Black Tangled Heart

by Samantha Young

  Then he was there, pushing gently inside.

  Our eyes locked as his thickness filled me, our soft pants falling against each other’s lips as he moved deeper and deeper.

  Under my skin.

  Forever.

  “No one but you,” he promised, emotion making his eyes bright. “I missed you every day, Doe.”

  “Me too,” I confessed. Nothing was right in this world if I wasn’t connected with Jamie McKenna. Caressing his back, I moved my fingertips around to his abs and down, my touch making his hips falter. His breathing hitched as my fingers moved across his sensitive skin and through the crinkle of hair to where we were joined. I wanted to feel our connection.

  “Oh, fuck.” He bowed his head in pleasure as I felt him move in and out of me.

  Reaching between us, he took my hand and pressed my fingers to my clit. He guided my fingers, bracing himself with one hand as he glided, slow and deep. He looked up from watching us touch me, and held my eyes as he made love to me. He pulled back, sliding out, but only so he could brace himself on his knees. Grabbing my hips in his big hands, he tilted them and drove back in at an angle, hitting me in a place that sent me to the stars.

  “Jamie!” I cried out as he continued to move slow and easy, but each glide forcing a deeper penetration against the coiling tension inside. I trembled against him as he took pleasure in taking his time. Jamie was savoring this. Savoring us.

  What made it sexier was my need to move against him and my inability to do so because he was holding my hips captive. With one more thick push in and slow drag out, I broke.

  My hips stiffened for a beat and then I quivered, my inner muscles rippling in deep, tugging throbs around him.

  “Jane.” His grip loosened and he fell over me, bracing his hands at either side of my head as I came around him. He thrust into the sensation, fast, hard drives, guttural sounds of pleasure falling from his lips seconds before he tensed.

  Then his hips stilled.

  “Jane,” he growled. I felt the pulsing waves of his release as he jerked and shuddered … and shuddered some more.

  “Fuck.” Jamie breathed, falling against me. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He rolled onto his back so he wouldn’t crush me, his chest rising and falling in shallow pants. “What the fuck was that?”

  My heart raced as I tried to calm.

  Our skin was dewy, slick with sweat, as I turned my head to look at him.

  I found him staring at me in awe.

  I smiled.

  “That happened, right?” His deep voice coiled around my heart. “That was the best sex of our lives, right? Of anyone’s life.”

  Grinning, I felt giddy and scared and euphoric and worried all at once.

  Jamie rolled onto his side and pulled me onto mine so he could tangle our legs together, so he could feel my breasts against his chest. “I love you.” He kissed me, intense, a little frantic. “You’re here. We’re here. And you’ll never leave me again. Promise you’ll never leave me again.”

  Just like that, anger bloomed in my gut.

  Quick. Fiery. And dispelling the mood like a bomb.

  I wrenched away from him. “Jamie McKenna, if we’re going to make this work, you have to stop. Stop acting like I left you. You broke up with me. Remember? I still have the goddamn letter.”

  Jamie’s brows furrowed. “What fucking letter?”

  28

  JANE

  “What fucking letter, Jane?” Jamie repeated, sitting up.

  My pulse raced as an ominous feeling settled over me at the sight of his genuine confusion. I pushed up to sit beside him. “The letter Lorna gave me. The letter you wrote.”

  “When?” he demanded.

  “A few days after I visited you. Six years ago.” I made to move out of bed, and Jamie grabbed my wrist. “I’m getting the letter.”

  He released me, but his breathing was shallow, agitated.

  So was mine.

  I yanked his T-shirt up off the floor and pulled it on before I hurried to my closet. Hauling over my artist’s stool so I could reach the top shelf, I pushed shoeboxes aside to find the one with my keepsakes. Taking it down and over to the bed, I threw off the lid, desperate to find the letter. The box was filled with old photos of me and the McKennas, even a few with Willa, Nick, Tarin, and Flo, though I rarely ever saw them now.

  Shoving aside trinkets and ticket stubs, I found the letter buried at the bottom. My hands shook as I unfolded it. Looking at Jamie, I saw him studying the paper with a wrinkle between his brow.

  I held it out to him.

  He took it.

  I still remembered every word.

  I blame you. I know it all wasn’t your fault but some of it was. I will always love you but I also think things might have been better if you’d never been a part of our lives. That way I couldn’t miss what I’d had with you and hate you for how it all turned out. You being around just complicates things. I don’t need you in my life anymore. There’s just too much bad shit between us. I don’t want to see you anymore, and I don’t want you to visit. Don’t try to call either. Just … don’t.

  Jamie scanned it, his fingers biting so hard into the paper, it crumpled. His chest heaved, like he couldn’t get enough air. He threw himself off the bed, running a shaky hand through his hair as he looked over at me. “Where and when did you get this?”

  For me, that moment was like yesterday. “You’d been in prison for about a year. Things were getting more strained between us with every visit. My last visit—not the one running up to your parole, but the one six years ago—you were caustic about Devin. Do you remember?”

  “I remember it, Jane. I remember every second because it was the last time I saw you until you came to visit me two years ago.”

  “That’s why.” I pointed to the letter. “Lorna came to see me just a few days after that visit. She was in LA to see you and catch up with some friends.”

  He nodded. “I remember.”

  “She gave me that letter and said you asked her to pass it along. That you didn’t want to see me again. She told me I was to blame for everything and that I was to stay away.” Tears streamed down my cheeks as his reaction awoke dark suspicion. “It’s your handwriting, Jamie.”

  “From when I was fifteen!” he roared and spun, planting his fist through my floor-standing mirror.

  I yelled his name as it shattered, pieces falling at his feet.

  “Oh my God, Jamie.” I rushed forward, trying to avoid the shards littering my floor.

  There was blood on his knuckles. Taking hold of his wrist, I led him away from the glass, my heart thundering as I guided him into the bathroom. He was seething and silent, and my mind reeled as I tried to focus on cleaning up his knuckles with my first aid kit.

  “I don’t think you need stitches,” I whispered, fighting back tears.

  When I met his gaze, I saw he was holding back tears too. “How could she do that to us?”

  Then it was like he couldn’t bear his own weight. He slumped into me, falling to his knees as he wrapped his arms around my waist. His hands fisted in his T-shirt I’d thrown on, and he burrowed into me, desperate, as if he couldn’t get close enough. I could feel him shaking.

  I tried to be strong, but I couldn’t hold back tears as the realization of Lorna’s duplicity cut us both to the quick.

  I didn’t understand the full plot yet, but I got the general gist of it.

  And it was heartbreakingly tragic.

  Soon I was on the bathroom floor with him, our backs pressed to the tub, my head resting on his shoulder as we gripped tight to each other’s hands. I don’t know how long we sat there before Jamie finally spoke.

  “I wrote that letter to my dad when I was fifteen, and I never sent it. He’d started coming around again after Mom died. There was a part of me that wanted him around because he was good with me. But he was an absolute bastard to Lorna. Treated her like shit. Hurt her so much that it hurt me too.

  “It made me susp
ect that Lor wasn’t his. We all had Mom’s eyes, but Skye and I looked so much like our dad, and Lor didn’t. When I was younger, I never even thought that Lorna knew what I suspected, but when I got out of prison, I went to live in Boston for a while to be close to her. She works for a law firm there now. And she told me then that when she was ten, she overheard an argument between our parents. She wasn’t Dad’s. Mom had cheated. Lorna reached out to him when she was in college, asked him to do a DNA test so she could know once and for all.

  “She definitely wasn’t his daughter.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “Suddenly, all her insecurities made sense, and I’d wished that I’d known what she knew because I would’ve been more understanding. I would have been a better brother. I told her that. And when I left Boston to come here, Lorna and I were in a better place than we’d ever been.”

  I lifted my head to meet his gaze. The betrayal in his was soul destroying. “I wrote that letter to Dad when I was fifteen and she kept it.” He shook his head. “I threw it away, but she must have found it and kept it. She had, uh, short stories of mine, scraps of things I’d thrown away … I know she kept those too.” Jamie let out a shuddering breath. “She must have come from New York planning this because she had the letter with her. I had stupidly told her that seeing you every week was getting harder because I was afraid I was stopping you from living your life.

  “But none of that mattered. She was going to do this to us, no matter what. She remembered she had that letter, and she planned this.”

  As much as it killed that Lorna had done this to me, I was more devastated that she’d done this to Jamie.

  “She knew.” I could hear the rage building him. “She knew what you meant to me. And she took you from me when I needed you most.”

  I grabbed hold of him tight, trying to calm him. “Jamie, I knew her. And I should have come to you. Instead, I let all those awkward visits with you mess with my head, with what I knew was true. Yes, she did this to us, but I let her.”

  “No,” he bit out, shaking his head. “You don’t put that shit on yourself. I am done with self-recrimination. This”—he jumped to his feet and I hurried to follow him into the bedroom where he snatched up the letter sitting among the glass shards, tearing the page in two—“this is done for us now. It’s in the past. We know the truth.” Anguish darkened his features before he fought to let it go. “Neither of us meant to abandon the other. We love each other.”

  “We love each other,” I echoed the promise.

  “But I am done with my sister, and she needs to know that we know the truth.” He yanked on his jeans.

  “Jamie …”

  “No, Jane. She’s my sister so I won’t go after her for this, even though she’s almost as bad as the fuckers on my hit list. But I am done with her. There’s no coming back from deliberately tearing us apart.”

  “Don’t call her yet.” I took hold of his hand. “Stay here with me. Stay the whole night with me. Screw everyone else. We can face all that in the morning.”

  He hesitated, making my breath hitch.

  To my relief, however, he exhaled slowly and nodded.

  Jamie joined me back in bed.

  I’d clean up the broken mirror tomorrow.

  “I just gave us seven years more bad luck,” he groaned as I cuddled into him.

  I chuckled, and it was a relief to do so. “I don’t think it’s possible for us to have any more bad luck.”

  “Don’t jinx us, Doe.”

  I pressed a kiss to his chest. Despite sad revelations, I squirmed a little with happiness to hear the endearment again.

  Jamie rubbed his hand down my arm as we tried to settle into each other, to leave all the ugly, messy emotions at the door until tomorrow. “You need to text Gaines and tell him you can’t see him anymore.”

  “What about Wright?”

  He took a deep breath. “I’ll follow him. Plant a bug in his apartment. It was my last-resort plan.”

  The thought of anything happening to him now that I had him back made me tense with anxiety. “Jamie—”

  “It’ll be okay.”

  I wanted to believe that, and as I stewed on it, I realized what he’d just said. “A bug?” I pushed up off him and he stared at me warily. “Did you plant a bug at Asher’s? Is that how you knew he was sabotaging my attempts?”

  He nodded reluctantly. “In his car.”

  “How?”

  “I bribed one of his so-called friends to do it.”

  “Jamie, you need to remove that bug.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Why do you care?”

  “Asher hurt me, and I can’t be around him right now, but he has been like family to me these last few years. Those feelings don’t just go away. Removing the bug would be what’s decent and right.”

  Jamie’s lips twitched. “I’m not decent and right, Jane.”

  My heart lurched. I bent my head to his and pressed a soft, sweet kiss to his mouth. “Yes, you are. I just need to remind you.”

  Hours later, after we’d made love again, as my eyelids grew heavy with sleep, I remembered that Jamie didn’t sleep well, and that he needed the window open to even try. Feeling the smooth rise and fall of his chest beneath mine, I lifted my head to tell him I’d open the window but then halted.

  Seeing his eyes closed, I whispered, “Jamie?”

  No response.

  “Baby?”

  Not even a twitch.

  Jamie was asleep.

  A small, grateful smile tickled my lips as I carefully lowered my head back to his chest and closed my eyes.

  29

  JAMIE

  At some point in time, I’d convinced myself to treat the loss of Jane like a death. I hadn’t lied when I told her that I’d needed to hate her. To a certain extent, I’d always feel like I didn’t deserve her, but I couldn’t hate her anymore just to keep her at a distance.

  The relief of knowing she’d never stop loving me was too great.

  It was how I imagined it would feel to think someone you loved had passed away, only to discover they were still alive.

  At first, I didn’t feel that relief. Instead, the grief I’d felt over losing her, the grief that had made me bitter more than anything else, turned to hurt and betrayal. Realizing my sister was to blame for events that had rocked my life was more than I could handle at that moment.

  However, when the shock passed and the relief of having Jane back seeped in, it allowed me time to calm down. To be grateful to have her lying in bed beside me.

  All of that stopped me from facing my fears, jumping on a plane, and confronting Lorna. I wanted to cut her out of my life for good.

  I wasn’t a perfect man. I wasn’t very good at forgiving. Understatement.

  I couldn’t forgive Lorna for taking Jane away, but I still needed to know why.

  Slipping out of Jane’s bed that morning, my chest aching with a sweetness it hadn’t felt in a long time, I watched my girl sleep as I dressed. I didn’t understand what pulled us together. I didn’t know what made Jane Doe the only woman who satisfied my heart, body, and soul. I didn’t need to know.

  I just had to do what I could to not lose her again.

  If that meant cutting Lorna out of my life for fear of her fucking with us, then I’d do it.

  Leaving a note for Jane on her pillow, I let myself out of her apartment and took a shower in mine. Once dressed, I sat down on my sofa with my phone in hand. My heart beat a mile a minute.

  I dialed Lorna’s number.

  And it went straight to voicemail.

  Goddamn it!

  I hung up, my knee bouncing with agitation.

  “Screw it.” I called her again and when it went to voicemail, I stayed on the line. “Lorna, it’s me. I … I know about the letter you gave to Jane. I know what you did. If you love me at all, you’ll tell me why. Because”—I swallowed hard against my hurt and rage—“I don’t get how my sister could do that to me. I—” I hung up beca
use I knew I was about to lose my temper. And I wanted answers. She’d never give them to me if I raged at her.

  Pissed that I’d have to wait to talk to her, I called my PI and arranged to meet him at his office in thirty minutes. Burt Wethers was an ex-cop and friend of Irwin Alderidge. Irwin had put me in touch with Burt when I came out to LA to do what needed to be done. He was the guy who taught me about surveillance equipment, and he’s who I bought it from.

  I glanced at Jane’s door as I stepped out of mine, resisting the urge to walk on in and climb back into bed with her. As much as I loved her, there was still shit to do, and I couldn’t let myself get lost in her. Not yet.

  Thirty minutes later I strode into Wethers’s dismal little downtown office. His AC must have been broken because the place was stifling. Sweat beaded across my skin as Wethers crossed the room to greet me.

  He was short, balding, and probably hitting his fifties, but Wethers was also compact and strong, his biceps flexing with the handshake.

  “What can I do for you?”

  “I need more equipment. For Wright.”

  Since Irwin trusted Wethers, I gave the guy some of my trust too. He knew about my plans, and that’s why he’d only do so much for me. As an ex-cop, he knew when the line was being crossed. It didn’t mean he wasn’t on my side. He’d left the force because he saw too much injustice. And he hated dirty fucking cops.

  Wethers sighed heavily. “Well, funny you should call this morning because I was about to call you. And it’s about Wright.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’ve been keeping my ear to the ground about the people who did this to you, and Wright’s name popped up … with my contact at Internal Affairs.”

  I slumped back in the plastic seat he’d offered me, my pulse speeding up. “What does that mean exactly?”

  “They’re onto him, Jamie. Wright’s been taking bribes from all kinds of criminals in Los Angeles, as well as blackmailing prostitutes to give him part of their take to keep the cops off their backs.”