Act Your Age, Eve Brown (The Brown Sisters #3)(36)

She barely realized she’d said those words out loud before Jacob reacted. Cocking his head in that sudden, predatory way of his, he asked, “Failed?”

Oh dear. Ohhh dear. Why in God’s name had she said something like that? The fall must have shaken her brain loose. Or perhaps it was the pond-based bacterial infection currently multiplying in her lungs. Eve shrugged, though he probably couldn’t see the action, since she was underwater in the dark and everything. Then she reached out and grabbed his hand.

Their fingers actually squelched as they interlocked. Disgusting. Definitely disgusting. Except for the breadth of his palm, and the long delicacy of his fingers, and the firmness with which he held her, as if nothing on earth could make him let go because he simply wasn’t a letting go sort of man. Those things were . . . not disgusting. Not quite.

He was silent, for a moment, staring at their joined hands, probably thinking about that hideous squelch. Then he shook himself slightly and looked at her again. “How do you fail at drama? Well, I know how I failed at drama. I hated it. Also, my acting was more wooden than a plank. I should’ve been chucked out after my first class, except Aunt Lucy made me take it as an elective to improve my confidence.” All this came out in an absent-minded stream before he snapped his mouth shut and looked askance, as if he had no idea why he’d said such a thing. Maybe they’d both been infected with some kind of loose-tongue disease, or maybe over-sharing was a natural side effect of interacting with another human being in the dead of night.

Eve fought a smirk. “Improve your confidence, hm? Did it work?” She could just imagine a younger Jacob, doubtless twice as irritable and ferocious, refusing to talk to the other children because he found them all incredibly dull. And his aunt, deciding this was an issue of confidence, nudging him toward a class he hated with the best of intentions.

Or maybe that wasn’t right at all. Because now she was imagining a different younger Jacob, eyes huge behind his glasses, hair like duckling fluff, standing rigid at the back of a class while everyone else paired up and pretended with an ease he couldn’t quite access. And her heart sort of . . . squeezed.

Jacob scowled and shook his head. “No, it didn’t help, because drama is soul-destroying. For me, anyway. I would’ve assumed it came quite easily to you.” He untangled their hands, the same hands Eve had almost forgotten were joined. The connection had started to feel natural at some point, much like their bickering.

“Need more leverage,” he explained when she jumped a little, and then his hand slid down her forearm and wrapped around her elbow. “So,” he continued, planting his feet. “How did you fail at drama?”

“The same way I fail at everything,” she said breezily, wrapping her own hand around his forearm. “With pastiche.” She had the vague idea she’d misspoken, but Jacob didn’t correct her, and then her thoughts were sweeping off, anyway, too fast for specifics to matter. Eve had been searching for a foothold in the edge of the pond, but she froze as the connotations of her other words sank in.

I fail at everything.

It was technically true: she’d bombed school, every one of her professional dreams had died, none of her friends cared enough to hold her braids back while she threw up, and her last boyfriend had believed vaccines were a front for a government tracking system based around injectable microchips. She quite literally failed at everything, from meaningful employment to sound relationship choices. But she certainly wasn’t in the habit of admitting that out loud, and especially not to her employer.

“Erm,” she added after the mother of all awkward pauses. “Not that I’m going to fail you. I mean, this job. Or anything.”

Jacob looked down at her seriously. “That hadn’t even entered my mind.”

“Oh.” Tentatively, she smiled.

“Until you brought it up.”

“Oh.” Her smile was replaced by a scowl—until she caught sight of his smile in the moonlight, another subtle tilt of the lips, a wicked gleam in his eyes. “Oh! You bastard.”

“You’re not supposed to call your boss a bastard. Pull.” As if following his own instructions, he began to heave Eve upward. She squawked and grabbed a fistful of grass with her free hand, until he barked, “Do not fuck up my lawn.”

Scoffing, she let go and grabbed his calf instead. “Fine. And I will call my boss a bastard when he teases me with such a ruthless lack of concern for my sensitive soul.”

“I don’t tease,” Jacob said, his voice low and strained as he dragged her bodily from the pond. For a moment, Eve thought of those same words in a different context. They flashed through her, hot and glittering and entirely inappropriate. “And,” he went on, “I don’t give a damn about your sensitive soul.”

“Clearly,” she shot back. She was almost out of the pond now, her upper body completely clear. Jacob’s muscles were straining and his jaw tight, yet somehow he managed to balance lifting a woman who clearly weighed more than him—one-handed!—with trying not to tumble back into the pond himself. It was slow, but it was steady, and Eve had the sneaking suspicion that despite her own best efforts to clamber out, she wasn’t doing much to help.

“Look,” he said, the word a rasp. “There are many ways to fail—”

“Trust me, I’m aware.”