“Regina had him for lunch, and she was his dinner. That’s how she got through.”
Elizabeth looked startled at his blunt assessment of events, but his assistant didn’t know Regina like Jacob did. McDougal may have been a decorated army captain and possessed six years of top-notch corporate security experience, but he was relatively young and virile, and would be no match for Regina . . . especially a manic, hypersexual Regina. She’d known how to wind men around her finger since she was a girl.
She’d been forced to learn how to get what she could from men.
“Jim was just here,” Elizabeth whispered. “He’d gone out to park her car when she pulled up to the house earlier. She just bulldozed past him, but Jim got a look in her car. He came up to tell me that there’s several bottles of prescription medication empty in the passenger seat . . . along with a dress and some underclothing.”
“Go down and get the bottles, please. Bring them up. I’m going to call 9-1-1, and then Dr. Fielding. I think she’s manic . . . and high.”
Elizabeth nodded and hurried out of her office. Jacob went over to his desk, moving aside some papers and locating his phone. The phone thumped on his desk when Regina grabbed his arm roughly and jerked it.
“Jesus,” he muttered incredulously. She was completely naked, save her heels.
“Surprise,” Regina said, her red lips curving. She stepped into him, pressing her breasts against his ribs, her hands making a manic tour of his body.
• • •
Apparently neither Jacob nor Elizabeth had altered her security clearance since she’d stormed out of the Lattice compound three days ago. Harper entered Jacob’s mansion without incident and jogged up the grand st
aircase.
What Burt had revealed in her office just minutes ago kept pulsing in her brain. The inflammatory information certainly confirmed the many fears she’d long held about men of Jacob Latimer’s caliber.
But now she knew that Jacob was in a class all his own. What’s more, Jake Tharp would never be so callous or cold-blooded. And she very much wanted to believe that Jake Tharp hadn’t completely been killed off by Jacob.
When she approached Elizabeth’s office door, she was surprised to see that it was open. She stepped over the threshold. Elizabeth didn’t appear to be anywhere around. Jacob’s door was ajar, though.
“Hello?” she called. She looked around the door and froze.
Jacob stood next to his desk in profile to her. Regina Morrow was pressed tightly against him. She was completely naked. Harper stared, her stunned brain absorbing a myriad of details in one stomach-dropping moment: Jacob’s hand on Regina’s hip, her naked, large breasts smashed against his lower chest, her upturned, pouting lips . . . the fact that her buttock looked reddened, as though it’d been spanked.
Suddenly, Jacob was staring directly at her, his face rigid.
“Harper.”
She stood there, speechless, the graphic image of the pair of them pummeling at her unprepared consciousness. It was as if her worst fear had sprung out of her brain and taken shape. Regina turned, her gaze landing on Harper. Her full lips opened. She started to laugh hysterically, pushing on Jacob’s chest and stumbling in her high heels. Jacob caught her by grasping at her elbows. Her bare breasts swayed. They looked liked they’d been manhandled. They were reddened. Harper realized numbly she could see the outline of fingerprints on the flesh.
She wasn’t aware of turning around, but suddenly she was face-to-face with Elizabeth.
“Harper, I didn’t realize you’d—”
“Excuse me, Elizabeth,” she said woodenly, gliding swiftly past Jacob’s wide-eyed assistant and out the door.
She was so badly shaken that she just left her car where it was at Jacob’s and headed toward the terrace. She plunged out the glass doors, jogging down the multiple levels. When she hit the beach, she kicked off her shoes and tossed them in her purse. She didn’t look to the left, where she and Jacob had played with the dogs the other morning before he’d taken her up to his bedroom and made love to her with a fierce wildness. She didn’t look to the right a moment later, to the spot where he’d first walked up to her on the beach, putting her under his spell from the very first.
Harper just stared straight ahead toward her townhome, using all her energy to block the image of Regina and Jacob from her head.
• • •
She plunged into her townhome, gasping for breath. As disoriented as she was, however, something had altered in her on that sunny flight down the beach. She’d gained a little perspective.
It’d been horribly damning, of course, the nude Regina, the signs of recent, forceful sex on full display on her lush body. It’d looked bad.
Very bad.
But as she hastened to her kitchen, Harper admitted to herself that her nearly panicked state had as much to do with what had been going on inside her for the past several days as it did the volatile image of Jacob with a naked, beautiful woman in his arms. It related to her grief over losing that special boy, and her parents’ intentional lies, and the fact that she’d fallen in love with a man who intimidated and overwhelmed her.
Jacob Latimer had the power to crush her heart to dust. Knowing that he’d once been Jake Tharp only increased his ability to hurt her, and that very thought had been increasingly terrifying her.