But not while she was eating a Mars Bar. A man had to have his limits.

You will not kiss her at all. Sensible, starched Jacob rose from the ashes of himself and corrected tonight’s giddy, contact-high, Eve-addicted Jacob with a stern look and a sharp tone. There would be no kissing. It wasn’t proper or practical and there were ten thousand issues of consent, and anyway, what would happen after the kiss? Jacob knew what he’d want to happen: when he liked a woman enough to kiss her, he liked that woman enough to keep her, too.

But there were social scripts to be observed beyond fondness > physical contact > emotional commitment, and even if those scripts had never felt natural to Jacob, he’d learned them well enough to copy. So. No kissing and claiming. It wasn’t fashionable, and if you did it too quickly, you wound up with a woman who was more interested in what you could do with your tongue than she was in your sudoku skills or your conversation. The kind of woman who left.

None of which mattered in this situation, because a man simply could not claim his chef. Aside from anything else, it would take him straight back to the ten thousand issues of consent.

“Oh dear,” Eve was saying, “you have. You have gone into shock and died.”

Jacob realized he had been silent for far too many seconds. “Stop talking rubbish. When were you going to tell me you could . . .” He trailed off for a moment, uncomfortable with every description of her voice that came to mind. They all seemed too gushing, or too distant, or too inadequate to describe a talent that felt embedded into her soul. He didn’t want to treat this as a party trick when, apparently, singing as if she should be on a stage was just Eve. In the end, he vaguely motioned to her throat and finished awkwardly, “When were you going to tell me you could do that?”

“When it became something that matters, which—oh, look, it hasn’t.”

“Eve,” he said, “everything about you matters.” And then he briefly but seriously considered ripping out his own tongue.

Chapter Thirteen

Everything about you matters.

Eve might have fainted—might have swooned into a pile of dust, kind of like she did when she reached the romantic declaration part of her favorite horny fanfics—if it weren’t for the rest of Jacob’s little speech.

“We’re friends now,” he said. “Friends share, correct?”

Ah. Yes. Friendship. That was how she’d ended up lying in bed beside him under a gorgeous night sky, her skin fizzing with the electricity of his quiet, contained nearness and her mind veering into forbidden territory every five minutes. Friendship. Obviously. Hm.

“It didn’t seem relevant,” she said at last. “So I like to sing. You know that. What else is there?”

“You can’t tell me,” he said, “that it’s not important to you. When you sing like that. It has to be important to you.”