Act Your Age, Eve Brown (The Brown Sisters #3) - Talia Hibbert Page 0,9
stared.
Montrose laughed.
Jacob realized that must have been a joke. “Ha. Ha. Hilarious.” Then he remembered that sometimes jokes were kind of true and wondered if she didn’t have a computer because she didn’t have a home, and if she was wandering around looking for jobs because she really needed one.
But she sounded like the queen, and her shoes, he’d noticed, were white Doc Martens with red hearts, probably limited edition and very expensive. If he were homeless, he would sell his expensive shoes. Except, no, he wouldn’t, not if they were warm and waterproof and sturdy and possibly the only pair he had, because that wouldn’t make long-term sense.
“Are you homeless?” he asked.
She blinked rapidly.
“Jacob,” Mont scowled, then looked at Eve. “You don’t need to answer that. Listen, Eve, let me level with you.”
“Oh, God,” Jacob sighed, because Mont leveling with people usually involved a vile amount of needless honesty. People complained Jacob was blunt, but at least he’d figured out when it was polite to lie. (Mostly.)
“Jacob here is knee-deep in the shit,” Mont said cheerfully.
Great. Absolutely brilliant. Jacob’s second-in-command had gone rogue.
Chapter Three
Eve had never had the pleasure of staying at a B&B. In fact, she rarely ever stayed at any sort of hotel—why bother, when Grandpa’s home in Saint Catherine was always open? Her vision of a B&B owner, therefore, had been cobbled together from vague ideas and possibly a few books she’d read as a child. Jacob Wayne should, by rights, be an old married couple with a twinkle in their eye who looked upon the world at large with kindness and goodwill and would be happy to hire Eve so that she could start her journey to self-actualization in a job she’d never get too attached to.
Instead, Jacob Wayne was a single man, not much older than her, and the twinkle in his eye was more of a steely, judgmental glint. Or maybe that was just the light flashing off his silver-rimmed glasses. Those glasses were balanced on a strong, Roman nose that someone should probably break, because all his features were strong and Roman and that likely had something to do with how he’d become so arrogant. The man was disgustingly, inescapably, thoroughly handsome, and as Gigi often said, A handsome man is a fearsome liability to everyone but himself.
Jacob had high cheekbones and a hard, sharp jaw, a terminally unsmiling mouth, pale skin, and rainy-sky eyes that had speared Eve through the chest from the moment she’d entered the room. Everything about him, from his severely side-parted blond hair, to his blue button-down shirt with its crisply rolled-up sleeves, suggested brisk efficiency. Even the way he talked, staccato bursts that zipped from point to point, said he was irritated by the irrelevant chatter the rest of the world wasted its time on.
Most of all, he seemed irritated by Eve.
Which was, frankly, his loss. Eve was an absolute delight, everyone knew that—yet it was abundantly clear that Jacob believed himself to be better than her. And perhaps, in certain respects, he might be right . . . but she wasn’t overly fond of people who made judgments like that without the proper evidence. She wasn’t fond of them at all.
Honestly, she barely wanted to work here anyway. In fact, what she wanted to do with Jacob sneering Wayne, after just ten minutes of acquaintance, was conk him on the head with a saucepan.
But watching a scarlet flush creep up his chiseled cheeks was also enjoyable, and since that’s what happened when Mont said, Jacob here is knee-deep in the shit, Eve decided to listen instead of storming off.
“Jacob’s last chef won the lotto down at the corner shop last week,” Mont went on. “Fifty grand, so she’s jacked work in and moved back to Scotland to marry her fella—long distance, they were—and start her own business.”
Eve arched a dubious eyebrow. “Well, that’s nice for her. But I doubt she’ll get far with fifty thousand.”
“That’s what I said,” Jacob burst out. “What’s a house deposit without a guaranteed income to pay the mortgage?” He frowned and snapped his mouth shut as soon as the words escaped, looking thoroughly displeased at having agreed with Eve on any level.
Of course, Eve hadn’t realized fifty thousand pounds was a house deposit. What she’d meant was that fifty thousand pounds hadn’t been even half of the budget of the wedding she’d planned for Cecelia. But she decided to keep that minor detail to herself.