“Shut up,” Jacob said crisply.
“If you adore them and you want to marry them and hide them away in your lair forever and ever?” Mont finished.
“You exaggerate.” Jacob paced his office for the seventy-fifth time today, wishing that was true. But unfortunately, Mont was right: Jacob didn’t like people easily, but once he did like them, it was always too far and too fast. He had to temper himself, had to be careful.
Not that he’d been remotely careful with Eve. And it showed.
Take this morning at breakfast, for example. If he hadn’t been knackered from another sleepless night of overthinking and berating himself, he might have kissed her glossy, orange mouth over the pain au chocolat, and then where would they be? Up to their eyeballs in horrified Trip Advisor reviews, and more importantly, on a treacherous path from safe, long-term friendship to difficult, dangerous romance. Which she didn’t even want. So there was no use thinking about it.
“I mean, I can’t say I didn’t see this coming.”
Jacob almost tripped over his own feet. “What?”
“Come on, man. Surely you saw this coming.”
“I say again: what?”
Mont laughed down the phone. “Never mind. Never mind. So, you slept with the attractive woman you haven’t stopped talking about in weeks. Shocker.”
“I—haven’t—” Jacob cut off his outraged sputtering, focused on a nice, blank spot on the wall, and took a breath. “Relaying an employee’s increasingly excellent job performance is not the same as talking about her for weeks. And stop being flippant about the situation, Montrose. It’s horrific.”
“Why? You like the girl. I think she likes you back. Ask her out.”
“No,” Jacob snapped, because he was sensible and logical and would not be led astray by Mont’s shockingly casual attitude toward human connection. Mont didn’t understand these things. Mont was charming and classically handsome and inherently flexible, and Mont didn’t get tied up in knots over the slightest thing, and Mont had almost certainly never had a woman tell him that he was great in bed but a little too intense out of it.
Jacob had heard that several thousand times and did not want to hear it from Eve. In fact, if he ever did hear it from Eve—accompanied by one of those pitying wince-smiles as she disappeared into the mist—he was oddly certain he might burn Castell Cottage to the ground.
“Christ, mate, stop being so bloody awkward and just tell her how you—hang on.” Mont broke off midsentence, his voice fading as he spoke to someone else in the background. “Give me a sec, Tess.”
“Are you talking to Jacob?” Tessa Montrose’s voice floated down the line.
“Yes.”
“Is he having a meltdown?”
“Yes.”
“Has that woman hit him with her car again?”
Mont laughed. “Oh, something like that. Now piss off.”
“But do you know where my—?”
“No, I don’t know where your glue gun is, piss off. Sorry, Jake. What was I saying?”
“I don’t remember,” he lied. “Put Tess on the phone, would you? I want to talk to her.” Something about hearing her voice had given him an idea. An idea about how to make Eve smile, which was a goal he found himself more and more eager to achieve, these days. She made everyone smile so often, so easily—he could do the same for her, couldn’t he?
He certainly fucking hoped so. She deserved it.
“You want to talk to Tess? Charming,” Mont said. “Why? You need something fixed?”
“Just put your sister on the phone and stop asking questions.”
“Why would I do that when I could keep asking questions and get on your nerves?”
Jacob muttered an insult and drifted toward the window behind his desk. Eve was in the garden, clearing up the empty wrought-iron tables, looking like one of the meadow flowers with her lavender braids and rose-pink T-shirt. She’d started serving afternoon tea outside when the weather was nice. Her idea. And, God, why did it make him oddly hot and . . . fluffy, inside, when she behaved as if this job, as if this B&B, was her passion, too?
She walked out from under the shade of an oak and it was like watching the sun rise.
Her mouth was moving, but Jacob couldn’t hear her—so he balanced the phone between his ear and his shoulder and opened the window. Eve’s voice flooded the room like a glass of ice water on a sweltering day. She was singing “Special Affair,” and the sound of it thrust him back in time to last Sunday. To sweet, silvery darkness and her body beneath him.
“Tess,” Mont was saying, “I think Jake wants to talk to you. God only knows why.”
The words barely registered; Jacob was too busy controlling his cock and his thoughts. Reminding himself that there was no way the world would let him keep a woman like Eve. She’d leave in the end. Everyone and everything left, in the end, didn’t they?
The thought wasn’t entirely accurate, he knew that, but it felt accurate. It felt inescapable.
“Never mind,” he said out loud. “Never mind. I’ll call Tessa later. Mont, I have to go.”
“What? Don’t. You’re freaking out about something, aren’t you?”
“No. Good-bye,” Jacob said, and then he hung up. Down in the garden, Eve looked up as if she’d heard his voice. Her eyes met his as if drawn by some magnetic force. She smiled, and waved, and Jacob—
Jacob was hit with such soul-deep affection, he actually lost his breath.
Somehow, he managed to wave awkwardly back. Then he turned away and slumped into the hidden safety of his desk chair. He sat there for God only knew how long, frozen and confused, his chest heaving and his thoughts flying. The sun sank low, and still, he sat. The breeze through the open window turned cool, almost cold, and still, he sat.
But no matter how long he waited, the feeling didn’t go away.
Bloody shitting hell. He was in love with her.
How goddamn inconvenient.
* * *
As far as Eve could tell, things between she and Jacob went back to normal after that moment at Lucy’s. Their version of normal, anyway.
The awkwardness that had muffled their friendship was burned away by the time they’d walked home. They still bickered over breakfast in the mornings, still teased each other over bed making in the afternoons. Jacob started bringing his laptop down to the kitchen, typing away with unnerving focus while she prepared tea and cake for the guests.
It was only on nights like tonight—a quiet Wednesday evening when she’d gone to her room early, sitting on the creaky sofa bed where she almost never wanked over Jacob—that Eve noticed a slight tension between them. A barely banked heat. Because as soon as they went up to the B&B’s private quarters, he turned rigidly silent.
He nodded stiffly at her when they crossed paths in the corridor. He responded to her calls of Good night with vague grunts. Eve wanted to decipher those grunts, but she was worried that understanding his whole tight-jawed restraint thing might push her into accidentally seducing him. Mature, adult women did not accidentally seduce their bosses, nor did they obsess over said boss’s grunts like teenagers with a whale-sized crush.
Mature, adult women focused on introspection and personal growth. And Eve really must be maturing, because tonight, instead of reliving the best head of her life for the thousandth time, she was busy with some personal research.