by BETH KERY
She inhaled for courage.
“Jacob, do you love me?”
He started slightly at the question.
“I only ask because you haven’t been . . . you know. Wanting to have sex. Ever since Regina died,” she stated bluntly in a rush.
His expression darkened. “You think I don’t want to have sex with you?” he asked quietly.
“I assume not, because we haven’t. And you’ve put me off quite a few times.”
He made a hissing sound and stood abruptly.
“Jacob?” She gently moved aside a dozing Milo and stood. He abruptly turned to her, his eyes stormy.
“You don’t get it, do you?”
She blinked at his terse question. “I guess not,” she replied dubiously.
He raked his fingers through his hair in obvious frustration.
“Jacob? Just tell me,” she insisted, becoming alarmed at how tense the topic had made him. Had she been wrong to bring it up?
“It hasn’t been since Regina died that we haven’t had sex,” he said. “It’s been ever since you understood I was Jake Tharp.”
Her mouth hung open. “What difference does that make?”
“It makes all the difference in the world.” He exhaled in frustration when she just stared at him in bewilderment. “I want to restrain you, Harper. Tie you up. Have you at my mercy. That hasn’t changed. You want to know if I love you?” he asked, stepping toward her. She resisted an urge to step back, he looked so fierce. “I worship the ground you walk on. I love you more than anything on this earth. I’d sacrifice everything for you.”
“Then why—”
“Because when you didn’t know I was Jake Tharp, when you didn’t know that we’d both been abused by the same man, when you didn’t know that the man who was tying you up to his bed was the same person who had untied you from that monster’s ropes . . . well, it was all a damn different scenario, wasn’t it?”
She just stared at him for a moment, shocked, trying desperately to absorb what he was saying . . . what he meant. Her heartbeat began to throb in her ears, and it finally hit her.
“You’re worried I’ll think you’re like Emmitt?”
His face stiffened. “I’m not,” he replied succinctly.
Compassion poured through her. “I couldn’t agree more,” she blazed. She shook her head. “Jacob, you told me in the beginning of our relationship that it was our choice, what we wanted sexually. You never make me feel anything but cherished and prized. And safe. Don’t you know that?”
His fierce expression broke slightly. She stepped toward him, placing her hands on his chest.
“From the first day I’ve known you, I trusted you. I still do,” she whispered. “I know you’d never hurt me. I believe you want to do just the opposite. I think you want me safe.”
“I do,” he said thickly, looking down at her face. His hand rose and encircled her wrist. “I want to keep you safe forever, Harper.”
“I want to keep you safe forever, too.”
“Do you remember what I told you weeks back, about why I wanted to restrain you?” he asked. “Because I want to know that at least for a short period of time, no one and nothing will take you from me? That was my fantasy as a kid. Not to tie you up and have sex with you. I wanted you, that was a given, but I didn’t have a clue when it came to sex back then. But I’m a man now.”
She felt his heart beating beneath her hands. “I know that,” she whispered. Did she ever.
“But that core of the fantasy remains. Now, in the act of sex, I want—no, I need to know that nothing in the world can take you from me. Not the state or some other faceless bureaucracy, not your parents, not Emmitt Tharp or any other evil thing or person . . . not even your doubts. Not mine. None of it can take you from me. I won’t let it.”
She reached up and cradled his jaw with her hands. She went up on her tiptoes and brushed her mouth against his in a kiss of cherishment. Benediction.
“I understood, Jacob. I do,” she whispered. “Nothing will come between us. Show me it’s true.”
For few breathless seconds, he just looked down at her. Then she felt it: the chains breaking loose, and he was kissing her forcefully, his hands at her back pulling her against him. They groaned in unison, their tongues dueling, desperate for each other’s taste, wild to partake of sexual communion. Harper strained toward him. She couldn’t seem to get close enough. As if he sensed her struggle—as if he shared in it—he slid his hands to her bottom and lifted her against him. She hung on to his shoulders, her legs encircling his hips. Their kiss continued, hungry, hot, and wild. How could she have thought he didn’t want her? He was like a volcano of erupting need.
She recognized they were moving and suddenly, he was spilling her back on the bed and coming down over her, unbuttoning her shirt even as he plucked and bit at her mouth. Somehow, they managed to get their clothes off—something that would seemingly have been impossible since they couldn’t keep their mouths and hands off each other.
His tongue plunged between her lips at the same time that he pushed a finger into her sex. She moaned into his mouth, writhing beneath his solid, naked body while he penetrated her forcefully. Then he was pushing her hands above her head and pressing them down into the mattress.
He stared down at her, fearsome and beautiful.
“Tie me up,” she whispered.
“I don’t need rope at the moment,” he replied grimly, rearing up over her. He pressed her hands harder into the mattress. “You’re not going anywhere. Are you?”
“No, Jacob.”
He pressed the head of his cock against her damp outer sex, finding her slit.
“You’re mine, aren’t you?”
“Yes. All of me. Forever, if you want me for it.”
“Oh, I want,” he ground out.
He thrust. She cried out at the impact of him. His face tightened in a rictus of pleasure . . . of feeling.
“Harper,” he ground out, sounding wild. “I’m gonna have to fuck you so hard . . . hold you down and fuck you . . .”
“Yes, yes. I’m yours to take. Prove to me it’s true. Prove to yourself. Fuck me,” she goaded mindlessly.
Then he was pounding into her, slaking a need that might never be extinguished, only temporarily quenched. Harper knew she’d be there for him, whenever he needed it. Always. He had so much need, and he’d been left hungry so many times.
He rocked her, the bed . . . her whole world. He took her as hard as he’d promised, his sexual hunger rabid at being held in abeyance for a period of time and sharpened by exposed need.
By love.
At one point, he halted his forceful strokes into her and kept his cock plunged deep. He shifted his grip, holding her wrists down with one hand and freeing his other. Rearing over her, he reached between their bodies. He rubbed her clit while she moaned shakily, holding her stare the whole time. He continued to stimulate her while he shifted his hips ever so slightly back and forth, fucking her with the tiniest, most electrical strokes. She gasped and burned beneath his fingertip, the pressure from his swollen, embedded cock making her eyes cross in cresting pleasure. Her eyelids flickered closed as she rose over the edge.
“Open your eyes,” he said harshly. “Look at me.”
She forced her eyelids open. She watched him as the first shudder of orgasm shook her. A convulsion tightened his big, rigid body. A roar ripped at his throat. She felt his warm semen spill into her while she shook in a seizure of bliss.
He fell down over her, panting. He separated her arms, pressing her wrists down firmly into the mattress with both of his hands. He thrust his cock in and out of her, still ejaculating powerfully.
A final shudder coursed through him. He winced, looking pained.
“I want to fuck you forever,” he grated out, and she sensed his frustration that
the peak of intimacy had passed, when he still felt so much inside. She shared in that longing. It was a kind of agony, to know she’d never be able to express fully in word or deed how much she felt for this man.
He opened his eyelids and pinned her with his stare. “I’m going to tie you up in a minute and have you again.”
“Yes,” she replied without hesitation.
Something crossed his face then, something wild and vast and beautiful. He leaned down and pressed his forehead to hers.
“I’ve waited so long to have you. I’m never going to let you go,” he grated out next to her lips.
“I’m counting on that,” she said with a smile.
He lifted his head slightly, and she saw the shiny, fiery quality of his eyes.
“I love you. Jake. Jacob. All of you,” she whispered.
His nostrils flared slightly.
“If you do, I suppose I should try harder to love all of me, too.”
“You better.”
He gave a small smile. She smiled back, but he quickly became serious again.
“Marry me,” he said.
Her grin evaporated. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I am,” he said impatiently, his brows slanted. She laughed.
“You’re laughing, at a moment like this?” he asked disbelievingly.
“I’m sorry. I’ve never been proposed to before. It took me off guard,” she tried to explain as euphoria dawned inside her, a golden, pure, sweet feeling.
“I’ve never proposed to anyone before, either.”
“Really?” she asked. He shook his head. “I’m speechless.”
“Not too speechless to give me an answer, I hope. Do you want me to tell you the right answer?” he asked drolly when she just stared up at him in awe. A smile tickled her lips at hearing the same question he’d asked her twenty years ago when she’d hesitated about stalactites and stalagmites.
“No.”
“What?” he asked sharply, frowning.
“That’s not my answer. I meant that I can answer for myself. And the answer is yes.”
His slow smile caused something to curl tight deep in her belly. God, she loved him so hard it hurt. He was such a living miracle to her.
He leaned down, kissing her softly on the mouth.
“That was definitely the right answer,” he told her, before his kiss deepened, and his heat warmed her whole world.
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His longtime friend Jimmy Rothschild wore an amused expression as he watched the waitress walk away.
“That look might rock it in Aleppo or Cairo my friend, but you’re scaring the locals in the good old US of A,” Jimmy joked quietly, nodding at the back of the retreating waitress, and then Asher’s face. Asher knew Jimmy referred to his full-out beard and rough appearance. Or possibly he’d been frowning as he ordered from the blonde, thinking more about the meeting with his parents tomorrow morning than being civil and pleasant in front of a pretty woman?
Or maybe everyone really did notice how out of place he felt in his the city he’d once called home.
Rudy Fattore, his other friend, snorted. “The waitress wasn’t afraid of him,” Rudy told Jimmy with a wise air. “She was thinking about where to start in on him. With that beard and tan, Ash reeks of the desert and intrigue. Trust me, women love the smell of danger. He’s giving off that ‘most-interesting-man-alive’ aura. It’s concentrated testosterone, I’m telling you.” He grazed his fingers across his own clean shaven jaw. “I may not be up for a Pulitzer Prize or the Gazette’s new European bureau chief, but I’m still an award-winning photojournalist, aren’t I? I think I’ll give a beard a spin.”
“You’d only be overcompensating for the lack of hair on your head,” Jimmy said. He smiled calmly at Rudy’s glare.
“You tried to grow a beard in college and it sprouted in patches,” Asher reminded Rudy.
“Things are different now,” Rudy insisted. “I’ve got eleven years on that patchy kid.”
Asher grinned despite his bad mood. Rudy was always good for a laugh. Well, most of the time, anyway.
He slumped in the uncomfortable, sleek chair, searching the Lincoln Park, upscale French Bistro. It took him a moment to realize he was scanning for a potential threat amongst the loud, carefree crowd of diners. He halted the instinctive reaction with effort. He, along with a lot of other Western reporters, had been banned entry to Syria several few years ago. But working there, out of all his assignments, had especially created a constant hyper-alert state in him. It was weird being back in the States after spending most of the last eight years in various parts of the Middle East.
Not a lot had changed in the old Lincoln Park neighborhood. Even Petite Poulet, the French bistro, looked unchanged. Yet everything looked strangely gray and muted to him, like he was a sleepwalker in a dream world of the past that had remained strangely congealed in time while he—Asher—had transformed into something alien that didn’t fit into the scene anymore. Of course he’d been back in the States several times since becoming a foreign correspondent years ago. Maybe it was being in the familiar restaurant with his childhood buddies that made things especially surreal. He hadn’t been out with both of them in years. Jimmy still lived and worked here in Chicago, but Rudy had moved to L.A.
In fact, the three of them hadn’t been together in eight years. Not since those bittersweet days in Crescent Bay that had been, in many ways, the last, elusive hours of his youth.
“Are you actually going to meet Madeline in the morning wearing that beard?”
Asher forced his mind out his nostalgic musings at his friend’s question.
Jimmy was right to question his grooming choice, of course. Jimmy Rothschild had known Asher’s mother, Madeline Gaites-Granville, almost as long as Asher had. Their mothers had been friends forever, taking turns bragging or complaining about their sons, showing off their latest designer shoes or handbags at the latest high profile charity event, digging up gossip and hobnobbing at the Union or Cliff Dweller’s Clubs, or looking down their noses at social climbers at exclusive Winnetka dinner parties. His mom would probably have a stroke, seeing her only son’s swarthy skin and thick beard.
Maybe he’d shave before showing up for the dreaded brunch in Winnetka tomorrow. His full beard and one of his mom’s silver-and-crystal-gilded brunches definitely wouldn’t mix. Asher resented that it mattered, but what else was new?
“If what you told me is true,” Asher said to Jimmy as he lifted his glass of Chivas, “Mom’s going to have more to worry about than my beard.”
“What’s that mean?” Rudy demanded. When Asher remained brooding and silent, Rudy turned to Jimmy. “What’s going on?”
Jimmy exhaled slowly. “I told Asher earlier that according to my mother, Asher’s parents are under the impression that the prodigal son has returned home to Chicago to do his filial duty and finally take over the helm of the Gaites-Granville media empire,” Jimmy replied with attempted levity. Still, his dark eyes looked worried as he examined Asher. Asher frowned, trying unsuccessfully to tamp down his ever-present mixture of annoyance and guilt when it came to the topic of his parents.
“I didn’t have a clue that’s why they thought I was coming to Chicago. I have some rare time off between jobs, and I owe them a visit after being away for over two years. That’s all. It was purely coincidental, me being here close to my birthday,” Asher said.
“It’s not surprising that Clark and Madeline jumped to that conclusion, though. You know it’s the moment they’ve waited for now for thirty years,” Jimmy pointed out fairly.
Asher slouched his large body further down in the uncomfortable chair. Of course his mom and dad thought that was why he’d arrived in Chicago this autumn: to lay claim to the principal of his
trust fund. How could he have been so stupid as to blunder blindly into a hornet’s nest?
If he accepted their money, he’d have to follow their plan for his life, wouldn’t he? Maybe that was never explicitly said, but it’d certainly been the depressing implication Asher had gotten since he was nine years old.
His parents couldn’t fathom that Asher rarely thought about his inheritance for the past ten years of his life. He willfully repressed the idea of that money, along with all the invisible strings attached to it. Strings? Try titanium steel chains. Those hundreds of millions of dollars had come to symbolize his parents’ hold on him. No, it better represented Asher’s refusal . . . no, his inability, to give them what they wanted. What they needed: a suitable, polished, biddable Gaites-Granville heir.
That inheritance, along with all the other privileges his parents offered, were the crown Asher cringed from accepting. But according to his parents, that symbolic crown was his privilege. His birthright.
His duty.
Bullshit.
He grimaced at the snarling voice in his head. Asher had ritualistically done whatever he wanted with his life, despite his parents’ rampant disapproval. Publicly, his mother and father had regularly made passive-aggressive comments and broadcast their disapproval of him with every glance and gesture. In private, they’d threatened dire circumstances in regard to his choices. When he’d remained steadfast in his plans, they’d stiffened their backbones and pursed their lips against their anger with such silent forcefulness that sometimes, Asher feared they’d shatter into a million pieces solely from concentrated disappointment. Despite all of their disapproval, he knew that his parents also smugly bragged about Asher’s career to their business acquaintances and friends as though he was doing exactly what they’d planned for him all along. And all the while, Grant and Madeline just waited for the day when Asher would return to toe the line.
They believed that day had finally come.
“Right, the big day is finally around the corner,” Rudy drawled presently, snapping his fingers in remembrance. “I’ve been waiting for you to turn thirty since we were at Stanford. I mean, you haven’t exactly been a pauper up until now, seeing as how your grandfather left you a nice little nest egg, and that’s more money than most of us will ever see in a lifetime. But that’s all petty cash compared to the big enchilada. It’s finally here: your thirtieth birthday and total control over your trust fund. Freedom, man. What are you going to buy first? Please say a race car. You’ll have to get me one, too, to have someone to practice against. Wait, no . . . a yacht. Hey, the three of us should plan a trip to climb Mt. Everest! Or what about a beach house like that one your parents have in Crescent Bay? The chicks love that. Damn you’re going to get laid morning, noon and night—”