Act Your Age, Eve Brown (The Brown Sisters #3) - Talia Hibbert Page 0,4
without her even noticing. Just when she was beginning to feel the first pangs of hunger, she caught sight of a sign that read SKYBRIAR: FIFTEEN MILES.
“Skybriar,” she murmured over the thrum of cleopatrick’s “hometown.” It sounded like a fairy tale. Fairy tales meant happily ever after.
She took the turn.
Skybriar looked like a fairy tale, too. Its main road unraveled down a gigantic hill, the kind usually found in books or Welsh travel brochures. Mysterious woodland stood tall on either side of the pavement, likely containing pixies and unicorns and other fabulous things. The air through Eve’s open window tasted fresh and earthy and clean as she drove deeper into the town, past adorable, old-fashioned, stone-built houses and people in wellies walking well-behaved little dogs. She spotted a sign among the green, a gleaming blue board with white lace effect around the edges that read PEMBERTON GINGERBREAD FESTIVAL: SATURDAY, 31ST AUGUST. How absolutely darling, and how potentially delicious. Oh—but it wasn’t the thirty-first yet. Never mind.
Another turn, taken at random, and she struck gold. Up ahead, guarded by a grand oak tree and fenced in by a low, moss-covered wall, sat an impressive redbrick Victorian with a burgundy sign outside that read CASTELL COTTAGE. EXCELLENT ACCOMMODATION, DELICIOUS CUISINE.
She was feeling better already.
(Actually, that was a categorical lie. But she would feel better, once she ate, and took a moment to think, and generally stopped her drama queen behavior. Eve was quite certain of that.)
She threw her car into the nearest sort-of parking space—well, it was an empty spot by the pavement, so it would do—and cut off the radio. Then she slipped in an AirPod, chose a new song—“Shut Up and Groove,” Masego—to match her determinedly positive mood, and pressed Play. Flipping down the car’s mirror, she dabbed at her red eyes and stared disapprovingly at her bare mouth. Boring, boring, boring. Even her waist-length braids, lavender and brown, were still tied back in a bedtime knot. She set them free to spill over her shoulders, then rifled through her glove box and found a glittery, orange Chanel lip gloss.
“There,” she smiled at her reflection. “Much better.” When in doubt, throw some color at it. Satisfied, she got out of the car and approached the cute little countryside restaurant thingy through softly falling drizzle. Only when she reached the grand front door, above which sat yet another burgundy sign, did she notice what she’d missed the first time.
CASTELL COTTAGE
BED-AND-BREAKFAST
Eve checked her watch and discovered that it was now far from breakfast time.
“Gabriel’s burning bollocks, you have got to be kidding me.” She glared at her warped reflection in the front door’s stained-glass window. “Has the trauma of the morning’s events killed off your last remaining brain cells, Eve? Is that it?”
Her reflection did not reply.
She let out a hangry little growl and started to turn—when a laminated notice pinned up beside the door caught her eye.
CHEF INTERVIEWS: FIRST DOOR ON THE RIGHT
Well, now. That was rather interesting. So interesting, in fact, that Eve’s witchy sister, Dani, would likely call this literal sign . . . a sign.
Of course, Eve wasn’t Dani, so she simply called it a coincidence.
“Or an opportunity,” she murmured slowly.
Eve, after all, could cook. She was forced to do so every day in order to live, and she was also quite good at it, having entertained brief fantasies of opening a Michelin-starred restaurant before watching an episode of Hell’s Kitchen and developing a Gordon Ramsay phobia. Of course, despite her private efforts, she had never actually cooked professionally before—unless one considered her ill-advised foray into 3D genital cakes cooking. It was certainly baking, which amounted to much the same thing. Kind of.
The more she thought about it, the more perfect this seemed. Wedding planning had been too exhilarating—the kind of career she could easily fall in love with. The kind where true failure could break her. But cooking at some small-town bed-and-breakfast? She certainly couldn’t fall in love with that.
Your father and I would like you to hold down a job for at least a year before we restart your trust fund payments.
Her parents didn’t think she could get a job on her own and clearly doubted her ability to keep one. They thought she needed supervision for every little thing, and if she was honest with herself, Eve understood why. But that didn’t stop their doubt from biting like too-small leather boots. So, securing her own job the day she left home? And also, quite conveniently,