Act Your Age, Eve Brown (The Brown Sisters #3)(90)

“Next week?” Jacob interjected. He hadn’t meant to speak aloud, but—well, that was wrong. Pretty much everything said in the last ten minutes had been wrong, but also understandable. This statement, however, stuck out like a sore thumb. Eve couldn’t have been planning to visit home next week, because next weekend was the Gingerbread Festival.

“Or was it the week after?” Joy waved her hand. “I don’t know. Whenever you were coming back to begin the event-planning job. But you know you have a tendency to pick up, erm, less than suitable men, darling, so we thought we’d better nip up here just to check nothing was getting out of hand.”

Event-planning job. Jacob supposed he should be focusing more on the fact that Eve’s mother had just called him less than suitable—or had she simply insulted Eve’s general life choices? One of those. And usually, he’d be incredibly pissed by either option. But his brain was a little stuck on the phrase event-planning job, trying and failing to absorb it, to move past it, to make it make sense.

He looked at Eve, waiting for her to clear things up. Instead, she avoided his gaze and told her mother, “Jacob isn’t unsuitable, Mum. He’s exceedingly—good. And very—accomplished. And far cleverer than—” She spluttered awkwardly. “Oh, never mind. The event planning begins after next weekend.”

“The what?” Jacob asked, his voice harder than he intended. Couldn’t help it. He felt suddenly twisted and prickly, and—awkward and foolish and caught unawares. All the things he most hated to be.

Because apparently, Eve was leaving, and he was the only person in this room who didn’t know about it.

Eve’s dad, Martin, glared at Jacob with surprising force. “Do you know, son, I’m not sure how this conversation is any of your business.”

Jacob stood up straighter, feeling himself ice over. “I’m Eve’s employer. Her whereabouts during our busiest season are certainly my business.”

“Well,” Martin shot back, “our Eve has a lucrative opportunity in event planning beginning in September, so perhaps you won’t be her employer for much longer.”

Those words plunged Jacob into ice water. He ground his teeth practically to dust, trying to hold on to the leftovers of the day’s happiness—but he couldn’t. He couldn’t. Because all of a sudden, he was uncertain, he was an outsider in his own safe haven, and the woman who should be with him—the woman who should always be with him—was planning to leave. Had been planning to leave all along, he realized. When he turned to look at her, the guilt was written all over her face. Her brows were drawn tight together, her eyes huge and shimmering, her teeth sinking into her lip. He wanted to go over there and put his arms around her, to comfort her.

He wanted her arms around him. He was so cold. She was so warm. She’d fix it.

Except right now, she was the problem. She was the one who’d made him a fucking fool.

“Jacob,” she said cautiously, “after I interviewed here, I agreed to plan a party for an old friend.”

“Plan a party?” Joy repeated. “Don’t downplay your achievement, darling. Your father and I were beyond impressed when Mrs. Lennox let us know you’d be planning Freddy’s twenty-first. She had me on the phone for half an hour yesterday morning alone. You’ve done very well.”

“I wasn’t due to start,” Eve said, still looking at him, “until after the festival.”

And there it was. The final confirmation. Jacob’s throat felt tight, his stomach roiled, his skin stretched thin and painful over his bones. Of course she’d been planning to leave. What had he thought—that this perfect hurricane of a woman would blow into his life and actually stick around? Fall in love with him? Instead of blowing right the fuck out again?

He shouldn’t be surprised she was disappearing so soon. Jacob was easy to leave behind; he’d learned that very early on. What hurt—no, what made him furious, so furious his eyes prickled with it and his blood burned him from the inside—was the fact that she’d almost convinced him she might stay. Why had she done that? Why had she done that? And why had he wanted her so bad after all of five fucking seconds? He should know by now that other people didn’t work like him, weren’t intense like him, but she was so right and so familiar, he’d just—

“Fuck,” he muttered, and suddenly he couldn’t bear to stand in that room in front of all those people, all those strangers. He stormed past Eve and slammed out into the hall, drawing alarmed looks from two guests heading up the stairs.

Heart pounding, breaths coming a bit too fast, Jacob pulled himself together and offered them a smile that felt more like baring fangs. Their alarm didn’t fade. Actually, they seemed to head up the stairs a bit faster.

“Fuck,” he repeated, and then the door behind him opened and Eve was there.

Her fingers fluttered up to his shoulder. “Jacob—”

“Don’t touch me.” Her hand felt like a boulder. He jerked away and whirled around to face her, forcing himself to ignore the expression on her face.

The expression that said she was crumbling.

Clearly, his interpretations couldn’t be trusted when it came to this woman. Clearly, he always got her entirely, overwhelmingly wrong.

“Why?” he demanded. “Why would you—” He didn’t even know what to say.