Act Your Age, Eve Brown (The Brown Sisters #3)(74)

“Erm,” she said. “Yes.” She squeezed Alex’s hand limply, murmured, “Enchanté,” then wondered why the bloody hell she’d said such a thing. Oh, well. She was alarmed, she was taken aback, and her toes were still slightly wet. Under such circumstances, she could not be blamed for a little ridiculousness.

Alex arched her eyebrows, one of which was sharply bisected by a pale scar, before continuing. “We are here to bully you out of the house.”

“Well,” piped up Tessa, “the B&B.”

“Which is a house, Tess.”

“And if I called a camper van a—a car, you’d be horrified.”

“I wouldn’t give a flying fuck,” Alex said calmly, and somehow sauntered past Eve into the room.

“Liar,” Tessa said, and flipped her hair some more, and followed. She turned to Eve, who was still standing, slightly dazed, by the door. “Do you like my hair? Roller set. Twenty-four hours and seven different YouTube tutorials! I had to sleep on the rollers. What a nightmare. Anyway, get dressed.”

“You’re doing this all wrong,” Alex told her. Eve noticed that Alex had made herself comfortable on Jacob’s weight bench, of all things, lying back and propping up one knee, staring at the ceiling with her hands over her stomach. She had a thick, dark scar wrapped all around her wrist like a bracelet.

“I’m doing it wrong? You’re lying on the furniture,” Tessa said, but by now Eve had noticed their bickering held zero heat. As if they were simply annoying each other for the fun of it. “Now, Eve, I know this is all very sudden, but Jacob told us you urgently needed to socialize, and we are his only friends aside from Mont—”

“Friends?” Alex snorted.

Eve found herself suddenly scowling. “Jacob’s only next door, you know. He can probably hear you.”

“Good,” Alex grinned, raising her voice, at which point Eve realized this was a gentle in-joke, as opposed to actual Jacob-hating, and felt rather silly.

“Well,” Tessa said thoughtfully, “we’re probably not his only friends. He gets on very well with that older lady who runs the cheese counter at the supermarket and also the man who washes out the wheelie bins, but you know what I mean. He wanted to show you a good time, and he decided we were the best option. Obviously.” She swished the hair again, leaving a trail of hibiscus and coconut in the air, and flashed a rather beguiling smile. “So. Are you in?”

Was Eve in? At this point, she wasn’t even certain she was conscious. “Erm. I must admit, I’m slightly confused on several counts. Jacob wanted to show me a good time?” Jacob had already shown her a good time. Very effectively. And most enthusiastically, she remembered, her cheeks flushing. More to the point, he wasn’t here to show her a good time now, so what the bloody hell was going on?

“Well, he’s not a big fan of going out dancing,” Tessa said.

“Shocker,” Alex interjected.

“But he thought you might be, and also that you might want to talk to someone other than him, for once, so he told us all about you and we decided you sounded excellent and that we should definitely hang out.”

Eve’s heart started vibrating, which was alarming, but entirely understandable, all things considered. “He told you all about me? What . . . what did that entail?” She tried to stamp out the tentative pleasure in her voice, but judging by Alex’s smirk, she wasn’t entirely successful.

“He said,” Alex grinned, “that you were funny, and sweet, and then he had an embolism from being too complimentary and refused to say anything else except, Just be nice to her, Alexandra, or I’ll murder you in your sleep.”

Eve bit her lip on a smile. First he gave her the mother of all orgasms. Then he brooded himself into a tizzy about it. Now he was trying to make her happy in a predictably cloak-and-dagger fashion. It was all so fucking Jacob she might just pass out.

For God’s sake, how the hell was she supposed to resist him? She adored him. It was undoubtedly true that mature, sensible women didn’t sleep with their bosses—but it seemed painfully clear, in that moment, that mature, sensible Eves weren’t supposed to let men like Jacob Wayne pass them by.

So she wouldn’t. She simply wouldn’t. Maybe she’d made bad choices in the past, but she was changing now. Eve was going to follow everything she felt for this man, and if it all ended in tears, she’d simply face the consequences like the grown woman she was.

Just making that decision lifted a weight from her shoulders. A slow smile spread across her face. She felt the urge to go and throw herself at Jacob right this instant, but first . . .

Well, first, she was kind of missing her sisters, and the two women in front of her were chaotic enough to fill at least a quarter of that gap.

“All right,” she said finally. “I’ll go out with you.”

“Yay!” Tessa clapped her hands, while Alex produced a surprisingly sweet smile. In that moment, with matching dimples in their right cheeks and warm, whiskey eyes, Eve finally cottoned on.

“Oh! You’re twins!”

Alex arched an amused eyebrow. “Uh . . . we’re identical. Don’t tell me you only just noticed.”

“Don’t be annoying, Alex, who cares if she just noticed? Eve, come on, get dressed. I love your hair. We’re going to the pub.”