The Sweetest Taboo Read Free Page A

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