Act Your Age, Eve Brown (The Brown Sisters #3) - Talia Hibbert Page 0,50

mongoose eat a snake. He was now experiencing a similar fascinated, secondhand alarm.

“Welll,” Craig repeated, drawing out the word uncomfortably this time. “Obviously, Spock is . . .”

Eve waited, blinking slowly.

“Spock is . . .”

“What?” she nudged.

“Well, you know that Jacob is . . .”

Eve waited. Then she repeated, “What? Jacob is what?”

“Yes, Mr. Jackson,” Marissa interjected. “Jacob is what?” Much like Eve, she waited for his answer with a deceptively patient smile.

“Erm,” Craig mumbled. “Er. Ah. Never mind.”

“Are you sure?” Eve asked.

“Doesn’t matter.”

“But—”

“I said it doesn’t bloody matter!” Craig barked, his face flushing red.

Jacob’s amusement drained away at that, replaced by a cold fury. “Do not,” he said quietly, “raise your voice at my employees.”

Craig shifted uncomfortably, looking away. “Christ,” he muttered. “Let’s bloody get on with it.”

“I couldn’t agree more,” Marissa said severely. “If you’re done disrupting proceedings, Mr. Jackson, we are all busy people and have no time to waste.”

Craig’s redness ratcheted up to fire engine, but, with a wary glare in Eve and Jacob’s direction, he kept his mouth shut.

Marissa opened the notebook in front of her and flicked through a few pages before starting a speech about schedules and orders of events. But, honestly, Jacob barely heard a word. He was too busy staring at Eve, who had produced a notebook of her own from somewhere and was already scribbling bullet points as Marissa spoke.

He looked at the downward sweep of her dark lashes, the sugar-sweet pink gloss on that lovely, clever mouth, the quick glide of her hand over the page. And then he saw the title she’d written on the clean, white paper.

Notes for Jacob.

All the breath swept out of him in a long, quiet wave. Eve, he had noticed, helped everyone. So it shouldn’t hit him like a fist to the chest when she helped him, too—yet his heart stuttered a bit beneath the blow of his surprise.

This woman—he kept waiting for her to hate him more, but she appeared to be hating him less. They were moving backward, firmly away from safe, spiky interactions and closer to something dangerously like friendship.

Jacob really wasn’t sure what to do with that.

Chapter Eleven

Eve’s family saw her as “the social one”—but only because her eldest sister was a hermit, and her middle sister was a bookworm with a vague disdain for human contact. If Chloe or Dani cared enough to collect friendships, they’d probably be far more successful than Eve—because Eve’s method of socializing had been born out of desperation and careful observation, a shield of giggling charm and always-up-for-it flair designed to hide the ways she didn’t quite fit in.

It was odd, really; the more she thought about it, the more she occasionally reminded herself of . . . Jacob.

Well, only a little bit. Just the awkward parts.

So when the man himself announced on Friday morning that they’d finally be doing the housekeeping together, alone, Eve waited patiently for self-conscious anxiety to consume her. She should be a nervous wreck, frantic about maintaining a persona that worked best in group situations, worried he might see right through her and find her irritating or unnerving or just not right.

Instead, she surprised herself by feeling utterly serene. Because, honestly? Jacob wasn’t like other people. He’d found her irritating from the start, and he hadn’t bothered to hide it, so she’d long since bothered to care. It turned out there was a difference between the heavy weight of wondering what people might think, and the easy acceptance of knowing what Jacob thought because he bloody well said it out loud.

Plus, she was pleased to finally offer some help.

So when he dragged Eve off to get cleaning supplies, she found herself skipping merrily after him, singing, “We’re off to see the storeroom, the wonderful storeroom of Oz.”

“Good God, woman,” Jacob muttered. “Your energy is indecent. Weren’t you moaning this morning about how early we have to wake up?”

“I think I’m getting so little sleep it’s making me hyperactive,” Eve said.

“Like a toddler,” he replied. “Delightful.”

“Anyway, you said I could sing. You said, something something, blah blah blah, no AirPod, Eve can sing.”

She expected him to express regret over that fact. Instead, all he did was murmur gravely, “Ah. So I did.” Then he shut up about the singing thing completely.

For an outrageous grump, he could be incredibly reasonable sometimes.

They entered a green-and-white wallpapered hallway where Jacob caught her wrist and tugged her to a stop. You’d think, after all the touching and rescuing there’d been the other night,