,” he repeated, and Eve realized her brain was doing the thing where it stuck, like a scratched CD, on one particular element of the world around her. (Jacob’s di—fly, in this case.) She was about to start moving when he wrapped a hand around her upper arm and hauled her to her feet with a strength that was as impressive as it was unexpected.
She popped up beside him feeling slightly breathless, waving the glass cleaner like a trophy. “Got it.” Probably a redundant comment, by now, but her brain was still feeling sluggish.
That bulge had been very big. Very . . . thick.
And Jacob seemed, in the low light, to be blushing. Why was he blushing?
Probably the electric toothbrush comment.
“Yes,” he was saying, his voice oddly stilted. “Good . . . good catch. Very good catch. Cheers.”
“No problem. I didn’t want to interrupt next door and put an end to the juiciest conversation I’ve ever overheard.”
Jacob blinked as if he might have misheard her. She waited for his confusion to be replaced by a dry look of disapproval. Instead, after one shocked second, he . . . smiled. “You’re so fucking shameless,” he said, but he made it sound like a compliment. And he’d cursed. She had noticed, over the last few days, that Jacob only swore when he was pushed to the absolute limit or when he was pissing around with Mont. So, in short, when he was being himself.
Fucking had never sounded quite so lovely.
“I could never admit that I wanted to listen to this shit,” he said.
“But you do. You do want to listen.”
“It’s like a car crash. The first car crash in recent memory that I haven’t been a victim of.”
She scowled through the tug of guilt in her stomach. “Holy ginger biscuit, Jacob Wayne, are you trying to make me crumble into a pile of sad and sandy regret?”
“Yes,” he said. “It makes you awkward and babble-y, and then you say things like holy ginger biscuit.”
Well. Eve certainly hadn’t expected that response. She hesitated, trying to unravel all the threads in his voice—the warmth and the familiarity and the amusement. Because surely uptight and impatient Jacob Wayne wasn’t trying to say that he enjoyed her rambling?
Before she could decide, he spoke again, all business now. “We should sneak off before one of them storms out into the hallway and we’re trapped.” He turned away, as if he didn’t want her to examine his face in the fine light through that one window any longer.
And she had the oddest feeling that he did enjoy her rambling, after all.
* * *
Fifty minutes and two bedrooms later, all such wonderings about Jacob’s inner mind had ceased. Instead, Eve had started to fantasize about hitting him with her car again.
“Tighter,” he said, sounding bored out of his mind. “Eve. Seriously. Tighter.”
It turned out, making beds to Jacob’s ludicrously exacting standards was really fucking hard. Changing sheets? Even harder. Changing duvet covers? The single attempt she’d made would haunt her nightmares forever. Really, didn’t most sensible people accept that the duvet would always be a little bit bunched within its cover?
Apparently, not Jacob Wayne.
Then again, she had never believed him to be sensible.
“Tighter,” he repeated for the fifty thousandth time.
Tighter, she mouthed, scrunching her face into a scowl.
“I saw that.”
“No you didn’t!” she gasped, outraged. “You’re behind me!”
“There’s a mirror in front of you.”
“Oh.” Eve looked up, and so there was. Over the dresser, right there. She could see herself, bending awkwardly as she attempted the pristine hospital corners Jacob was still somehow capable of without his dominant hand—the corners she couldn’t seem to manage. They’d barely been at this tidying nonsense an hour, but Eve’s brand-new T-shirt—CERTIFIED HEROINE—was already clinging to her slight sheen of sweat, and her braids were spilling out of their ponytail. She looked a mess.
Jacob, meanwhile, was sitting comfortably in the wingback chair behind her, arching a sardonic eyebrow and looking generally villainous. Even the white cast on his arm could be mistaken for a white cat. Any moment now, he’d start stroking himself nefariously.
Heh. Stroking himself. Amusement struck her for a moment before the image of Jacob in that same chair, bare-chested and maybe a little wet, with one hand on his hard cock, wiped her smile away.