by BETH KERY
. . . But the experience of being the target of her desire held him spellbound, as well. His paradoxical need created a friction in him: the need to dominate fighting with the desire to accept what she was giving him, to accept love rather than take it.
To acknowledge instead of demand.
A sweet, agonizing moment later, she rose over him, lifting her dress to her waist with one hand. She started to come down over his naked cock. He paused her by tightening his hold.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” he asked.
“Yes,” she breathed. “I want you in me this way. Now. I’m like you, Jacob. I’ve always been very careful about making sure I was safe. Only for a moment. Please.”
“You don’t have to beg me,” he said incredulously. There was an intensity to her tonight that he couldn’t quite comprehend. Her cheeks were no longer wet, but her eyes looked mysterious and deep in the moonlight.
He helped her by guiding her hip. She sunk down over him, sheathing him in her sleek body. He saw ecstasy tighten her face, and knew her pleasure matched his. She paused in his lap and whipped the dress above her head.
He held her to him, the pleasure cutting at him. The feeling. She began to rise and fall over him. She looked so beautiful, naked and bathed in the glow of the stars and moon. Need tore at his throat. Desperation. He pulled her to him, clenching his teeth hard at the sensation of her erect nipples pressing against his ribs. He gripped the hair at her nape in his fist.
“What is it?” he hissed tensely against her mouth. “What happened, Harper? Tell me. Why were you crying when you woke me up?”
“I don’t know,” she said brokenly, and she looked every bit as desperate as he felt. “I had a dream.”
“What dream?”
“About a boy,” burst out of her throat. “A boy I knew a long, long time ago. Why am I dreaming of him now? Why do I keep thinking of him?” she murmured, and it was as if she asked herself. Her face crunched tight.
Wild emotion rushed through him at the vision of her pain. It was like a knife in her side. In his.
“Make me forget, Jacob,” she whispered. She began to move her hips, pumping his cock in and out of her body. He gripped her head tighter.
“Come here,” he said, his mouth slanting. He’d seen her pain, and it’d driven a stake of urgency into him.
She’d dreamed of Jake. Surely she’d meant Jake.
Surely she’d remembered me?
The thought both panicked and excited him. He didn’t know on what side of the ledge he existed anymore, only that he felt like he was constantly falling off it, free-falling into Harper’s sweetness.
He kissed her voraciously, using one hand to guide her strokes over his body, mounting their frenzy of need. From every direction, he felt pummeled. Maddened. Because even while he gave her what she needed, he couldn’t have said for himself what desire was sharper inside him: for her to remember or for her to forget, for her to acknowledge him for who he was, or for her to remain veiled, safe, and protected. Did he want her to recognize the vulnerable boy he’d buried long ago? Or did he want even more to continue drowning in the sweetness of her loving him for whom he’d become, forever ignorant of whom he’d been . . .
Forever blinded to what they’d meant to one another.
• • •
The morning dawned crystal clear and luminous out on the vast, blue expanse of Lake Tahoe.
After they’d made love on the top deck last night, Jacob and she had gone down to the bedroom and slept the rest of the night in each other’s arms. Harper awoke before Jacob, studying his face in repose for a moment in the light of dawn. Her chest grew tight when she recalled their emotional, charged . . . bewildering lovemaking last night beneath the stars.
She wasn’t sure what had happened. It all seemed so confusing: the dream, her uncontrollable eruption of feeling, his passionate, soulful response. What really bothered her was how she kept recalling that dream. His face was emerging from the shadows with startling clarity.
Jake.
Jacob had promised her an affair that was about forgetting, about staving off grief and loss. But strangely, she was remembering more.
Is this what it meant to really fall in love? she wondered numbly as she stole from his arms a moment later. Did it mean that you felt everything more clearly, the sad along with the amazing? Maybe so. She’d considered herself to be in love several times in the past, but that pale feeling had nothing to do with the vibrant, powerful emotions Jacob evoked in her.
She was making them breakfast with the eggs and a freshly baked loaf of bread that Lisa had packed for them in the hamper when he found her. She turned upon hearing his tread on the stairs, her heart in her throat.
He touched her almost immediately after he entered the galley, taking her into his arms and kissing her deeply. She was glad to realize that their newfound closeness and intimacy remained, despite her uncertainties and vague embarrassment about her emotional display last night. Maybe he sensed her uncommon shyness or some shared strain, and was determined to melt it. Knowing him, and his bullheaded determination to have nothing separate them physically, that was probably it. If so, it worked in spades, Harper realized dazedly a moment later when he lifted his head from their kiss, and she very reluctantly left his arms to finish making the eggs.
By some silent pact, neither of them spoke of what had happened last night under the stars. They spent a nice morning on the top deck basking in the bright sun. He read some files from his briefcase and Harper consumed a book Cyril had given to her about writing screenplays, her feet resting in his lap.
“Is it good?” Jacob asked a while later, nodding at the book she read, setting aside his file and grasping one of her feet instead, massaging the muscles deeply.
She sighed in pleasure and lowered the book. “It is. I’m excited to start writing.”
“Excited is good. Very good,” he murmured, his deep, mellow voice washing over her and prickling her nerves to life. “I have some of Cyril’s movies at the house. Do you want to watch a couple, when we get back?”
She nodded eagerly, warming as she saw that small smile she loved shaping his mouth before he picked up the report again. This time, even with his attention focused on his reading, he continued to massage her until she drifted off into a sun-warmed sleep.
• • •
They anchored the yacht at about two that afternoon. Harper was a little sad to leave the water and their temporary escape from the rest of the world. It’d been heaven being out there on the water, just the two of them.
When they returned to the mansion, Elizabeth stood at the top of the terrace, ready to greet them. So . . . Jacob’s faithful assistant had come back to his side. Harper wanted to ask Elizabeth about Regina Morrow’s well-being, but recognized it wasn’t her place. Harper could tell by the urgent, strained look Elizabeth gave Jacob even before they’d exchanged hellos that she wanted to confer with him privately.
“Why don’t you go up and shower and I’ll meet you upstairs in a minute?” Jacob asked Harper.
“Sure,” Harper replied, her smile assuring both Jacob and Elizabeth she was fine with that plan. In truth, she’d held on to a small hope that Jacob would tell Elizabeth that she could speak openly about Regina in front of Harper. That wasn’t the case, though, Harper acknowledged grimly as she went through the terrace doors. Apparently, there were still secrets regarding Regina that Jacob wasn’t ready for Harper to know.
But in all fairness, what Jacob had said in San Francisco in regard to Regina was true. Regina obviously had a lot of emotional and mental health issues. As a friend, Jacob couldn’t in good faith go around blabbing about her problems to someone like Harper, who was a stranger to Regina. But Jacob had also admitted Regina was a former lover, and that he cared for her deeply.
It’s only natural that the hush-hush, charg
ed aura surrounding Regina Morrow bothers me a little.
Maybe because of her conflicting thoughts, she was overly sensitive about reading Jacob’s mood when he joined her in his suite a while later. If he seemed a little subdued at first, his preoccupation passed quickly enough.
His attention was all for her.
He showed her for the first time how a wood-paneled wall in the sitting area of his bedroom opened to an entertainment center. They agreed to be lazy for the rest of the day, watching two of Cyril’s movies, talking . . . making love. They became so involved in the latter that they forgot dinner. When Harper’s stomach rumbled loudly at one point while they were entwined in bed, Jacob rose despite Harper’s protests. They ordered Thai food and ate it in bed naked. She thought it was the most delicious meal she’d ever eaten in her life.
“Back to work tomorrow,” Harper murmured later against Jacob’s bare chest. She loved to press her lips against the crisp hair there, feeling the heat of his skin and the density of muscle beneath. The lights in his suite were out, but star shine poured through the open, circular bank of windows. She turned her head slightly, brushing her mouth against him and inhaling his scent. “It seems like a month since I was at the newsroom, not three days.”
He didn’t reply. She rested her cheek on his chest, sensing his preoccupation.
“Are you thinking about work, too?” she asked him after a pause.
His hand cupped her shoulder. “No. Harper, there’s something I didn’t tell you about this weekend. I guess I should now.”
She came up on one elbow, peering into his shadowed face.
“What’s wrong? It sounds serious.”
“I wouldn’t say it’s serious.” He exhaled and rolled over on the mattress. He switched on a lamp. “Maybe it’d be easier if I just showed you.”
He rose from the bed. Harper watched him walk over to the sitting area, the dim lamplight gilding his ass and muscular back. He withdrew a newspaper from his briefcase and walked back over to the bed. Harper recalled him looking at what appeared to be the same paper in the back of the limo yesterday morning, when they’d returned from San Francisco. It was a copy of the Chronicle, a minor detail she’d noticed, having worked for that paper for a good part of her professional life.
When she held up her hands to receive the paper, he paused before giving it to her.
“Don’t be mad at me for not showing you yesterday. It was selfish on my part, but I was mostly thinking of you. I didn’t want anything to come in the way of you enjoying the rest of your holiday. Besides, there was nothing you could have done about it at that point, anyway.” He shrugged and gave her the paper. “There’s nothing you can do now, either, except to be prepared for any flak when you return to the Gazette tomorrow.”
Her brows creased in concern at his buildup. She sat up in bed, the sheet tucked around her breasts. He came down next to her.
“Page twenty-three,” he said.
Harper whipped through the pages. A moment later she was staring openmouthed at a fairly large photo of Jacob and her leaving Geb on Saturday night in San Francisco. They both looked serious. Jacob’s hand was at the small of her back. The caption read, Lattice owner and CEO, Jacob Latimer, and his escort for the evening, former Chronicle reporter and current news editor of the Sierra Tahoe Gazette, Harper McFadden.
“Escort for the evening. Charlie Nelson.” Her lip curled in bitter disgust when she saw the name of the photographer.
“You know him?”
Harper nodded grimly, skimming the rest of the brief article, which was mostly about Jacob. She rolled her eyes and folded the paper with haphazard forcefulness before tossing it aside irritably.
“I never saw any photographers that night. Makes sense that it was Charlie. That swine makes it a practice to hide behind garbage cans, where he belongs.”
“Do you think it’ll be a problem for you at work?” Jacob asked.
“It’ll certainly make it more difficult to deny that I have any inside track to you or Lattice with Ruth, not to mention Burt, one of my reporters who’s been nosing around.” She noticed his somber expression. “Don’t worry. I’ll handle it. Because they know that you and I are seeing each other doesn’t change a thing. If anything, it should send a clearer message that what’s . . .” She hesitated in describing their relationship, realizing it was a glaring question mark. How exactly did one describe Jacob’s and her involvement—especially after their intense, amazing long weekend together? “What’s happening between us is private and not a topic for public consumption.”
“They’re going to be curious. They’re going to ask a lot of questions. Do you think your editor in chief is going to give you a hard time?”
“Sangar? No. He’s a pussycat compared to Ruth, or even Burt Chavis.” Her gaze flickered over his face. Her heart squeezed a little at how sober he looked. “Are you regretting getting involved with a reporter again?” she asked softly. His eyebrows arched a question, and she sighed. “Cyril told me you were still having doubts about seeing me because I was a reporter.”
“I’m managing those doubts pretty well. Wouldn’t you say? Just like you’re managing yours, about being with me?”
She gave a bark of laughter and rubbed her eyes, suddenly feeling tired. “Damn Charlie Nelson. I’m going to call him tomorrow and let him have it.”
“It’s okay, Harper,” he said, coming down in the bed and urging her to recline with him.
“It is?” she asked incredulously as he twisted around to shut off the lamp.
She felt his shrug against her chin as his arms encircled her a moment later.
“At least you won’t have to tiptoe around the topic at work anymore.”
She rubbed her lips against his skin distractedly. “No more sneaking into the newsroom’s bathroom, now that the spotlight has been turned on.” She squeaked in surprise when he was suddenly rolling her on her back and coming down over her.
“I’m not promising anything. Being with me is risky business.”
She laughed and encircled his neck with her arms. “The reward has far outweighed the risk so far.”
“I could say the same about you,” he replied huskily before he covered her mouth with his own.
• • •
The next morning, Harper got up extra early with Jacob to jog. Much to her amazement, Elizabeth was already at the mansion, waiting for them at the bottom of the stairs. She informed them she wanted to orient Harper to the compound’s security measures so that Harper could return there anytime she chose without difficulty. Harper gave Jacob a surprised glance, but could tell by his relaxed expression he’d been the one to give the direction to his assistant in the first place. Knowing that he’d expressed to Elizabeth his trust in her by giving her total access to his home gratified Harper.
After her orientation, she and Jacob jogged on the beach during a glorious sunrise.
“Do you want to take a few of the dogs out for some catch?” Jacob asked her upon their return.
Harper checked her watch and nodded, liking the idea.
He ended up doing most of the ball throwing to three or four of the adult dogs, however, while Harper sat in the sand with her legs spread, watching him and playing with Milo, the puppy that’d had his foot amputated by some sadistic sociopath.
“He likes you,” Jacob said as he walked toward her a while later, and the golden sun blazed over the tops of the mountains. Warmth went through her at the magnificent vision he made, wearing running shorts, his dark blond hair damp at the nape from jogging and play, his simple gray T-shirt molding his muscular, fit torso in the most distracting way.
“Do you think so?” she asked hopefully, petting the puppy’s ears and scratching his back.
“I know so.” He reached for her hand and pulled her into a standing position while Milo nuzzled her ankles. “What’s not t
o like?” He leaned down and brushed her cheeks with his lips, as if he couldn’t resist feeling the heat that had risen in her cheeks at his compliment. Then he transferred his mouth to hers, and Harper lost time for a moment.
“I’m going to be late for work,” she murmured against his lips.
He grabbed her hand. “If you’re late, what difference does it make if you’re a little or a lot?” he asked.
He led her to his bedroom.
She wasn’t terribly late by the time she got out the door. She was flustered, happy, and extremely sex-flushed. The chances of her appearing cool and contained in front of her colleagues following the Chronicle photo with Jacob were pretty much nil.
She realized she couldn’t have cared less.
• • •
After Harper left for work, Jacob put in a call to Dr. Larry Fielding in Napa. The psychiatrist immediately began talking about Regina’s recent relapse and what he planned to do in regard to her treatment.
“She’s very depressed,” Dr. Fielding told Jacob. “I’ve moved up her outpatient therapy to four times a week, so I can better assess if she’s suicidal.”
“Shouldn’t she be in the hospital?” Jacob asked.
“Possibly, but as you know, I can’t admit her involuntarily unless she expresses active suicidal ideation or shows signs of being unable to care for herself. I’m going to add an antidepressant to her mood stabilizer. That’s another reason I want to see her several times a week, to assess how she reacts. She’ll also continue with the outpatient group, so they’ll be able to monitor her, as well.”
“As long as she goes,” Jacob muttered as he paced back and forth in front of his office windows.
“You’ve done everything for her that you can,” Dr. Fielding said patiently. “God knows it’s light-years more than most people would do.”
But it’s not enough. It’ll never be enough.
“Jacob, you’re not her savior. She has to want to save herself,” Fielding said as if he’d read Jacob’s mind—which he probably had.