The Sweetest Taboo Read Free

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