Make Me Read online

  No sooner had she nodded in agreement than he was whisking the scarf around her head. He didn’t tie it tight. Her eyes opened behind the soft material, but she was well and truly blinded. A frisson of panic splintered her intense arousal. Then she felt the mattress lower as he came onto the bed. He touched her bare knees, letting her know he was between her thighs. She felt his weight shift forward between her widely spread legs. A choked sound escaped her throat. Her body started to vibrate subtly with nervous arousal. The anticipation was killing her. But he didn’t make her wait long.

  His fingers spread her slit, and she felt the steely pressure of his cockhead at her entrance. He kept one hand on her knee and rolled her hips back slightly to get a good angle. He started to penetrate her.

  “Oh God,” she moaned, lifting her head off the pillow.

  “Hush,” he ground out, and he pushed his cock several inches into her. She gave a broken cry. His other hand came up to her knee. Her flesh resisted his swollen member one moment, and then melted around it the next. He sawed his hips firmly, fucking her for a moment with the first half of his cock. A low growl vibrated in his throat.

  “Your pussy is hot. And sweet,” he growled. She had a vision of him watching himself pierce her, his eyes glittering with lust, his hard, beautiful mouth twisted into a snarl. Heat rushed through her at the imagined image.

  “Yeah, that feels good,” he rasped.

  He thrust harder, and she gasped. She felt his hands come down on the mattress next to her head. For a moment, he didn’t move, his pelvis and balls smashed tightly against her outer sex, his cock fully submerged. Harper panted, overwhelmed by the sensation of him throbbing deep inside her.

  “Harper,” he rasped.

  “Yes?” she managed in a quivery voice. It was strange the way he’d said her name. It wasn’t really a question. More like a declaration . . .

  A satisfied one.

  “Press your knees a little further into your chest with your hands,” he ordered tensely. Like her feet, her hands were free. She did what he’d demanded, grimacing slightly at the increase of pressure. His cock pressed impossibly higher and harder into her at the new angle. He must have thought the same thing, too, because he grunted in pleasure.

  “This is going to feel so damn good,” he said.

  He drew out of her and immediately plunged back. She cried out, but he didn’t pause. His pelvis began to slap against hers in a taut, rapid rhythm. She lay there, helpless in the restraint as he pounded into her. She screamed. It wasn’t something she could stop. The pressure building in her was too intense.

  “Can you take it, Harper?”

  He continued to fuck her as he snarled the question. She heard him say it through the cries of excitement that were popping out of her throat every time he crashed into her.

  “Yes. God, yes,” burst out of her when he drove deep.

  “Because you have to take it. You’re mine.”

  Oh God. Her eyes clamped tight behind the blindfold. It was unbearable, but she wouldn’t have traded the experience for anything. Her entire world became the friction of his driving cock. It was like he was igniting a fire in her. She felt his feral focus on her, sensed it as if it were as real as an encompassing embrace. His grunts of pleasure and satisfaction only added fuel to her volatility.

  He was so swollen and hard in her. She thought his arousal might verge on pain. She knew perfectly that he would explode first. And that, too, was fuel on the flame.

  He drove deep. She felt his cock lurch viciously inside her. She gritted her teeth together, stifling an anguished cry. She wasn’t ready for him to leave her. Not yet. But he was about to come, and she craved that, as well.

  A moment later, he jerked his cock out of her. She felt his elbow against her bare knee, and the subtle sensation of movement at the joint. He’d removed the condom and was jacking his cock. He grunted savagely, and her body tensed tight as a wire.

  Her belly leapt at the first splash of his warm semen on her skin. She lay there, panting and undone, listening to the ominous, low growls that rattled his throat as he continued to ejaculate on her stomach, ribs, and lower breasts. It was the climax to a claiming, more than anything, and she suspected Jacob knew that. Her thought was confirmed when she felt him fall forward after a tense moment, both of his hands planted on the mattress next to her head.

  “Mine,” he repeated between ragged breaths.

  Harper didn’t reply. In that moment, it seemed ridiculous to comment further on the obvious.

  • • •

  Even though she couldn’t see him, his harsh breathing joined them, somehow. So did the feeling of his testicles pressed tightly against her outer sex and the feeling of the warm liquid coating her belly and ribs. Slowly, his breathing evened and his semen began to cool. He pushed himself off the mattress. She waited breathlessly. Then came the sensation of the soft towel pressing against her skin, drying her of his ejaculate.

  A moment later, she heard the bedside table drawer open. The blindfold slipped off her head. She blinked dazedly. The mattress gave as he sat next to her. She stared up at him, hungry for the image. Starving for it. He looked down at her, his expression solemn. He held her stare, but she was aware of his hand moving over the rope restraint, tactilely checking that the rope held secure and that his planned releases were intact.

  “You’re comfortable?” he murmured.

  The dull ache between her thighs, the feeling of the cool air tickling her aroused, wet sex nudged at her awareness. “Yes,” she whispered, panting shallowly. He’d built a boatload of sexual tension in her. Her nipples were tight and hard, and the soles of her feet simmered.

  A smile flickered across his firm mouth. “All except for this?”

  Her eyelids fluttered at the sensation of his fingers brushing softly against the pubic hair over her mound. Too softly. Her sex clenched tight. She moaned miserably. God, she was right on the edge.

  “Don’t worry,” he said soothingly. “I’m not trying to torture you. Just tell me what you want, Harper.”

  “To come,” she said shakily. “Please make me come.”

  His hand covered her entire mound. She cried out at the forceful pressure. He circled his arm subtly. She gasped, her head coming off the pillow as the first harsh shudder of orgasm shook her. After a mindless moment of flooding sensation, she became aware that he watched her fixedly as he worked every last bit of tension and pleasure out of her body.

  She exhaled, her head falling back on the pillow. He continued to stimulate her, but slower now, making her shiver in post-orgasmic bliss. She opened her heavy eyelids. Their stares held as his hand continued to move between her thighs.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said quietly.

  She smiled. She was too worn out to speak.

  He lifted his hand and stood next to the bed. She rolled her head, watching him. He lifted the towel from the bedside table and used the corner of it to wipe off his hand. He tossed down the towel.

  “That’s how wet you were,” he commented dryly, referring to his glistening fingers. He turned his attention to her bound wrists. He quickly loosened the knot that bound her arm to her leg. He released her other arm, as well, then drew both hands over her head.

  “Bend your elbows and rest them on the pillow,” he instructed gruffly. “Take a comfortable position.”

  When she’d done what he’d asked, he tied her wrists together, binding her hands above her head. Then he stood next to the bed, gazing down at her, and she couldn’t help but wonder with a mixture of rising excitement and anxiety what else he had in store for her.

  Her gaze ran the length of him. He looked hard and awesome, both intimidating and calm at once. His cock was long and firm, neither erect nor flaccid, but at some in-between stage. She had a vivid fantasy of sliding him into her mouth in that state, and feeling him harden against
her tongue, his girth beginning to stretch her lips wide . . .

  “Don’t look at me like that, Harper,” he said, his tone a silky remonstrance. He reached for something on the bedside table and sat next to her on the bed. She heard the click of a cap and stared at what he held in his hands. It was a bottle of light pink lubricant. He spread some on his fingers and then closed the cap. He set the bottle aside.

  “Your nipples,” he said thickly, reaching for her. “I’ve never seen them so hard as they were when I was inside you. It was driving me crazy,” he mused. He rubbed the lubricant onto a nipple. Her back arched slightly off the bed at the stimulation. With her hands tied above her head, he had free access to her breasts, which she recognized was what he’d intended. He turned his attention to the other nipple, rubbing it deliberately with the lubricant.

  Watching his intent focus—and feeling the result—made her flex her hips downward on the mattress in mounting excitement. He lifted his other hand and pinched and massaged both nipples at once. She moaned, incredulous as need swiped at her again with a sharp claw.

  As if her moan was his cue, he suddenly knelt by the bed. He took a breast into his palm and slipped a nipple into his mouth, torturing the flesh with his agile, firm tongue and precise suction. Perspiration shone on the valley between her breasts. He swiped his tongue along it before he sucked the other aching nipple into his hot mouth. She laid there, a captive to her own arousal, her breathing growing rough. He switched again, sucking her other nipple into his hot mouth.

  The moment stretched as he awakened her flesh to a state of sharp excitement yet again. She called his name in dazed dissatisfaction when he lifted his head a while later. He calmly reached again into the bedside drawer and withdrew what she recognized as a bullet vibrator. She heard the slight buzz as he turned it on. He reached between her thighs, pressing it against her clit. She cried out sharply as simmering pleasure swamped her.

  “You know I love to watch you come.” His deep, fluid voice washed over as the bullet vibrated against her clit. “Does it feel good?”

  “So good,” she gasped.

  He leaned down and brushed his mouth over her parted lips, as if he was absorbing the minute trembling of her straining body. She saw the hot gleam in his eyes. She knew it then, that she was his captive . . . in more ways than one.

  She was falling in love with him, she realized with a mixed sense of euphoria and dread.

  “You don’t have any choice, do you?” he murmured.

  She blinked. Had he read her mind? “I don’t have any choice?” she asked in a quivering voice.

  “You don’t have any choice but to come.”

  “No,” she moaned, her entire body a tight knot of sexual tension. “God, no.”

  He pulsed the vibrator demandingly. “Then do it.”

  The knot exploded. She shook violently in the rope restraints.

  But they held firm.

  twenty-seven

  When she’d calmed, he came onto the bed again and entered her. With the blindfold removed, she was free to watch him this time, to bear witness to yet another claiming of her. He staked it every bit as forcefully and completely as he had the first time.

  Afterward, tears inexplicably welled in her eyes as he tenderly dried her skin of his semen and systematically removed the rope restraint. It was like he was liberating her in more ways than one, freeing her to a huge, intimidating well of emotion. As he removed the last length of the rope from her ankle, and her aching leg straightened, he noticed her damp eyes.

  “I . . . don’t know why,” she admitted with a shaky laugh, seeing his brows slant in concern.

  “It’s okay,” he said. He came down on the bed next to her and pulled her into his arms. Her cheek fell against his chest. He hugged her tight, his embrace divine. Emotion flooded her.

  “The ropes bring out a lot of things, before, during, and after,” he murmured, kissing her temple. She gasped against his chest and shuddered. He stroked her hair, soothing her roughened state. “But I’m still here, Harper. I’m still right here with you.”

  • • •

  She slept after that, with Jacob holding her fast in his arms. Despite her strong surge of emotion after they’d made love—not to mention her startling realization that she was falling for him—she awoke feeling alert, calm, and content. Their sexual exchange had been intense and the most challenging of her life, but strangely, it seemed to have acted like some kind of catharsis on her emotions.

  The soft, muffled sound of Jacob’s shower penetrated her awareness. She was a little forlorn to realize that he was already up, but did have a vague recollection of him running kisses along her jaw and neck and murmuring in a sexy, sleep-roughened voice that he needed to get up. She’d been too sleepy to do much of anything but mutter an incomprehensible protest when his warm, hard body moved away from her. Afterward, she’d fallen back to sleep.

  She knew he had a lot of work to attend to today, and had already gotten a late start. The memory of what had happened at the opera swept through her then. It no longer had the depressing effect on her that it had just hours ago. What had taken place in Jacob’s bed early this morning had been so powerful, last night seemed like it’d happened months ago.

  She rose and showered on her own in the guest bathroom. It was already almost noon, and Cyril Atwater was coming here at twelve thirty to have lunch and meet with Harper about the proposed film. She was sitting on a stool at the vanity, wearing a light robe and combing her damp hair, when she heard a knock at the bathroom door.

  “Come in,” she called, turning toward the door.

  Jacob walked into the room, looking appealing in a white shirt, black blazer, and jeans, his hair appearing as dark as his goatee because it was still damp from his shower. Her heart gave a little jump when she saw the expression in his golden-green eyes as he glanced over her. He approached, a small smile tilting his mouth.

  For some stupid reason, shyness swept through her. He’d done incredibly intimate things to her in his bed, and here he was, looking like he was ready to do a GQ cover, seemingly so miles out of her league, so untouchable. The disparity jarred her.

  For a few seconds, anyway.

  Until he said, “Morning,” in a warm, gruff voice, and leaned down to kiss her. His mouth lingered when she reciprocated, his hand going to the back of her head. She bracketed his jaw with her hands. His scent filled her: soap and his familiar spicy cologne. So male. So amazing. He pierced her mouth with his tongue, and their kiss segued from a good-morning peck to a full-fledged heart-pounder. By the time they sealed it a moment later, she panted softly against his hovering mouth.

  “Morning,” she finally replied. She saw the hot gleam in his eyes and his smile. He straightened in front of her, his fingers brushing back a loose tendril of damp hair and pushing it behind her ear.

  “If I didn’t absolutely have to be at these meetings, I’d keep you in bed the whole day,” he murmured.

  She gazed up at him, warmth suffusing her. His saying that meant a lot.

  “And I’d let you.”

  Again, graphic memories of their lovemaking swamped her. The fact that they’d both expressed their uncertainties beforehand—exposed their vulnerabilities—seemed to make the memories even more intense. Heat expanded on her cheeks. He touched her face with light fingertips.

  “Are you blushing?” he asked, his brows slanting as if he was both amused and fascinated.

  She ducked her head and started to turn on the stool. He stopped her by grasping her shoulders with both hands.

  “Harper?” he queried when she had difficulty looking up at him.

  “I can’t believe I let you do those things,” she said, looking at her lap because the alternative was to stare straight ahead at Jacob’s crotch, and that was even more uncomfortable than meeting his eyes.

  His long fingers car
essed the underside of her chin, but he didn’t force her to look up.

  “You should believe it. Because I’m going to do more of those things to you tonight, and I’d hate for you to be shocked.”

  She laughed. His low chuckle from above her sent another wave of warmth through her that had nothing to do with embarrassment. This time, she looked up when he urged her with his touch under her chin.

  “It wasn’t just a first for you, Harper.” His stare on her was lambent, and struck her as wholly sincere, not to mention sexy as hell.

  She gave a shaky laugh. “What, you got that expert with rope by tying up manikins?”

  “No,” he replied, his solemn reply instantly quashing her uncomfortable attempt at humor. “I meant it was new to me, too. The way it felt.”

  She found herself staring up at him, searching for the truth. Her mouth trembled as she smiled, because she was beyond assured by what she saw in his eyes. His thumb feathered across the corner of her mouth.

  Across her scar.

  She shut her eyes and turned her chin into his hand. What was happening to her? Maybe he sensed her swelling emotion, because he leaned down and kissed her forehead.

  “You’re meeting with Cyril soon, aren’t you?” he asked quietly, and she was thankful he’d changed the subject.

  “Yes,” she said with fake brightness.

  “Are you going to write the screenplay with him?”

  “I haven’t completely decided yet. I need more information to know if I really can do it and if I have the time.”

  He leaned down and brushed his lips against her temple before he stepped back. “Time is the main factor, then, because I know you could write it.”

  “Thanks,” she said, flattered. Jacob was the type of man whose confidence in you counted.

  “Be ready for dinner tonight at seven thirty? I’m taking you to a place that a friend of mine just opened.”