by BETH KERY
“What’s this I hear about you telling Jim you wanted to get your car?” he asked. The bright evening light off the lake made his agate eyes seem to glow. His hands lowered to her ass. “Are you planning on an escape, Harper?”
“Hell, no,” she drawled, ducking forward to kiss his mouth again, diverting both him and herself from the fact that his teasing about her car had come a little too close to the truth. He caught her to him and deepened their kiss, pressing her against him tightly in a way that made it clear to her just how much he’d missed her. This time when he sealed their kiss, he straightened and stepped away from her. Harper tried to contain her disappointment as she watched him walk around his desk. Her gaze dropped down over his lean, powerful body. Despite both her reanimated and new doubts, her desire for him was cutting as it’d ever been.
Possibly even sharper.
He lifted an envelope from his desk and handed it to her. Harper took it with a questioning look, but he merely gestured that she should look for herself.
She unfolded several pieces of paper. They were lab reports and a written note from Dr. Amorantz. She looked up, her breath frozen in her lungs. Jacob wore a small, enigmatic smile.
“We’re both as healthy as they come. Nothing else between us,” he said, and there was something in his tone of voice, a quiet but profound victory.
She swallowed with difficulty and smiled.
“What’s wrong?” he asked. “Aren’t you glad that he cleared us for sex without protection?”
“Of course I am,” she managed thickly.
“Then what is it?” he asked, coming around his desk with that predator’s stalk she loved, but which also intimidated. She floundered for something to say. Her gaze flickered anxiously across the bookshelves behind him because she was having difficulty meeting his stare.
She froze with her mouth open, staring at very fine, gilded copies of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings directly behind his desk. Suddenly he turned, following her stare to the bookcase.
“Jacob,” she said abruptly, recognizing the break in her composure and rushing to fill the vacuum. He glanced back at her narrowly. “I was wondering about something. You uh . . . you did say that you grew up in South Carolina, didn’t you?” she asked in a rush. She was desperate, for some reason. It wasn’t possible that he could see down into the heart of her, but she still got that impression sometimes that he could.
That he was doing it, right at this very moment. She waited for him to reply, her heart starting to throb in her ears.
“That’s what I said, yes,” he replied, stepping toward her, his face a mask.
“Oh. Did you mean for your entire childhood?” she asked, and despite her efforts at appearing light and calm, her voice broke.
“Why?” he asked, coming to a halt just inches in front of her. She couldn’t seem to break his boring stare.
“I just wondered,” she said with fake casualness, shrugging. “Someone at work today used the term ‘born and bred.’ They said they were born and bred in Tahoe Shores, and they meant they’d never left it until they went to college. So I was just wondering if you meant the same thing when you said the same about South Carolina . . .” She faded off lamely. His stare seemed to drain the oxygen from her lungs.
“I’ve told you that I don’t want to talk about my past. I don’t want to focus on it. But you can’t seem to let it go, can you?”
His quietly uttered words seemed to strike her like bullets. She didn’t reply. She couldn’t. It was like there was a squeezing hand at her throat.
When it became clear she wasn’t going to answer him, he grabbed her wrist.
“Where are we going?” she asked him when he started toward the door and she had to jog to keep up with his long-legged stride.
“To get your head out of the past and into the present, where it belongs,” she heard him reply with steely determination.
thirty-eight
A moment later, he slammed the door of his bedroom suite shut behind them and fastened the lock.
“Jacob—”
She cut herself off when he dropped her hand and moved past her, his face rigid. She didn’t really know what to say, anyway. What could she do or say to reassure him, when she couldn’t reassure herself anymore?
What the hell is happening?
Her heart pounded out an excited, anxious tattoo in her ears. He crossed the suite and opened a door—a door that she’d seen him go into on several occasions in the past. When he walked out a moment later, her gaze dipped to what he held in one hand: several bundles of black rope.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said quietly, his eyes flashing as he walked toward her. “You know I’m not going to hurt you.” He paused in front of her, his hard mouth slanted. “Do you not want to do this?”
“I . . . I don’t know.”
“I’m trying to haul you back into the moment, Harper,” he bit out.
For a few seconds, her whole world was the vision of his stormy eyes and the throb of her heart in her ears. She wanted him so much . . .
I love him.
She found herself nodding, compelled by his eyes.
As always.
“Come over to the bed,” he said.
She followed him to the foot of his bed. He tossed down the bundles of rope and turned to her, immediately beginning to unfasten her blouse.
“Jacob, don’t be mad at me.”
His gaze shot up to her face.
“I’m not mad at you, Harper. Do you think I should be? Do you think I should be pissed at you for keeping secrets from me, just because you’re mad at me for not babbling on about my childhood?”
She blinked, startled by his slicing vehemence. She opened her mouth to respond, but he cut her off.
“I’m not going to make love to you right now because I’m mad.” He unfastened the last button and jerked her blouse open, pushing it down her arms. “I’m doing it exactly because of what I said before: to get your head into the moment.”
“Because you know I can’t think about anything else but the present when you tie me up and make me feel?” she accused.
He paused in the action of unfastening her skirt.
“Make you? Is that what you think? That I’m forcing you?”
“No,” she admitted, a little ashamed at how condemning she’d sounded because of her anxiety.
His expression hardened. He methodically stripped her, all except her black pumps.
“Leave them on,” he said, referring to her shoes. He turned to pick up the coils of rope. “Lie on your back in the center of the bed. I’m going to restrain your arms and legs to it.”
Her heart felt too big for her chest as she climbed onto the bed, but she was feeling something else besides trepidation. His seemingly dispassionate undressing of her and his instructions to lie on the bed so that he could tie her up had created a low burn of arousal at her sex. Who knew why she liked it so much, to be restrained by him? To give complete control to him? She only knew she did.
Both her anxiety and arousal elevated in tandem a moment later when he gave her terse instructions to take a spread-eagle position on the bed. She watched him, having trouble catching her breath, as he soberly and expertly began to restrain her. She realized that the four separate bundles of rope were pre-tied for this specific task. All he had to do was slip a thick coil around wrists and ankles, tighten it, and then fasten the free end of the rope to a corner of the bed.
When he finally straightened after tying off her last limb, he looked very forbidding. She studied his face as he walked around the bed, and then his body. His flinty expression wasn’t from anger. Her gaze stuck on the fullness of his crotch. No. She thought that determinedly aroused might describe his state better.
The spread-eagle position he’d told her to take left her feeling glaringly vulnerab
le and aroused . . . turned on and unable to hide it. She panted shallowly, her rising and falling breasts betraying her excitement as did her tight, prickling nipples. Cool air tickled at her spread sex, as well, informing her that she’d grown damp watching him methodically restraining her.
He began to undress. His averted gaze hurt her a little. Until he removed his pants and underwear anyway, and she confirmed how thoroughly excited he was, despite his dispassionate expression. He was hurting, somehow. Just like she was.
The recognition only added to her chaotic state.
He reached into the bedside drawer, grabbing something. He crawled onto the bed, coming down on his side next to her, his elbow on the mattress, his hand propping up his head. She swallowed thickly when he met her stare.
“Jacob, what is it? What’s wrong?” she whispered. Frustration simmered in her, because not only would he not help her clarify his turmoil, he wouldn’t even acknowledge it existed.
“Nothing is wrong, Harper,” he said evenly, opening his hand over her belly. He began to stroke her naked body, holding her stare. He brushed his fingertips over her ribs and her sensitive sides, making her nipples pull so tight that the ache in them swelled to sharp pain. She clamped her eyelids shut, unable to keep meeting his determined, blazing stare. “Why can’t you believe me when I say that everything is fine? That there’s no reason to go digging around for reasons to doubt me.” His fingertips brushed over her rock hard nipples. She gasped shakily. He leaned over her. “Do you want to doubt me, Harper?”
“No,” she said with shaky emphasis.
“Do you doubt, right here in the moment?”
“No.”
God, no. The only thing she did in that moment was hunger.
Then his mouth was on hers, feeding that hunger . . . mounting it. He massaged her breasts forcefully while he kissed her, pinching lightly at her hard nipples. It felt so good. She grew so desperate, she thought she might explode from the nipple stimulation alone. Then he was lifting his head and kissing her neck, whispering hotly in her ear.
“Just let go. You’re mine right now. Completely mine. No one is going to take you from me. Nothing is.”
She sobbed raggedly, sinking into the mattress, surrendering to the moment. And his mouth was on her breast, his hand caressing her naked thigh, and she felt herself falling deeper under his spell. His tongue lashed at her nipple, torturing the exquisitely sensitive flesh. He drew on her with electrical precision. She cried out, her eyes going wide. Could she climax with just his mouth on her breast?
She never found out, because suddenly his hand was between her legs, and he was pressing a vibrator to her clit. She seized in climax.
When she came back to herself, he was drawing on her other breast just as forcefully as he had the other. He’d lifted the vibrator from her clit, but his hand was still between her legs. As she panted, still in recovery from her climax, he set the bullet vibrator on her mons and thrust a finger into her sheath. She moaned his name, but he seemed impervious to her sweet agony as he continued to suck on the tip of her breast and finger-fuck her as deep as he could. Harper lay there, swimming in sensation, hating her helplessness . . .
Loving it, because she was in his hands.
A while later, he released her nipple and fastened on her mouth, instead. He thrust his tongue between her lips, kissing her demandingly, and lifted the vibrator from her mons. He slipped it between her labia, buzzing her until she burned in agony again.
When she ignited, she screamed into his marauding kiss.
“Jacob, please,” she muttered when he finally released her mouth after her shudders of bliss had waned. She didn’t know what she begged for, though: more torture or freedom from it? It didn’t matter. There was no escape from him. He kissed and licked her everywhere, his appetite shocking her. She grew dizzy at the sensation of him kissing her inner thigh. Then his lips brushed her labia and his head dipped. Harper stared blindly into space, held hostage by his hot, deep, demanding kiss on her sex.
He brought her to climax again with his firm, demanding tongue. Not until she lay panting on the bed, her muscles and nerves spent, completely wrung out by pleasure, did he crawl between her thighs, brace his upper body by pressing his fists into the mattress, and enter her.
She gave a sharp cry, her body tensing. It was the first time he’d been in her raw. He was steely hard and swollen. Because she couldn’t tilt her hips to better accommodate him in the taut, spread-eagle position, the pressure was intense at first . . . almost uncomfortable. He paused at her cry, but she saw the fire in his eyes. His patience wouldn’t last long.
“Are you all right?” he asked her thickly, waiting for her body to get used to his cock being buried inside her at this angle.
“Yes.”
He thrust, wincing in pleasure when his balls pressed tightly against her outer sex. He looked heartrendingly beautiful to her in that moment, his burnished hair mussed, his hard mouth still slick from her juices.
“God, you feel like heaven,” he rasped. Harper held her breath, awed by the emotion she heard in his voice.
He began to move, slaking his thirst on her, holding her stare the whole time. He took her hard, his hips and ass moving in a tense, erotic rhythm, his pelvis slapping briskly against her spread thighs with every downstroke. Pleasure finally melted away his impassive mask.
He thrust deep. A muscle in his cheek jumped from tension.
“Mine,” he growled. “Say it, Harper.”
She gasped, staring up at him incredulously. “I’m yours,” she said, shaking her head on the pillow. “And you’re mine, Jake.”
He started, his eyes flashing at her words. He began to shudder. He groaned gutturally and began to pour himself into her for the first time—all of his need, all of his longing and pain.
All of his shame.
She panted, held in a grip of shock, unable to believe her senses.
Maybe Jacob hadn’t meant to reveal the truth during their emotional lovemaking, but he had, anyway. Hadn’t he?
He’d stamped himself onto her soul just now. And in doing so, she’d spied a crack in his armor. He met her stare, still panting heavily from his orgasm. She peered disbelievingly into his eyes like they were a window to her past.
“Jake Tharp?” she whispered. “It is you, isn’t it?”
Twenty Years Ago
Harper and he burst through the front doors of the Barterton Police Station at around dusk, hand in hand and gasping for breath. From the alarmed look on the female receptionist’s face, Jake guessed they looked pretty bad after finishing the last leg of their journey fueled solely by adrenaline and fear.
The sheriff of Barterton, Adam Maddington—a thin, serious man in his late thirties—was notified of their arrival. He immediately informed the state police and the FBI via phone.
The small police station had been relatively sleepy when Jake and Harper stumbled into it, but it started to bustle with a sense of emergency and purpose with their arrival. From snatches of distant conversation between employees, Jake started to realize that Harper’s kidnapping and the hunt for her was a gigantic deal.
“Guess we know the reason for that helicopter we heard now,” Jake mumbled to Harper as they sat side by side, listening to Sheriff Maddington and two deputies talking tersely on separate phones.
“You mean . . .”
He nodded. “Yeah. They were searching for you.”
Sheriff Maddington also called for some EMTs to come check their injuries. Afterward, he settled in to patiently listen to their story.
“You mean your uncle, Emmitt Tharp, is still back there in the woods somewhere?” he interrupted Jake’s description.
Jake glanced over at a dirt-smudged, bloodied, bruised Harper uneasily and nodded. It made him sick, to think of how he’d plunged that knife into human flesh . . . how Harper had wa
tched him. He’d felt like he didn’t have any choice. If he didn’t disable Emmitt, his uncle would catch up to them for sure.
Is that what Harper’s memory of him would be? Is that how she’d remember him, as a killer?
State troopers and two FBI agents arrived at the station during the sheriff’s questioning. They joined in the interrogation. Occasionally the adults talked tensely with each other in a muted tone Jake couldn’t make out. The overhead lights in the police station felt very harsh on his dry, burning eyes. He and Harper just sat there on two straight-backed chairs, gripping each other’s hands tightly.
There was talk of organizing a search party to find Emmitt. Jake volunteered to go with them to the location where he’d stabbed his uncle. The two agents wouldn’t agree to that plan, however. Instead, they got a map and Jake pointed out their path on it as best he could. One of the deputies who was familiar with the area told him that his descriptions of the landscape were top-notch and extremely detailed.
“Jake’s an expert in the woods,” Harper told the group of men. “He saved my life more than once.”
“You were lucky Jake was there. We all were,” one of the agents agreed, patting Jake on the shoulder before he walked away with the map in his hand. Jake flushed in mixed embarrassment and pride at that, ducking his head to hide it. Harper just held his hand even tighter.
The EMTs arrived. After examining them both, they proclaimed them essentially healthy. They told Sheriff Maddington that the worst of their combined injuries was the knife cut at the corner of Harper’s mouth. She required stitches.
Harper squeezed his hand so tight it brought tears to his eyes while the female EMT put four stitches in the wound. He knew she suffered far worse, though, so he didn’t say a word.
“Mr. Maddington, has someone called my parents?” Harper asked after the EMT had finished. Jake noticed she was visibly trembling.
“Do you think she could lie down somewhere, Sheriff?” Jake asked before Maddington could reply to Harper.