Two Weeks Later

Harper looked up at the sound of the door opening. She sat cross-legged on the floor near the fireplace of Jacob’s suite. Actually, they’d both started to call it their suite or their bedroom in the past few weeks. Harper had even caught Elizabeth saying your suite a few times recently. It was a natural consequence of the fact that she’d spent every hour there at the mansion with Jacob when she wasn’t working, ever since Regina’s death.

“Are you reading those things again?” Jacob asked her, a small, incredulous smile on his mouth as he walked toward her. He looked especially tall and incredible to her from her position on the floor. He’d come from his office, she knew, even though it was Sunday. She scanned his face, looking for signs of fatigue or grief, but no . . . He looked good. Very good . . . all powerful, virile male. He wore a pair of jeans that looked fantastic on his tall, fit body and a dark blue T-shirt that showed off his muscular arms and chest ideally. They’d been out on the yacht yesterday afternoon, and the sun had given his skin a healthy glow. His gaze on her was warm, as always.

Even though he spent a lot of time with her in the evenings, he’d worked every day since Regina’s funeral, often returning to his office once Harper fell asleep. Harper tried not to complain. She thought focusing on work was helping him through the difficult period. But increasingly, she was growing worried. Often she was aware of him returning to bed at night, and holding her against him. When that happened, she sometimes sensed his arousal. But they didn’t make love. They hadn’t, ever since Regina had died.

There was a chained quality to him she couldn’t comprehend.

Although he was attentive and loving to her when they were together, he seemed strained. Although he touched her frequently, and they’d never been more intimate in their communication, they never came together in the fierce, no-holds-barred manner in which she’d grown used to . . . which she loved. Harper was starting to suspect that Regina’s death, and the guilt he’d carried since he was a child, had scarred him more deeply than she’d first suspected.

Even though she was nervous about confronting him about their strained physical distance, she was determined to do it tonight. The longer she waited, the further he might move away from her. And after all they’d been through, distance between them was something she refused to tolerate.

He sat down on the couch near her and she set aside one of the letters. Milo was in her lap. She idly petted the drowsy puppy’s ear.

“I like reading the letters,” she replied to his question with a smile.

“They don’t make you cry anymore,” he said quietly, studying her face with that sharp, narrowed gaze that saw so much. “I’m glad.”

“It was natural that they made me sad at first. All those years we missed together.”

“Are you still mad at your parents?”

She exhaled and looked away, finding the topic a difficult one. “Yes. But I think I’ll come to terms with it. Someday. I know they thought they were doing the right thing for me.”

“I agree,” Jacob said.

She gave him a sharp glance. “They were wrong, though.”

He didn’t respond. He didn’t need to. They both knew her parents were wrong. They hadn’t understood Jake’s and her connection. They’d considered her connection to that boy to be an adolescent infatuation, a side effect of her trauma . . . something to be erased so that she could get back to her old, safe life. They hadn’t realized that their precious daughter had been changed forever in those West Virginia mountains.

“It wasn’t the trauma of being kidnapped that made me so dysfunctional and anxiety-ridden for years, Jake,” she said quietly. “Believing you were dead was the final straw. My parents were responsible for me thinking that. I was smothered by guilt and sadness. I’d never truly felt like the world was random and meaningless and scary as hell until my parents told me you were dead.”

“That’s a pretty good description of how I felt,” he said after a pause. “When I thought you were forgetting me. And then eventually, when I finally accepted you’d forgotten.”

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.