After all that, Jacob decided the most sensible thing he could do was lie very still and make sure he wasn’t dead.
“Oh, shit in a sweet pea.”
His thoughts exactly, but the voice that floated to him over pounding rain definitely wasn’t his own. It was too posh and too pretty. Could voices be pretty? Jacob wasn’t sure. He’d take a look at the voice and check.
He opened his eyes, felt a stab of pain shoot through his head like a sharpened ice pick to the skull, and closed them again. His glasses were missing, anyway. No point doing eye stuff. Bugger eyes. Who needed them?
“Oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no.” There was that voice again, strange and yet familiar. His mind was hot and sticky like fudge. Yum, fudge. Was this a guest, maybe? A yummy, fudgy guest? Fuck. No lying around in the street in front of guests. It was inappropriate and irresponsible and very bad business.
Jacob tried to sit up, but several points of agony screamed at him simultaneously to stop that shit and lie down again. So he stopped that shit and lay down again.
Then the voice said, “Are you a dog? Please don’t be a dog,” and memory came to him like a bolt of lightning.
He croaked accusingly, “Eve.”
She was supposed to wilt with guilt under the mighty power of his voice, but all she did was sigh, “Oh, thank goodness you’re not a dog.”
Rage was an excellent method of clearing the head. Jacob forced his eyes open, even though he couldn’t see for shit and felt kind of dizzy. The sky above him was a sickly yellow, staticky with the motion of still-falling rain. He didn’t spot any Eve-shaped blobs in his line of sight, but he hoped she could see him—or more specifically, that she could see the burning hate in his eyes. “You’d rather hit me than hit a dog?” he demanded. “Interview was . . . so bad?” His words were wonky. Goddamn it. He didn’t want his words to be wonky.
“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said primly. “It has nothing to do with you in particular. I meant that I’d rather hit a person than a dog.”
His lurching mind grappled with that drivel for a moment before he announced, “You are joking. This is a joke.”
“Of course I’m not joking! Dogs are so small and sweet and vulnerable. Humans are much sturdier. See how well you’re handling this?”
Jacob might be having an out-of-body rage experience right now, because his pain was growing oddly distant, and he barely even noticed that the storm was slowing as suddenly as it had begun, and really, all he could feel was this overwhelming urge to bury Eve Brown in a hole somewhere, or possibly dump her at the bottom of a well. “How well I’m handling this?” he echoed, his shout making his battered lungs ache. “Woman, I am one wrong move from vomiting blood.”
There was a slight pause before Eve said reasonably, “Ah, but if you were a dog, you might be dead right now.”
Jacob was searching for the strength to drag himself up and strangle her, even if it killed him, when a new smudge of blurry color appeared before his eyes: an oval of rich brown, surrounded by ribbons of pastel purple. She came closer, closer, and he made out the details he’d rather forget. The rounded cheeks and the big, dark eyes behind rain-wet, spiky eyelashes. The stubbornly pointed chin and glittery, glossy lips. She was biting those lips, if he wasn’t mistaken, and quite violently, too. Not to mention, there was a deep furrow on her formerly smooth forehead. Maybe she was racked with guilt.
Or maybe she was just worried about a potential manslaughter charge if he died.
Probably the latter.
“Would it take your mind off things if I showed you my tits?” she asked out of the blue.
God, concussions were strange.
“Jacob?”
“What?” he bit out.
“Did you hear me?”
“Did I—?” He stopped. Oh. Had the tits comment not been some kind of auditory hallucination? “Dunno,” he slurred. “Maybe it would help. Wait, no it—what the hell is wrong with you?”
“Several things.” She’d disappeared from his line of sight, which was honestly a blessing, and her voice came as if from a distance. “I only asked because when I came to the interview you seemed very distracted by my chest, so—”
“I was reading the T-shirt,” he insisted for what felt like the thousandth time.
“If you say so,” she murmured, clearly amused and absolutely infuriating. Then she cried, “Ah! Found them,” and reappeared again. Slowly, carefully, she slid his glasses back onto his face.
His glasses. She’d found his glasses. He hadn’t even asked. And now here she was, putting them on for him.
Of course, that task was not as easy as certain films and TV shows liked to make it look. As a general rule, Jacob made sure no one ever did it to him. Similarly, when women tried to remove his glasses in fits of passion, or whatever the fuck they thought they were doing, it usually pissed him off enough to take him out of the mood, and then he had to think about messy blow jobs for a solid five minutes to get going again. So when he realized that a complete stranger was attempting one of his least favorite things in the world, he tensed.
Which hurt like a motherfucker and turned out to be a waste of energy when she pulled off the move without a hitch.
Well, mostly. She avoided all the big no-no’s, like stabbing him in the cheek or the eye or the ear. She didn’t get the glasses quite straight—but he suspected they were no longer straight at all. Plus, one of the lenses had cracked, which was utterly her fault, so he refused to give her 10/10 for cautious glasses-sliding. But still. Pretty impressive.
And now her face was in focus, he could see something unexpected: those huge eyes of hers were shimmering with something that might actually be tears.
But she didn’t let the maybe-tears fall. She offered a smile that was a shadow of the cheerful, dimpled thing she’d flashed in his dining room and said, “There. Now you can glare at me properly.”
Jacob really must be concussed, because instead of telling her to fuck off, he said softly, “Thanks.”
Thanking her. He was thanking her for putting his shattered glasses back on his face after she’d knocked them off with her car.
But her smile was wider and realer now, and if she gave him just a little more, that dimple would appear, and . . .
“Jake?” The shout was Mont’s, clearly nearby. “Where are you, man?”
Eve looked up. Jacob blinked and wondered why he felt so off-balance, now her gaze wasn’t on him anymore.
Concussed. He was definitely concussed.
“Montrose,” she called, and rose to her feet.
Jacob, for some reason, tried to sit up, as if there was a string attached between them. He made it roughly halfway before pain wrapped a fist around him and squeezed. Shit, shit, shit. He clamped his jaw shut because he refused to throw up in front of Eve—or rather, in public—or rather, at all. Then he sat up the rest of the way, realized he’d done something terrible to his arse, and tried to roll up on his knees instead.
“Christ, mate,” came Montrose’s voice from above. “You’re a mess. What the bloody hell happened?”
Eve wailed, “I hit him with my car,” just as Jacob snapped, “She hit me with her car!” Then he registered how teary Eve sounded and felt like a bit of a bastard.