She walked out from under the shade of an oak and it was like watching the sun rise.

Her mouth was moving, but Jacob couldn’t hear her—so he balanced the phone between his ear and his shoulder and opened the window. Eve’s voice flooded the room like a glass of ice water on a sweltering day. She was singing “Special Affair,” and the sound of it thrust him back in time to last Sunday. To sweet, silvery darkness and her body beneath him.

“Tess,” Mont was saying, “I think Jake wants to talk to you. God only knows why.”

The words barely registered; Jacob was too busy controlling his cock and his thoughts. Reminding himself that there was no way the world would let him keep a woman like Eve. She’d leave in the end. Everyone and everything left, in the end, didn’t they?

The thought wasn’t entirely accurate, he knew that, but it felt accurate. It felt inescapable.

“Never mind,” he said out loud. “Never mind. I’ll call Tessa later. Mont, I have to go.”

“What? Don’t. You’re freaking out about something, aren’t you?”

“No. Good-bye,” Jacob said, and then he hung up. Down in the garden, Eve looked up as if she’d heard his voice. Her eyes met his as if drawn by some magnetic force. She smiled, and waved, and Jacob—

Jacob was hit with such soul-deep affection, he actually lost his breath.

Somehow, he managed to wave awkwardly back. Then he turned away and slumped into the hidden safety of his desk chair. He sat there for God only knew how long, frozen and confused, his chest heaving and his thoughts flying. The sun sank low, and still, he sat. The breeze through the open window turned cool, almost cold, and still, he sat.

But no matter how long he waited, the feeling didn’t go away.

Bloody shitting hell. He was in love with her.

How goddamn inconvenient.

* * *

As far as Eve could tell, things between she and Jacob went back to normal after that moment at Lucy’s. Their version of normal, anyway.

The awkwardness that had muffled their friendship was burned away by the time they’d walked home. They still bickered over breakfast in the mornings, still teased each other over bed making in the afternoons. Jacob started bringing his laptop down to the kitchen, typing away with unnerving focus while she prepared tea and cake for the guests.

It was only on nights like tonight—a quiet Wednesday evening when she’d gone to her room early, sitting on the creaky sofa bed where she almost never wanked over Jacob—that Eve noticed a slight tension between them. A barely banked heat. Because as soon as they went up to the B&B’s private quarters, he turned rigidly silent.

He nodded stiffly at her when they crossed paths in the corridor. He responded to her calls of Good night with vague grunts. Eve wanted to decipher those grunts, but she was worried that understanding his whole tight-jawed restraint thing might push her into accidentally seducing him. Mature, adult women did not accidentally seduce their bosses, nor did they obsess over said boss’s grunts like teenagers with a whale-sized crush.