Make Me Forever

by BETH KERY

  Harper took another swallow of cool water, willing her racing brain to slow. Deliberately, she called up the inflammatory image of Regina in Jacob’s arms.

  True, there were signs of rough sex on the brunette’s body . . . but when had Jacob ever left such vivid marks or fingerprints on her—Harper’s—body?

  Never.

  Regina had stumbled, she recalled, and Jacob had reached out to steady her. Had that been why his hands were on her hips when Harper had walked into the room? In order to stabilize her or even push her away? She recalled how Regina had been wobbly on the night of the opera, too.

  And Regina’s laugh: It’d filled Harper with a sense of horror when she’d heard the high-pitched giggle reverberate around Jacob’s office. Now, as she stood in her kitchen on bare, sandy feet and her mind began to calm, that laugh suddenly struck Harper as hysterical.

  Intoxicated.

  Desperate?

  Jacob’s face suddenly leapt into her mind’s eye at the moment when he’d turned and seen her standing in the doorway of his office. He’d looked tense and wild, and not in the out-of-control, delicious way she’d seen in his expression when he was in the grip of lust as they made love. Instead, he’d looked worried.

  She pressed her hand to her chest when she felt the uncomfortable jump of her heart.

  “Shit,” she said out loud.

  She tossed her purse on the counter and began to dig for her phone. No sooner had she closed her hand around it than she heard the wail of sirens in the near distance. She froze, staring in the direction of the sirens . . . and of Jacob’s house. An unpleasant wave of dread swept down her spine. A strange prescience overcame her.

  “Oh no,” she whispered.

  She hastily found the number for the newsroom on her phone.

  “Cassie?” she asked, recognizing the voice of one of the newsroom’s interns. “It’s Harper McFadden. Can you do me a favor and go and turn on the newsroom’s police scanner right away?”

  * * *

  Harper jogged into the North Lake Hospital ER, searching the waiting area for Jacob’s familiar tall form. She didn’t see Jacob, but she saw Elizabeth sitting tensely in the back row of a seating area all by herself.

  “Elizabeth?” she asked breathlessly as she approached.

  “Harper? How did you know?” Elizabeth asked, standing awkwardly.

  “The newsroom police scanner. They didn’t give any names, but I guessed . . . it’s Regina?” she asked, dread weighing her words.

  Elizabeth nodded. Jacob’s assistant looked so frayed, Harper grasped her upper arm for reassurance.

  “Let’s sit, okay?” she prompted.

  Elizabeth let her guide her down to the chair. Harper sat down next to her.

  “She passed out,” Elizabeth said numbly. She blinked and focused on Harper’s face. “It was just after I saw you . . . after you left.” Harper nodded, recalling seeing Elizabeth in her office before she’d run out of Jacob’s house. “We found more pill bottles in her purse. Jacob thought she might have taken them just before she came up to his office. He had me call 9-1-1, but while I was on the phone, Regina stopped—” Elizabeth gasped, her eyes going wide at the memory. “Breathing. Jacob did CPR, and she started to breathe again, but—”

  “Is Jacob with her now?” Harper asked, pulling some tissues out of her purse and putting them in the other woman’s hand, so that she felt them. Tears spilled onto her cheeks. Elizabeth nodded and removed her glasses. She blotted her eyes with the tissues.

  “He was so upset. He cares about Regina so much. All he’s done for her—gotten her jobs, paid for her treatments, given her a home to live in . . .” Elizabeth faded off, blowing her nose.

  “He obviously cares for her a great deal,” Harper said, sitting back in her seat. She felt numb. “And Regina still loves him. I heard her say so, while we were in San Francisco.”

  “Still?” Elizabeth asked, wringing her hands and crumpling the tissue she held.

  “Still . . . even though they’re not a couple anymore. Are they?” Harper asked uncomfortably when she saw Elizabeth’s bewildered expression.

  “Jacob and Regina? A couple?” Elizabeth laughed mirthlessly and shook her head. “You misunderstood, if that’s what you thought. They’ve never been a couple. Jacob saved Regina. He saved me, too. He’d never sleep with any of us—not the ones he saves.”

  “Saves?”

  “Regina was a high-priced call girl when he found her ten or fifteen years ago,” Regina sniffed. “It was before he hired me, so I’m not exactly sure about all the details. I’ve helped him out with her over the years; Regina was constantly in crisis. Neither one of them would talk much about how they knew each other. I only know they have a long history. Jacob never gave up on trying to get a better life for her, even though Regina—bless her—gave him plenty of reasons to wash his hands of her. He’s probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on her and countless hours. Who knows why he does it?” Elizabeth shrugged helplessly. “Who knows why he came to my rescue? He’s driven by something. Not demons, though . . .” She faded off, a faraway look on her face. “His angels, I think. That’s what drives him.”

  Harper’s heart squeezed tight when Elizabeth sobbed quietly. She dug for more tissues and handed them to Jacob’s assistant.

  “He . . . he came to your rescue?” she asked when Elizabeth had composed herself somewhat.

  Elizabeth nodded. “Lattice sponsored a job fair seven years ago, and Jacob insisted that people in San Francisco shelters and halfway houses be invited and given priority. I was living in a battered women’s shelter at the time. I was a wreck . . . not even a whole person . . . more like fragments of one. The only thing that glued me together was shame. He must have seen something in me, though. I had secretarial experience, but nothing in comparison to what I do now. He remade me . . . somehow put me back together again, and even added some major parts. He’s good at that. I’m not the only one he’s saved. But Regina . . . I think she was just so far gone, even when he’d found her.” Harper put her arm around Elizabeth’s shoulders when she shook again.

  After a moment, Elizabeth sniffed and glanced over at her. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “It was just so scary, seeing her like that. It brought back so much. It made me think of what it was like, to be so vulnerable.”

  “I can imagine,” Harper empathized, squeezing the other woman’s shoulders more tightly. So many thoughts spun in her head.

  If Jacob and Regina had never been involved sexually or romantically, why had he led her to believe that they had? Why would he feel the need to hide amazing acts of kindness and charity?

  “He’d never sleep with any of us.”

  She thought of Jacob’s sexual preferences, how exciting and challenging she’d found them. It made sense, though, that he didn’t want to expose vulnerable women to his bent for bondage, for fear of traumatizing them.

  “Harper?”

  She started in surprise at the sound of his familiar, deep voice. She turned and saw Jacob standing in the aisle. His face looked weighted with grief. Her heart squeezed unpleasantly in her chest.

  “Jacob?” Harper mouthed, dread settling on her.

  “How’s Regina?” Elizabeth asked hopefully, but Harper already knew the answer. She’d read it in Jacob’s eyes as he’d fixed her with his stare.

  “She’s gone,” he said.

  Harper hugged Elizabeth tighter to her side when she heard the other woman’s miserable moan. She continued to hold Jacob’s stare, though. In that moment, when death hovered around them, she clung onto their invisible bond like she would a life raft in choppy water. Still hugging Elizabeth to her, she reached for Jacob’s hand. He grabbed it, and she inhaled shakily in relief. Somehow, she sensed he was accepting her support and taking strength from their bond. For that, she was profoundly grateful.
/>   * * *

  After Jacob had seen to some necessary arrangements in regard to Regina’s funeral, Jim came to get them at North Lake Hospital. Upon Jacob’s request, the driver dropped all three of them off at Elizabeth’s. His assistant had taken the news of Regina’s overdose and death hard.

  Elizabeth lived in a cozy little ranch home on a cul-de-sac in Tahoe Shores. Harper cleared the last remnants of the herbal tea she’d made earlier to help calm Elizabeth. It soothed Harper, to do something domestic and ordinary in the midst of a crisis. It helped, to have something mundane to focus on while grief and sadness seemed to cloak Elizabeth’s neat home.

  Jacob walked out of the hallway into the living room. She looked up and their stares held. Her heart began to throb in her ears. He looked strained and tired. Yet he was freshly amazing to her. She questioned numbly when that feeling of miraculous wonder at his existence would fade.

  Or if it ever would.

  “Is she resting?” Harper asked him softly.

  He nodded. “She’ll be okay, I think, after some rest. I didn’t realize she felt so close to Regina.”

  “I think she felt like they were two of a kind,” Harper said slowly, setting the mug and sugar bowl on the tray. “She told me in the waiting room that she and Regina had something in common.” She noticed his slight puzzled expression and met his stare squarely. “Elizabeth told me you’d saved both her and Regina.”

  The ensuing silence seemed to press on her ears. Her heart. Jacob looked so solemn to her as he regarded her unblinkingly.

  “Is that what you were doing with me?” She asked a question that had been hovering in the back of her mind ever since she’d spoken to Elizabeth in the waiting room. “Saving me?”

  “No,” he said emphatically, taking a step toward her, but then abruptly halting himself. “It’s not like that, Harper. Jesus,” he muttered, raking his fingers through his short hair in a frustrated gesture. She straightened and walked toward him, feeling guilty for making him more upset when he was clearly already distraught over Regina’s death.

  “I’m sorry,” she said honestly. “I’m sorry for asking you that. And I’m so sorry about Regina.”

  His gaze flickered over her face and caught. Her chest hurt at what she saw in his eyes.

  “What you saw in my office with Regina . . . it wasn’t what it looked like. She’d just shown up there. She was high and out of control. I thought she was out of it, but I’ve seen her worse. I think she might have taken more pills while I was talking to Elizabeth. I tried to call 9-1-1, but Regina stopped me before I could even dial one number. Then you walked in—”

  Pain shot through her when he shut his eyes reflexively, trying to block the potent memory.

  “Jacob, it wasn’t your fault. She took you by surprise. It all happened within a matter of minutes. Seconds, even. You did everything you could.”

  Slowly, he opened his eyes and pinned her with his stare.

  “Why didn’t you tell me she lived on your property in Napa? Why did you make me believe you two had been lovers? Jacob?” she asked when he just continued to look at her. “Is Regina the woman you talked about that reminded you of me?”

  “You must know that you’re not like anyone else, Harper,” he said gruffly after a pause in which the ache in her chest swelled. “When I told you in the beginning that you reminded me of someone else, I was talking about you when you were young. Not Regina. I was . . . torn. I felt guilty for wanting you the way that I did, but I couldn’t stop myself.”

  She swallowed thickly, partial understanding dawning. “At least it helps me to understand why you seemed so ambivalent about me at times,” she admitted with a mirthless laugh.

  “You’re different than any other woman I’ve met. And you know why. You’re the one who said it out loud first.”

  A clock on Elizabeth’s mantel seemed to tick abnormally loud in her ears. She knew what he meant. He referred to what she’d said when they huddled together under that blanket in the police station, when she first spoke out loud of their bond.

  “I’m yours,” she said softly.

  “And you’re mine.”

  They stood with several feet separating them, but she’d never felt their bond so deeply.

  “While we were in San Francisco,” Jacob said, taking one step toward her. “I told you that you and Regina were alike, do you remember?”

  She nodded. “You meant because we’d both been hurt by men. Regina by Clint Jefferies and countless others. Me by Emmitt Tharp.”

  “Both by Emmitt Tharp.”

  “What?”

  She saw his throat convulse and he glanced away. “I don’t know yet how much you actually remember about details from when we were young . . . those days and nights we spent together, but—”

  “Everything. I remember everything, Jake,” she interrupted, stepping toward him. “What do you mean, Regina and I were both . . .” Jacob looked over at her when she faded off. “Oh my God,” she whispered disbelievingly. “You told me when we were kids that Emmitt had done it before. That he’d taken another girl, and when you’d found her and talked to her, he’d threatened to cut out your tongue before . . .”

  “He killed me,” Jacob finished.

  “That other girl was Regina?” she whispered.

  He nodded once, his face a mask, his eyes the only windows onto his turmoil. “Back when I first found her tied up in the barn, she’d gone by the name Regina Stellowitz. Even though it was seven years later when I next saw her on Jefferies’s property, I recognized her right away.”

  “Jake,” she muttered feelingly.

  She rushed into his arms. She felt his lips move in her hair, and then press tight against her skull.

  “I never knew what had happened to Regina until I was eighteen,” he said hoarsely. “Then I saw her one night, coming out of Clint’s bedroom. She’d been beaten. There’d been hints before that Clint was rough with women during sex, but I hadn’t really gotten the depth of how twisted he was until that night. I already knew he was regularly unfaithful to his wife and had a penchant for call girls. Young ones,” he added bitterly. “I was young, still, as well. He tried to keep me at a distance when it came to his more severe proclivities. I didn’t really get the extent of his sickness until Regina walked out of his bedroom that night, and I recognized her as being the girl Emmitt had kidnapped years before.

  “Emmitt’d sold her into a sex slave ring. They’d hooked her on drugs. Raped her repeatedly. Starved her. Beat her. Eventually, she began to prostitute willingly. Who wouldn’t, given the alternative? When I saw her that night, she was twenty years old, but she might as well have been fifty, for all she’d seen and done since Emmitt had first gotten a hold of her when she was thirteen years old.”

  Harper shook her head against his chest and squeezed him tighter. “That’s what Emmitt would have done to me, if you hadn’t saved me. How horrible for Regina,” she said shakily. She sent up a silent prayer for the other woman. Regina’s life could so easily have been hers, if it weren’t for the man she held in her arms.

  “It was at a big party at Jefferies’s lake house that it happened, wasn’t it?” she asked against his chest. “You called 9-1-1 and an ambulance came for Regina?”

  He moved back slightly. She looked up to see him peering at her face.

  “How did you know that?”

  She sniffed. “I’ve told you I had a reporter, Burt, who was angling for a story on you in addition to Ruth. He has a friend who is a detective at the Charleston PD who looked up any incidents associated with Jefferies or his property during the time period before you showed up at MIT with a different name—”

  “Before I bought and sold the Markham stock,” Jacob interrupted grimly.

  She nodded. “Anyway, his friend sent him an incident report regarding the 9-1-1 call regarding a Gina Morrow. I
t was called in by a Jacob Sinclair.”

  “And you realized that Gina Morrow was Regina and that Jacob Sinclair was me. Is that when you started to suspect I was Jake Tharp, as well?”

  She tried to read his expression, and couldn’t. Was he mad at her, for her revelation that a reporter under her watch had been investigating a past he guarded so closely?

  “I actually didn’t start to suspect that in any solid sense until I realized the police report was from Charleston, West Virginia. Before that, it was just the occasional sense of déjà vu, intense dreams . . . unbelievable suspicions.” She swallowed thickly. “You told me you were from South Carolina. You kept West Virginia secret from me, because you were covering any associations between you and Jake Tharp.”

  His brow quirked. “And you’re still mad at me for that, aren’t you?”

  She opened her mouth to deny it, but found she couldn’t.

  “I’ll never agree to you making that little boy disappear, Jacob,” she said softly. “I’ve fallen in love with you. But I’ve always loved Jake Tharp. I’ll always be loyal to that brave, incredible kid.”

  He just stared down at her, his eyes alight with emotion.

  “You believe you love me?” he asked her thickly.

  “I don’t believe it. I do.”

  “Despite what everyone says about me?”

  “Yes. And even if some of the lies hold a grain of truth.”

  “Is that reporter at the Gazette going to continue to dig for a story?”

  “No. Sangar has quashed it. He’s forbidden both Burt and Ruth to pursue a story. It so happens that he agreed with me. There’s nothing solid to print. You’ve buried your secrets well, Jacob. I know your soul,” she whispered. “I understand you, I think. Finally. And your secrets are safe with me.”

  He flinched slightly at that. “Are you sure? I’m no saint. What if I told you that a lot of the rumors are true about how I made my first fortune?” he asked bitterly. “I am guilty of colluding for gain when I was eighteen years old. I’d have done almost anything to make myself powerful.”