Eve: always taking care of him. He let his eyes slide shut and sank into the moment like it was a feather bed. “I do,” he said, his voice rough. “I mean, I can—I do—stay.” That was the point, really. He wanted her to stay, and he needed her to know it. Because he suspected people had let Eve go far too easily, in the past. That she was uncertain sometimes, just like him.

“You know I’m a sure thing, right?” he blurted out.

“Are you?” She raised her head with a wicked smile. “And here I thought you were tired.”

He rolled his eyes. “Stop that. Depraved woman. What I meant is—I was serious, earlier. You’re mine now.”

“Very caveman of you,” she murmured.

Jacob made the executive decision to ignore that. “You’re mine, which means you don’t need to worry about me wandering off or—or rejecting you, or—I’m a sure thing,” he repeated, because they were veering too deeply into emotional language and he strongly doubted his ability to get it right. “I’m certain. For you. Of you. And things.”

She raised her head again, but this time, there was no teasing smile. This time, her gaze met his, midnight pupils enveloping chocolate brown, and she blinked rapidly. “Oh,” she said, her voice quiet. And with that single syllable, Jacob’s suspicions were confirmed. Eve wasn’t used to being held on to.

He could relate.

“Will you tell me something?” he asked.

She lay down again, her head a comforting weight on his chest. “Anything.”

His heart squeezed at the word. “Why did you come here?”

She hesitated. He’d expected that. The day they’d met, Jacob had written this woman off as an irresponsible tornado sweeping the countryside, searching for interviews to ruin. Which was, obviously, ridiculous. But in his defense, he’d been under a lot of pressure, and he hadn’t really known her then.

He knew her now. He knew that she adored her sisters—so much she never shut up about them—and that her friends back home didn’t deserve her, but she talked about their ludicrous rich-girl antics with fondness, anyway, and that she was perfectly capable of working hard and succeeding as long as she was given the space to do so.

All of which begged the question—why had she left her life behind and taken the first job she could find out here? Once upon a time, Jacob hadn’t cared to know, and then he hadn’t deserved to ask, but now? Well. Now, he was the man Eve Brown would tell anything. Which felt like one of the top five most powerful positions in the world.

So he waited, and after a moment, she started talking. “This story isn’t especially flattering. Toward me, I mean.”

“You should know by now,” he said, somehow pulling her even closer, “that I’m not going to judge you.”

“Jacob Wayne, you dirty liar.”

“That I’m only going to judge you a little bit,” he corrected, “and that I’ll still—” He stopped talking, the words I’ll still love you yanked offstage by a hook around the neck. Not yet. Seriously, not yet. “I’ll still like you,” he finished roughly. Nice one. He was about as smooth as crunchy fucking peanut butter.