Fatal Links

By Natasha Lukin

Are you longing for captivating read to thrill you, scintillate you and get your thinking? Fatal Links provides a perfect balance of historical backstory, rich character development, snippets of sauciness, and boatload of edge-of-your-seat thrill.

When Rose and Jonathan meet online, we get the front seat insight into their burgeoning romance, complete with text bubbles and plenty of racy moments. What could go wrong? You’ll be surprised...

Natasha Lukin expertly created a timeless thriller based on love, while reflecting on our modern ways back at us with razor-sharp accuracy. It will have you thinking twice about downloading that dating app.

Lukin’s writing is energetic, with tangible pulse and fast rolling and unfolding of the events leading the characters to the point of no return and then to inescapable demise.

We can all recognise part of ourselves in the Natasha’s characters whether we want to or not... the mark of a true writer and outstanding book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris AU
• Release date: Oct 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798369493168

Natasha Lukin

Natasha Lukin loves life and never misses a chance to be challenged. She has been a human biologist, strategic psychology practitioner, NLP life coach, health educator and enrichment speaker for the Royal Caribbean cruise lines. An unusual twist in Natasha Lukin’s life has happened not that long ago. It is a quantum leap from being a scientist and psychologist authoring serious self-help books into the writer of psychological thrillers. Originally from Georgia, former USSR Republic, since 1991 Natasha lives and works in Australia, and all her fictional events happen in her favourite city of Melbourne which for many years has been a bearer of the title of “The most liveable city in the world”.

Book preview

FATAL

LINKS

Natasha Lukin

Copyright © 2023 by Natasha Lukin.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 09/28/2023

Xlibris

AU TFN: 1 800 844 927 (Toll Free inside Australia)

AU Local: [phone] ([phone] from outside Australia)

www.Xlibris.com.au

855473

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My deepest gratitude goes to my dear friends:

To Kate Romad for her unwavering trust in me and support with all my projects.

To Natasha Marchev for her inspirational ideas that helped me to enrich my plot and character developments.

I am very grateful to Rada Tochalna, amazing opera singer and model, for her kind permission to use her photograph in the book.

And my heartfelt ‘thank you’ goes to Cydney O’Sullivan, my inspirational motivational celebrity speaker and coach.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Life upon iCloud

Jonathan’s Story

Mesmerized and hopeful

Back to Reality

Rose’s Story

Anticipation and Interferences

Kosher Sex

Not face to face yet

Transcontinental Fiery Girl

The Woman with a Broken Heart

First Encounter

Femme Fatale and Exemplary Husband

Out of the Closet

Rose in Distress

First Cracks Come to View

Sabbath and ‘Wet on Wellington’

Storm Brewing

Blackmail

Cunning Plans

Splinter of Jealousy

Fall of the Curtain

Green-eyed Monster

Cruising on the Dance Floor

Waters Closing in

Dancing in Silvery Moonlight

If you’re not on social media, you don’t exist.

@Simplybuzz.com

LIFE UPON ICLOUD

You shall be there, it’s a must!

If not – then who do you think you are?

Social media – a vital part of new culture – in all its forms: emails, texting, SMS, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Messenger, WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Viber, iPhone versus Samsung, Hangouts – you name it – I get them.

Unlimited ways of getting communications, notifications, auto-corrections, reminders…

And dating!

All that hype of meeting partners, lovers, and companions amongst the whole lot of sneaky people, learning to navigate through those murky waters, recognizing and outsmarting Nigerian romance scammers, experiencing thrills from being able to instantly contact a host of beautiful girls and women… and all of that at the click of your finger!

And much, much more than that is lying there, available for viewing, investigating and… cheating, faking, scamming…Ouch!

Jonathan wouldn’t take it seriously – of course not!

He knew that many of his friends were kind of playing in there, spending time on dating sites, looking at the girls exchanging funny or flirty messages. He registered himself on one dating site – cautiously, not placing his name or photos anywhere and writing a very vague profile. He took it lightly, just for fun, ventilating his overworked brain.

But if he was honest with himself, that was not all that was bothering him. A young and healthy athletic man, he was starving for sex, although trying not to acknowledge it. On the surface, he was okay. His intimacy with his wife satisfied him to a certain degree, but he had a feeling there should be much more for a man in sex than basic intercourse. He had not had any other sexual experiences, but he knew there must be more. He wanted passion as it happened sometimes in his night dreams… deep all-consuming passion…

He picked the name secret lover.

He did not read girls’ profiles. He just looked at their photos. If attracted, he shot them short messages, a line or two, something like:

Hey, beautiful, how is your day going? What is such a charming lady doing here?

Don’t you, princess, have enough men around you, seeking your graces?

Would you like to chat?

That was until he saw HER! Jonathan suddenly felt goose bumps crawling all over his body. Those mesmerizing eyes! Who was she? His immediate physical attraction to her was so much beyond normal reaction of a man…a sexual desire…and he, a prominent young lawyer, was suddenly lost for words. What shall I say to her?

He shot his first message:

- Hey, stranger, which planet did you descend from to visit us mere mortals?

Her answer came immediately:

- From Venus, of course! Don’t you recognize me? You from Mars?

He replied:

- Of course, I am from Mars! Have we met?

She said:

- Near Andromeda clouds…

He picked up her line:

- Did we kiss? Did we cuddle?

He imagined her laughing:

- Yes, we did. That is how it works up there.

He replied:

- How about repeating it here, on our current planet?

Then a cold shower followed:

- Cannot chat longer. Have a visitor.

And then – silence. She stopped replying.

Jonathan sent a few more messages to no reply. Cold ripples ran up his arms.

Thoughts flashed frantically in his head: She said, have a visitor. What visitor? A husband? She would not call him a visitor. A lover? A lover who is not me! I shall be there with her! Am I losing my mind? How come I feel such a strong desire for a woman I’ve never even seen? Unless we met in the Galactic! He chuckled to himself.

There were eleven photos of her on the dating site. It was something magnetic in her eyes… suddenly he realized – it was the color! What were they: light brown, brownish grey with a touch of yellow? Then it dawned on him: caramel! Her eyes were a caramel color that he’d never seen in anybody before. He remembered one of his wife’s rings with a gemstone called tiger eye. That was it: the caramel color with golden specks – like a tiger...

Judging by the photos, she was tall, slender, maybe a good dancer, maybe even a professional dancer, as two of the photos depicted her in dancing costumes. Maybe an actress, a singer… definitely a girl with artistic flair…

Her profile was short and not very informative, rather plain. And she was forty-three – fourteen years older than him… but you would never have guessed her age from her incredible looks.

In one of her photos, she was standing in front of a cruise liner with her hands up in the air, and he saw it was a Royal Caribbean ship. Jonathan just could not take his eyes off her… it seemed like he felt her physical presence. Absurd!

Her presence inspired him so much that he began writing a poem.

Is it a wave of Hello or a wave of Goodbye?

Regardless of the fact she will sail on high...

Her hand gestures welcoming and warm as so,

Her smile is bright and her skin of bright glow.

The ship is not the attraction, but the woman at her,

Stopping the traffic and causing a stir.

Her checkered outfit like the flag of a race,

Slowly and steadily at her own pace.

It’s a race that she has already won.

Stealing men’s hearts, one by one…

Royal Caribbean was the name of the ship,

Voluptuous curves from hip to hip.

With one hand in the air without a care,

Glasses so bold for many to stare…

Is she a figment of my imagination?

A guaranteed beauty of God’s creation…

And then he pressed Send.

The reply came the next day: I am interested… What did she mean by that?

Ding – a new message came in, and he responded eagerly.

She wrote: What a lovely poem! Where did you find it? Seems like it really was about one of my photos…

That is what I wrote for you, Rose. It’s my poem and my feelings, my impressions of you, beautiful. I would not use someone else’s words to describe you! Jonathan replied. Let’s exchange phone numbers and emails so we can communicate not via that dating website. Please!

She said: Yes!

JONATHAN’S STORY

Having been born into a Jewish family, Jonathan grew up to be a fine Jewish man. That implied his highly developed IQ, obviously inherited from generations of lawyers, doctors, successful businessmen and financiers, and his upbringing where the highest values had been placed on education, hard work and traditional practices.

From his early days, he attended a synagogue with his extended family members wearing kippah. He observed candle-lighting times for Sabbath. Jonathan knew it all by heart, and he felt safe and secure with his family around this table, protected and surrounded by love. In general, his parents were not overly religious, but they loved to belong to like-minded people with common heritage and roots. The choice of their friends was wide and diverse; however, the majority of their friends were Jewish, which was typical for any ethnic community.

Jonathan’s grandparents came to Australia straight after WW2, in 1945. Originally from Estonia, from its capital Tallinn, they were highly educated and intelligent people.

His granddad was an engineer who had studied in Germany, at the Rhine-Westphalian Technical High School of Aachen, while his grandmother was a housewife and a