The Sweetest Taboo (2 page)

The article’s title says it all:
Men To Do Before Saying, “I do!”
We know we’ll eventually do the right thing with the right guy, but wouldn’t it be great to do it all wrong first? With no guilt and no worries?

What do you think? Samantha? With all you’re going through? Couldn’t you use an uncomplicated sex fest? And, Tess. One of the men mentioned is The Playboy. How conveniently perfect, don’t you think?

Why let men corner the market on fun when we girls have the same urges and needs? We can’t possibly get into any trouble if we do this with our eyes wide open, right? Me, I’m taking The Scary Guy. Yes. The one I told you about. The one living upstairs.

I know, I know. You’re both wondering if I’ve lost my mind. But you know I’ve never been one to jump out of my skin and these days its happening round the clock. Even now. I have goose bumps like you can’t imagine. My bedroom window’s open and I can hear his music and I can smell his cigar and I want to feel his hands.

I’m not sure how to pull this off since every time I see the man I forget how to put two words together. How do you tell a guy you don’t even know that he’s just won the bloomin’ sex lottery? Love you both!

Erin scanned the e-mail for typos then hit Send before changing her mind. She shut down the system and returned her laptop to the bedside table, switching off the lamp and snuggling into down feathers and plush Egyptian cotton. She was ridiculously hedonistic when it came to the haven of her bed. And a haven was exactly what it was.

This one room was her personal sanctuary. She refused to bring business through the doorway, keeping Paddington’s and all it entailed to her home office or the larger office she kept at the bar. This room was for dreaming, for reading, for letting her imagination run wild and indulging when she had a partner with whom to share her fantasies.

She’d meant what she’d said in her e-mail to Samantha and Tess. A relationship would come in good time for all of them. But this wasn’t Erin’s time. She had no ticking biological clock, no urge to hyphenate her last name, no desire to redecorate the red and gold harem of her bathroom with his and hers monogrammed towels.

Right now her focus had to be on Paddington’s end-of-month anniversary celebration.

The bar had belonged to the grandfather who’d taken her in at the age of eleven, after a trip to the Serengeti had taken her parents and left her in Rory Thatcher’s capable hands. He’d gone so far as to move from England to the U.S., wanting her to be comfortable growing up in the country she called home.

Rory had taught her not to pour all her energy into work but to save the best of everything she had for living. For the past year, she hadn’t lived much at all. She’d worked her fanny off seeing to his dream of keeping Paddington’s alive in the States after giving up the English pub that had been his life long before Erin had been born.

When he’d left this world three years ago, he’d only been fifty-seven, too bloody young to die. He’d lived a full and blessed life, right up to that very last minute. And Erin wanted to live the same. To grab the brass ring. To go for the gusto. To do all the things advertising guaranteed would make life the best it could be.

She smiled softly to herself as she began to drift off to sleep. She’d left her window open. Though the breeze was a little bit chilly, Erin remained warm, burrowed down in her bed and wrapped up in her imagination. The heat of the music blew warm liquid notes over her skin. The heated aroma of the richly smooth cigar teased her nostrils.

But it was the heat of The Scary Guy’s hands as she imagined them roaming beneath her bedcovers and over her body, his fingertips tap-dancing the length of her breastbone, his widespread palm cupping the curve of her waist, his thumb tugging at the elastic edge of her string bikinis, that set her on fire.

Her hands became his hands, her fingers his fingers, the pleasure she found enhanced by sharing his taste in music and the imagined smoke of his fine cigar. Sensation became unbearable. Her skin burned and sizzled and sparked. Dampness grew, seeping and spreading from her sex to her thighs.

And her touch, his touch, swept upward to the source, stroking along either side of the tight knot of nerves where sensation centered, slipping through the slickness he drew from her body, fingering the soft pillow of her inner core where the pleasure of waiting bordered on pain.

When she finally came, she reached for the edge with abandon, crying out her release with a breathless catch, a sob of exquisite satisfaction that wanted to know his name. Replete, exhausted and tingling still, she turned to her side and curled her body around the lingering high.

It was only then, when the night closed around her and the silence set in, that she realized the music had stopped. Erin held her breath and, swore above the beat of her heart, she heard the beat of his.

He watched her from the shadows fringing his world. Shadows that protected him
from prying minds, prying eyes. Her mind, her eyes, her certainty that she held his
salvation in the palm of her hand.

She was innocence embodied. Chaste and uncorrupt. And he was going to take
her down, drag her to the gutter, show her the reality of the life he called hell.

She thought she knew him. He’d seen the brash confidence in her eyes. And he’d
seen more. Flickers of quick-witted fear. A switchblade-sharp awareness. Vigilance.
Watchfulness. She knew the truth. That once he got his hands on her she wouldn’t want
him to let her go.

He was certain that was the reason she hovered on the edge of his existence. He
wondered how long caution would keep her curiosity bound. If her strength of character
could withstand the destruction of her faith in mankind. In him. In herself.

Raleigh Slater choked back the crazed laughter eating at his throat. She wasn’t
the first. There had been others. Women who’d driven to the brink of his twilight,
headlights cutting through the fog that concealed his dead end. He wasn’t giving this one
time to shift into reverse. Not until he’d fed her a taste of what she’d driven this far to
find.

She’d never even know. She’d swear she’d been dreaming. That what she’d felt
moving over her body while she slept had been nothing but the workings of her mind.
Only Raleigh would know the reality of his possession. That what she’d thought she’d
imagined, in truth, she had lived.

Sebastian Gallo saved the document and shut down his notebook computer. He’d had enough. Deadline or no deadline, he’d had enough. He needed a beer. He needed several. But he’d waited too long to go out.

The bars were closed for the night and now he’d have to put off until tomorrow what he needed to do today—to find a dark corner at Paddington’s On Main and watch Erin Thatcher pretend he didn’t make her sweat.

He needed to feel that edge, that cutting, biting awareness that he’d learned back when he was living on the streets and honed during his years in lockup. It was what kept him alive and kept him going. Fueled his high-performance artistry. Jump-started the creative bitch of a muse currently giving him hell.

A hell separate from her usual attempts at rewriting every word he wrote. No, this hell was harsh and demanding, a foot-stomping insistence that he set aside what she considered an unhealthy concentration on the macabre to write the book aching to break free from his heart. That’s when he had to remind her that he didn’t have a heart—the very reason he and Raleigh Slater got along so well.

Yep, he and Raleigh had more than a thing or two in common, but it was this latest obsession with a mysterious woman that was going to cause the both of them more than a man’s fair share of trouble. Raleigh’s problem was easily taken care of. Backspace. Delete. And his fictional world was set dead to rights.

The disruption to Sebastian’s well-ordered life required more than fancy finger work. He needed sleep but was afraid his mental gears were wound too tightly to shut down. The cigar hadn’t helped.

And the music, the blues, usually soothing in a twisted sort of way, had done nothing but speed up the beat of his heart, pumping blood into parts of his body that remained on edge no matter the intensity of his physical workouts. Or the long hot showers that followed.

He swore he’d heard her voice. After the music had stopped and before he’d put out the cigar and moved away from the window to reread the pages he’d written. The sound had crashed around him like lightning. White-hot electric jolts had nearly taken him out of his skin.

Now, minutes later, he wasn’t sure if what he’d heard had been all in his head, a sound from the city street below, or the cry of a woman in the throes of pure bliss.

Sebastian laughed under his breath, muttering a curse that had nothing to do with the woman living below him and everything to do with his obsession instead. He shucked off his sweater, scratched the ball of black wool over his chest before tossing it to the floor at the foot of his bed where it skidded up against the clothes he’d worn yesterday and the day before. One of these days he’d have to find time for laundry. And, he cringed, for the dishes in the kitchen sink.

His boots came next, the metal buckles hitting the hardwood floor with a sharp clatter. He released the button fly of his jeans and headed for the shower, stopping only to scratch Redrum behind the ears. The black cat lay curled in a ball of sleep and fur on top of the room’s highboy dresser.

At Sebastian’s touch, she stretched, yawned and returned to ignoring him which she did so well. He chuckled before leaning down and, in a voice husky and rough from rarely speaking to anyone other than his agent or the cat, purred into her ear.

“Yes, cat. You do your job well.” A job that entailed nothing more than reminding him of his invisibility, the condition once a hardship but now a valued commodity.

Redrum’s cold shoulder was easy to laugh off without causing Sebastian any grief. Or distracting his creative muse as Erin Thatcher had managed to do. It was all Sebastian’s fault that she affected him any way at all. His obsession had actually taken him to the mailroom where he’d discovered her name. She had no idea she’d picked up a stalker, though he, at least, did his stalking in his mind.

Raleigh Slater stalked women between the pages of the
New York Times
bestselling horror novels Sebastian wrote under the Ryder Falco pseudonym. But in Sebastian’s world, a solitary existence of his own making, an isolation nothing like the years he’d spent forcibly confined by the courts in juvenile hall, the only real stalking was done by Redrum.

The black cat did her damndest to sneak up on the pigeons that fluttered on and off the loft’s windowsill. Rats with wings, to Redrum’s way of seeing things. To Sebastian’s, too.

Reaching the bathroom enclosure—the dressing area and separate customdesigned shower space nearly half the size of his bedroom—he shucked off his jeans and boxer briefs, scratching all the body parts needing scratching before stepping beneath the blistering spray that rained down from three separate shower heads on three separate walls.

For the past sixteen years, since his release at age eighteen from the lockup where he’d spent his formative years, Sebastian had considered his showers as much about relaxation and clearing his mind as about cleaning his body. When he’d finally convinced himself he could deal with permanence, he’d made sure to allow the money and the room for the bathroom he needed to accomplish those goals.

For too many years he’d been allowed but a fifteen-minute shower four times a week, a shower shared with other boys considered a threat to society or to self. At least one out of each week’s four soap-and-self-defense sessions resulted in a fight, a near riot…or worse. Sebastian had managed to escape unscathed and undetected.

Because the day he’d been taken from the street where he’d lived alone since the scrappy age of eleven, he’d made a promise to himself, a promise that he would never look to another human being for security or sustenance or support.

He chuckled to himself, wondering if he’d really been eleven at the time he’d been picked up by social services. Or if he’d been closer to twelve. He’d changed his age with the changes to his body, finally deciding on sixteen when his voice dropped and his balls dropped and the hair on his face began to grow as thick as that in his crotch.

He hadn’t given a damn what age the courts declared him. He’d made up his own mind—relying on remembered images of candles and crushed cupcakes and little toy trucks—and counted forward.

Even now he had no idea how old he really was. All those ages and dates were as much a part of his imagination as Raleigh Slater.

Or as much as the fictional fantasies he wove of Erin Thatcher.

Sebastian reached for the bar of soap and ran it over his chest and armpits, working up a lather before stepping back beneath the spray to rinse. He kept his eyes closed, the hazy fog so thick he couldn’t see much of anything. He could barely even breathe. His skin burned from the stinging heat of the water. And from the mental picture of Erin. A picture of her sharing the heat and the steam. A steam that intensified as blood pulsed through his veins.

He stepped out from under the shower, moved to the back of the spacious enclosure and reached again for the soap. Suds slid down his slick skin, through the hair growing low on his abdomen into the thatch cushioning his sex. His hand was warm and soapy when he took his dick in his hand. He leaned his forehead on the forearm he’d braced on the wall and spread his legs.

Water pummeled his back and his buttocks as he began to stroke away the tension he’d had building for days. Eyes screwed up tight, he imagined Erin on her knees, her short sleek auburn hair slicked back, her big silver-bright eyes looking up into his, her mouth forming the perfect O, her lips plump and pink and wrapped around him.

He wanted to get her on her knees. He wanted to see the cherry ripe tips of her breasts pucker and pout. He wanted to know how much of her body she shaved and how her baby bare skin would taste when he sucked her into his mouth.