Act Your Age, Eve Brown (The Brown Sisters #3)(44)
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, Eve would be accustomed to physical contact with this man by now. But when his long fingers pressed firmly into her skin, she felt as if he’d shocked her—tiny, delicious bursts of electricity sparkling over her flesh.
He touched her casually, as if he had a right to do it, as if they were like that now. She supposed they might be like that now, because she knew him, at least a little bit. And somehow, despite his many infuriating qualities, she liked what she knew.
“You have to be quiet in the storeroom,” he murmured. “We both do. There’s a very thin connecting door to the bedroom beside it, and a shared air vent.”
“Oh,” she murmured back. “So . . . we whisper?”
“We whisper,” he agreed. Then he grabbed the big old ring of keys from his pocket and unlocked the storeroom door. The room inside was small and cramped, filled with well-stocked shelves, lit only by a high, round window on the far side. “You’ll have to grab the sheets,” he said, nodding at a fresh stack on those shelves, “since a dangerous driver recently incapacitated my right hand.”
A dangerous—?! Well, perhaps that wasn’t entirely inaccurate.
Pushing down a now-familiar wave of guilt, Eve shot him a glare—purely on principle, obviously—and took the sheets. She managed a basket of cleaning supplies, too, just to show off. Then a distracting hum of voices drifted in from the next room, and Eve willed herself not to drop a bottle of bleach or knock over a shelf or anything like that, because Jacob would probably murder her. He would bludgeon her to death with the box of little biscuits and tiny milks he was currently balancing in his left arm.
“Grab a blanket, too,” he said, nodding toward a separate pile of bedding.
Eve followed instructions—which was a rather novel experience for her—and asked, “What’s this for?”