Act Your Age, Eve Brown (The Brown Sisters #3)(88)

“I knew I liked you.”

“Go on,” Jacob was shouting, waving his cast around like a battering ram. “Be off with you!”

“Just go steady with him,” Mont said quietly.

Eve dragged her gaze away from the sight of a goose all but fleeing Jacob’s broken arm. “Hm?”

“He’s not as tough as he seems.” Mont’s voice was quiet, his own eyes on the goose, his focus clearly elsewhere. “That’s all. He’s not as tough as he seems.”

The goose exited the gate and waddled right. Eve opened her mouth to tell Mont that she knew, that she’d be awfully careful, that Jacob’s fragile brilliance was quite safe in her hands.

Then she heard a familiar voice floating through the air. Familiar, but impossible, of course.

“Is this it?” the voice asked. And then, “Dear Lord, Martin, was that a goose?”

Eve stiffened, then forced herself to relax. Her mother couldn’t possibly be here. That voice clearly belonged to some other lady. A lady accompanied by a man with the same name as Eve’s father.

That’s what she told herself, right up until the moment her mother stepped through Castell Cottage’s front gate, pushed her Dolce & Gabbana sunglasses up onto her forehead, pressed a hand to her chest, and cried, “Eve!”

Then the rest of the family, oh my goodness, crowded behind her—Dad, of course, and Gigi, and Shivani, and even Chloe and Danika, hovering at the back. It was a veritable ambush of relatives, which, in Eve’s experience, did not bode well.

It didn’t bode well at all.

“Oh, fudge,” she said.

Beside her, Mont squinted at Gigi. “Is that Garnet Brown?!”

*

Jacob wasn’t sure what he’d expected from Eve’s family, but this . . . Well, actually, he thought, as he looked around his packed dining room, this wasn’t a surprise at all.

Eve’s relatives all had an untouchable air of glamour and certainty, that healthy gloss of attractiveness that surrounded people who had access to the best of everything—food, clothes, whatever. He’d seen people like this many times before, but the part that threw him off was: they all seemed to like each other. It was hard to put his finger on how he knew that. Something about the way they’d walked as a group, making space for one another, steps almost in synch, like a pack rather than a simple group of relatives. Or the way they’d bickered through awkward hellos and made odd little comments to each other as Jacob had herded them inside like sheep.

Whatever the case, he could see the love between them like heat shimmering in the air. It made sense, of course, that Eve had been raised at the heart of a family like this. She’d learned her softness from somewhere, after all.

Jacob studied them now, since he’d run out of conversation shortly after Hello, and since Eve wasn’t here to ease the way for him. There was the mother, sitting stiffly by the window in a pristine suit, her sharp, hazel eyes examining every inch of the room. Probably looking for faults, which shouldn’t worry Jacob; his establishment had no faults, the occasional trespass of waterfowl aside. But he still felt a twinge of nervous worry in his gut, because, well . . . this was Eve’s mother, and she had the same sharpness about her that Aunt Lucy had, which suggested—among other things—very high standards.

And there was Eve’s father, a man who radiated warmth and appeared never to leave his wife’s side. He didn’t look much like Eve, what with the bald head and mustache and all, but he had the . . . the feel of Eve. He’d nodded and smiled, earlier, as Jacob had led them all in here to wait. And right now, he had a hand on the mother’s shoulder, like he could share calm through his touch the way Eve spread happiness through her smiles.

To Jacob’s right sat the sisters; pretty, different, close. They were whispering together in the corner, shooting him suspicious looks. The one with the blue glasses looked particularly murderous. The one with the purple hair seemed dispassionately curious, like a scientist who would dissect him if she thought it worth her while.

And then there was the grandmother, and the other older lady who seemed to be her partner. They were the only ones who weren’t pointedly ignoring him. Jacob rather wished they would.

“So,” the grandmother said. She was wearing enormous sunglasses and, unlike the mother, hadn’t bothered to remove them indoors. “You own this place, do you, darling?”

“I do, madam.”

“Oh, darling. How sweet. Did you hear that, Shivani? But no, no, you must call me Gigi. And this is my darling Shivani, and over there is Joy, having an embolism, and that is Martin, having a quieter embolism, and huddled in the corner like a pair of witches are Chloe and Danika. There, now, we’re all introduced and terribly intimate.” Gigi smiled beautifully, all white teeth and fine-boned beauty, before producing a cigarette from . . . somewhere. Jacob must have missed the source. “Can I smoke, darling?”

“I’d rather you—”

She held it to her lips, and then the other woman—Shivani—produced a box of matches, and the cigarette was chivalrously lit, and it was all very Hollywood.

“Times of great stress require it,” Gigi told him conspiratorially. “But really, I quit in ’79. Now, then. What was your name?”

“Erm,” he said, “Jacob.”