Act Your Age, Eve Brown (The Brown Sisters #3)(32)

He broke out of the back door minutes later, only realizing he was shirtless when a breeze bathed his bare torso. For fuck’s sake. He always wore his pajama set—always—but on the one night he couldn’t face wrestling his cast through the armhole . . .

Whatever. Didn’t matter. He had ducks to shoo.

Although, as Jacob strode across the grass, he realized he couldn’t hear the ducks anymore. Instead, he caught snatches of a voice, low and pure and kind of pearlescent, singing like a fairy-tale siren. Notes rose and fell on the wind, and he stopped walking, vaguely hypnotized. What the bloody hell was that? He rather liked it. Unless it belonged to an inhuman creature luring him to his death, in which case, he hated it, but damn, it was bloody effective. He stared into the darkness of the garden for a moment, trying to locate the source, until—QUACK. The voice cut out and the ducks returned. Fuck. He shook himself and started toward the pond again.

Past the cherry tree, around the folly, left at his carefully arranged wildflower planter—because meadows were pretty but order was prettier—and . . . there. The pond. It was a lovely sight, with the moonlight slanting off its narrow surface, and all that crap. There were just two things wrong with the whole scene.

One: the ducks. The fucking ducks. Two of them. The first was gliding over his pond as if it had the right, and the second was waddling about the banks, foraging for food.

Which brought Jacob to problem number two: Eve goddamn Brown, sitting there with a bag of bread, feeding the bastards. Encouraging their presence. Ruining everything, which he suspected was a particular talent of hers.

Although that thought came with a niggling sense of unfairness, because . . . she hadn’t ruined breakfast. Quite the opposite. She’d been thrown in at the deep end and it turned out he admired the way she swam. He’d been dangerously close to not-hating her presence—until the Accidental Finger Lick had brought him back down to earth via the power of embarrassment.

But he’d decided to wipe that unfortunate incident from his mind. So. Focus on the issue at hand, Jacob.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

She jumped half a foot in the air, slapped a hand to her chest, and released a little scream. Christ. Hadn’t she heard him coming? Did the woman have any situational awareness at all? Now he was worried about her being murdered or kidnapped when left unattended.

Worrying because such an event would leave him chefless. Obviously.

“Oh,” she said, slightly breathless. “Jacob.” She twisted to look at him, the side of her face softly illuminated by the moon. This sort of light turned her dark skin silvery and made her wide eyes into mirrors. Her braids were loose, spilling over her shoulders, practically forcing his gaze downward, at which point he discovered she wasn’t wearing a bra.

It was difficult to miss, really. Her top was thin and kind of loose, and the armholes hung low, and the sides of her breasts swelled—

Jacob put a fast and violent stop to that train of thought. It wasn’t hard. All he had to do was look at the ducks and fury welcomed him back into its cold embrace.

“Yes,” he agreed, “Jacob. Me. Here.” Hm. Maybe he hadn’t fully woken up yet. “Which means,” he continued, trying to snatch his thoughts back from their duck-Eve-boob precipice, “you are caught.”

She blinked slowly. “Caught . . .”

“Feeding ducks!”

She blinked some more. “Should I . . . not be feeding ducks?”

“No!” he burst out, then realized he was almost loud enough to wake the dead, never mind Castell Cottage’s guests. “No,” he repeated again, more quietly.

“But they seemed so hungry,” she said, and the worst part was that Eve appeared genuinely concerned. For ducks. For the vermin of the waterfowl world. Good God.

“They’re not hungry,” Jacob scowled, “they’re wild animals who know how to feed themselves, so stop it. You’ll encourage the bastards. They’ll make a habit of returning. They’ll treat my pond like a common watering hole and bring their friends. Next thing you know, the whole garden will be duck shit and duck sex—which is an extremely disturbing event, let me tell you—and aggressive duck demands for food. Aside from which, you’re not even supposed to give them bread.”

A pause. Eve cocked her head. Then, instead of addressing the substance of his speech, she asked in tones of great surprise, “You aren’t? Oh dear. Why on earth not?”

“It’s bad for the digestion! Christ, woman, read a waterfowl blog.”

“Which you do because . . .”

“Because,” Jacob sniffed, suddenly aware that this conversation had spiraled out of his control. “Know thine enemy.”

“Ah,” she murmured. “Yes. Of course.” The moon had shifted, so Jacob could no longer see her face. But he had the strangest suspicion that she was smiling.

He wasn’t entirely sure how he felt about that.

“What are you doing here, anyway?” he demanded. “Aside from sabotaging my garden.”

“Nothing.” Which was a nonsense answer if he’d ever heard one, but she rose to her feet and went on. “If you’re so antiduck, I’ll get rid of them. Not that I brought them here in the first place.”

Bloody ducks. They should know by now that Jacob’s property was off-limits to their foul ways.