Make Me Forever Read Free Page B

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 watched 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