Tamara, Taken: Book One of the Blue-Eyed Monsters duet
Copyright 2018 by Ginger Talbot
This book is intended for readers 18 and older only, due to adult content. It is a work of fiction. All characters and locations in this book are products of the imagination of the author.
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Prologue
I was never really insane except upon occasions when my heart was touched ~ Edgar Allan Poe
Joshua
Ever since mankind first learned to bang rocks together and spark fire, people have been driven to define themselves, to build neat little boxes and climb inside.
They divide themselves up by religion, race, nationality. And even that’s not enough. They make the boxes smaller and smaller. They come up with all kinds of bullshit ways to categorize themselves. Introverts, extroverts. Leaders, followers. Morning people, night owls.
It’s part of the human condition—the desperate desire to figure out where you belong. To know the truth of who you are, what you are.
Me? I’d kill anyone who tried to put me in a box. And I learned the only two important distinctions very early on.
Predators, or prey.
Eat, or be eaten.
What difference does it make if you’re an introverted morning person…if you’re gurgling your last breaths through the wide-open smile that I’ve carved in your throat?
Are you strong enough to survive an encounter with a predator? Do you deserve to survive?
Those of us who are worthy, we take what we want and crush those who oppose us. Money, power, prestige, women—we steal them away and use them as we wish.
We live on a different plane of existence. Our lives are both richer and more dangerous. We constantly seek new sensation. Our Everest-level craving for stimulation drives us to take mad risks.
These days, there are other names for us besides predator—more civilized ways to describe us. More scientific. The one that fits me the best is a name that’s flung about far too casually these days, but it’s accurate in my case.
Psychopath.
I’ve taken all the major tests for psychopathy, including the PCL-R. I tick off all the boxes.
Grandiose sense of self-worth? Manipulative? Surface-level charm? Ruthless? Lack of remorse?
Check, check, check, check, check. Although I think “grandiose” is a little unfair. I’d say “accurate”. The things I’ve accomplished, the billions I’ve earned, the heights I’ve scaled, the murders I’ve gotten away with again and again—my sense of self-worth is certainly quite healthy, but it’s not grandiose. It’s well-earned. I don’t even understand why they ask some of the questions. “I manipulate others to get what I want.” Well, obviously. How else would you get what you want? By saying pretty please?
So how does one become something like me? A designer suit wrapped around a piranha? Well, my father was a monster, and I am the clay he molded. Is that nature or nurture? Would I have been capable of empathy and self-restraint if I’d been stolen as an infant and given to normal humans? I guess we’ll never know.
I watched my brothers, both older and younger, those less worthy, fall one by one. Did I feel anything as I watched them gasp their final breaths? I don’t know anymore. I don’t remember what feelings feel like. They’re not useful to predators.
With each death, my father’s gaze burned with scorn. My mother’s lips quivered, and tears shimmered in her eyes, but she didn’t shed a single one. My father was a predator. She didn’t want him to devour her.
I learned the lessons my father taught us, and I adapted, and I alone survived.
A predator doesn’t ask. He takes.
A predator knows no fear.
A predator is a hunter, and a hunter needs prey.
A predator can only win if someone else loses.
But as the years went by, I grew bored, because it was impossible for me to find a real challenge. I became a corporate raider; I devoured companies and shredded them for profit. Money rained down on me from the sky. I destroyed everyone who resisted me, both personally and professionally. After I got tired of tying up and whipping every beautiful masochist on the East Coast, I started hunting. Not animals; they pose no challenge. I hunted humans who were like me, or rather, humans who thought they were like me. Humans who thought of themselves as apex predators.
But I never lost. Never. I suffered the dilemma of Alexander the Great, the mighty Greek military commander. As Plutarch said of him, “When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain, he wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer.”
Color and taste started to fade. I gulped down ghost peppers and threw myself into brutal cage fights with men twice my size, just so I could feel something…anything at all. The fierce joy I experienced when I cut down my human prey faded almost instantly. I went from killing once every year or two to needing it every few months, and it seemed as if even that wouldn’t be enough.
But then I received an amazing gift.
Tamara.
She stumbled right into my path. Staring up at me with those huge, frightened eyes. The ultimate prey. The ultimate prize.
I knew I’d take her. I knew she’d fight me. I knew I’d win.
Chapter One
Tamara
“I can’t believe you’ve been working for Joshua Smith for sixty days and you haven’t seen his dick yet.” Heather, my best friend and neighbor from across the hall, says things like that all the time. And she’s dead serious.
It’s Saturday afternoon. I just got home from the battered women’s shelter where I volunteer once a week. I’m standing in front of the mirror in my bedroom-slash-living room-slash-kitchen, holding up various consignment store dresses to see which one flatters me the most. The mirror was reclaimed from an alley. Dumpster diving, that’s my jam.
“Heather!” I squawk, scandalized.
“Don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it,” she teases. She’s sitting on a folding chair at my tiny folding table, stroking on black nail polish. She’s come over to help me pick a dress for the party at Smith Acquisitions tonight. I’ll be working as a cocktail waitress, and I’m secretly hoping to knock Joshua’s cashmere socks off.
Although I’d settle for a glance and a friendly smile.
I put on my huffy, offended air. “I most certainly have not.”
“Yeah, you have.” She smirks at me knowingly and blows on her nails.
Yes, I have. All the time.
I mean, what straight girl with a pulse and a set of working ovaries wouldn’t swoon over him? The richest man in Manhattan… But that’s the least important thing to know about him. That classically gorgeous face, a Michelangelo carving come to life. That silky hair. All that icy sexiness wrapped in hand-tailored raw silk suits and shod in buttery-soft Italian loafers. His suits are bespoke. That means they’re not only hand-tailored, but they’re also designed, cut, and measured just for him. The fabric caresses his skin the way every woman wishes she could.
And the way he moves. He doesn’t walk—he stalks like a tiger, with lethal grace and an
air of chilly aloofness that somehow makes him even more alluring.
And once, a couple of months before I started working for his company, he actually flirted with me.
Never since, though. Now I’m working at his company, apparently I’ve melted into the wallpaper and my vagina has vanished. I’m not a girl. I’m just another office drone to be ignored.
It’s not that I think I put Victoria’s Secret models to shame, but I’ve been told I’m attractive. I’m slim, I have small, round boobs, I have a nice thick head of chocolate-brown hair, thanks to my mother’s good genes, and my lips could legitimately be called “bee-stung”.
The first time I met Joshua, I’d been working as a cocktail waitress at a nightclub called Heaven, an extra gig I took on so I could afford my shoebox-sized studio apartment in Brooklyn. I was trying to make ends meet while waiting for September, when classes started. I was pre-law at NYU, on a full scholarship.
We were in the VIP room. I’d just dodged a man who tried to grab my ass while I expertly balanced a tray of glasses. As I shimmied through the crowd to get away from the ass-grabber, I almost walked right into Joshua.
I caught my tray just before it tipped over, and stared up at him. His ocean-blue eyes met my gaze and pierced the depths of my soul. My heart thudded against my ribcage, and I stood there blinking stupidly and gaping up at him as if I’d just stepped out of a convent and this was my first glimpse of a man.
I had no idea who he was at the time. I just knew he was the most gorgeous and terrifying person I’d ever seen in the flesh, bar none. He had silky blue-black hair and cruel, sensual lips. He was almost obscenely handsome, more like an airbrushed magazine ad than a person.
His dusky blue suit was accented with lavender pinstripes and a lavender tie.
“Very impressive,” he said. His eyes were as cold as an ice floe, but his voice was rich and warm. The disconnect was jarring. In the dim recesses of my mind, I knew which one was true and which one was the lie.
The eyes are the window to the soul. The warm caress of his words…it was a sweetly spun trap. A sticky spider’s web.
“Excuse me?” I said politely. “What’s impressive?”
His eyes crinkled with amusement. “The way you dodged him. You saw him out of the corner of your eye—you weren’t even looking at him straight on. Very impressive…reflexes.” His gaze drifted over my body. He left no doubt as to what reflexes he was talking about.
It was true. I had a sixth sense for danger—or at least, so I’d always thought. When you grow up in the kind of neighborhoods I did, it comes naturally after a while. I knew all about skirting the alleyways where faceless men skulked ready to lunge and grab, and the subtler peril of men gliding by in their beater cars and crooning obscene invitations. But, like most people, I’d never suspected that true terror would be wrapped up in an exquisite package like Joshua Smith. I’d thought the most I’d have to fear from a man like that was a broken heart.
“Thank you,” I murmured. “Can I get you another drink?”
“How did you know I’ve been drinking?” He wasn’t holding an empty glass. I could smell the whiskey on his breath.
“Oh, you’ve been here a while. I just assumed.” My cheeks heated.
“Liar.” He grinned at me. “But a very pretty liar.” His words were a teasing caress, stroking some secret inner part of me.
“Er…thank you, I think?” I looked up at him, intrigued. There was an air of danger about him, but the sexy kind of danger. The kind that said he’d throw me over his lap and spank me. Hold me down and thrust his knee between my thighs while I moaned “no” but meant yes. No man I’d been with had ever done that, and I suspected that was why I’d never had an orgasm yet. Plenty of frustrating neargasms, sure. But no Big O.
He cocked his head to the side. “Do you like to take orders?”
Oh God. Could he read my mind? My cheeks flushed with embarrassment.
“You…you want me to take your drink order?” I mumbled.
His laugh was rich and gently mocking. “Sure, we’ll start with that. Go get me another shot of Macallan.” He waved at the bartender, who nodded at him. “He’ll put it on my tab.”
There was an idiot grin on my face as I hurried to get his drink. He’d called me pretty.
He took the drink and tipped me a hundred bucks without a second glance, then strolled away, leaving me feeling disappointed but oddly relieved.
Sure, he was blindingly handsome, but I could feel the menace rolling off him, even then.
He vanished into the crowd for the rest of the evening, until it was close to quitting time and I was cleaning up. Then he walked up to me.
“Tamara,” he said with that easy grin. Like I should be dazzled that he’d taken the time to find out my name.
And I kind of was.
“There’s an all-night speakeasy I’d like to take you to. My limo’s waiting outside.”
“Oh, I can’t. I have friends waiting for me.” My gaze dropped to the floor as I lied.
Why would I turn down an obscenely wealthy man who oozed sex and self-confidence, who might finally let me reach the heights of pleasure that I craved?
I think it was because I knew what he was asking for—one casual fuck, and then I’d be cast aside and forgotten. If he’d wanted to get to know me, he’d have gotten my phone number and asked me out on a proper date. Men like him didn’t have relationships with hood-rat girls like me. They used us like the towel that blotted the wet spot, and cast us aside just as easily.
It would be mind-blowing, no doubt, but it would leave me with an achy and empty feeling. I’d had a couple of brief encounters before, and they’d always left me feeling cruddy the next morning.
And him? If he was anywhere near as hot as I suspected, if he was exactly what I’d been looking for all along, he’d be like a drug, and I’d suffer endless withdrawal.
So I politely bowed out. There was a glint of disappointment in his eyes, but he just nodded and left without a word.
I thought that was the end of it until a week later, when I got a corporate brochure in the mail, with a picture of him tucked into it. And a blank job application. They were looking for temporary clerks over the summer.
I was giddy with excitement. Maybe he was just intrigued because I’d turned him down. But who cared why? He liked me! He really liked me! The fact that he’d taken the time to find out who I was and where I lived was beyond flattering. I went and applied for the job, and a couple of weeks later, I was working there.
But then things got weird.
From the day I set foot in that gorgeous Gilded-Age building on Fifth Avenue, Joshua never acknowledged me. He didn’t just ignore me; he completely iced me out. When I was in the same room with him, I could feel disdain rolling off him like a chilling fog. I didn’t understand it. If he wasn’t interested, why had he sought me out and invited me to work there?
As the summer dragged on, I had to accept the unflattering truth. Men like him wanted new toys and quickly grew bored with whatever they’d craved yesterday. He’d had a crush on me for a hot minute, and he’d got over it before he’d even bothered to sample the goods.
It stung, though. I kept wondering if it was something I’d done. But what? I hadn’t even had the chance to offend him.
I became mildly obsessed. I Google-stalked him, trying to find out everything I could.
What I found was all superficial. Company press releases. News reports on his company’s latest acquisitions. He was quite the mystery man. He was photographed at the most exclusive restaurants and nightclubs in New York, but the few interviews he’d given were just canned publicity features.
I only found one mildly helpful tidbit—a reporter on a forum claiming that after he’d written an unflattering piece about Joshua Smith, he’d been abruptly fired from his job.
And when I tried to look up the article that he’d written, apparently it had been erased from the internet.
I’m stub
born, though. I used the Wayback search engine, which archives old internet pages, and found the article. The reporter likened Joshua Smith’s company to a swarm of locusts, devouring everything in its path and leaving devastation and heartbreak behind.
He also talked about how Joshua had appeared from nowhere ten years ago, after graduating from a low-level Midwestern business school that was more a diploma mill than anything else. Joshua was so tight-lipped about his personal life that he didn’t even reveal his age. He looked to be late twenties to early thirties, but that was just a guess. Nobody knew anything about Joshua’s family, or where he’d grown up. There are 2.8 million people in the United States with the last name of Smith, the reporter mentioned, making it just about impossible to track down his family. The reporter seemed to be hinting that it was a made-up name, chosen deliberately to hide his origins.
Joshua wasn’t publicity-shy, though. He was frequently seen around town with various models and socialites, but never more than once with the same woman. In every picture, they were clinging to his arm and gazing up at him adoringly, and he was looking away.
I just couldn’t figure him out. And I’m insecure enough that his rejection rankled. I wanted to make him look at me one more time, acknowledge my existence, as if I were a little girl again, invisible, lonely, begging someone to make me real by noticing me.
When I heard that Smith Acquisitions was having a party for some of their bigwig clients, on a whim, I went to human resources and volunteered to waitress. I told them I’d had experience, and was delighted when they said yes.
And now Heather, who knows about my obsession, is trying to force me to make a move. “This is your chance tonight. Whenever you go to work, you’re wearing those god-awful pantsuits. But tonight you’ll be dressed up all sexy. You have to make a pass at him,” Heather informs me.
“Are you insane?” I laugh at her.
“Yes.” She smirks. “But that’s beside the point. You talk about him all the time. Carpe dickem, woman. Seize the dick.”
Tamara, Taken (The Blue-eyed Monsters Book 1) Page 1
