Heartbreaker (Siren Publishing Ménage Amour) Read online

  Heartbreaker

  After her mother dies, Savannah James travels to the USA to search for the father she has never met, the only clues in a box her mother left her. But someone wants to stop her and is prepared to go to extreme lengths.

  Ben and his FBI brother Zac Masterton want the religious militia group that is chasing her, but not quite as much as they want Savannah. She and Zac have never been the stay-around types but as they make sense of the secrets of her past, they may also be able to find a way no one ends up heartbroken.

  As the search takes them from San Francisco to the East Coast, the stakes are raised after a shootout, and finding Savannah’s father may be the only way to keep her alive.

  Note: This book contains double vaginal penetration.

  Genre: BDSM, Contemporary, Ménage a Trois/Quatre

  Length: 40,661 words

  HEARTBREAKER

  Simone Sinna

  MENAGE AMOUR

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  ABOUT THE E-BOOK YOU HAVE PURCHASED: Your non-refundable purchase of this e-book allows you to only ONE LEGAL copy for your own personal reading on your own personal computer or device. You do not have resell or distribution rights without the prior written permission of both the publisher and the copyright owner of this book. This book cannot be copied in any format, sold, or otherwise transferred from your computer to another through upload to a file sharing peer to peer program, for free or for a fee, or as a prize in any contest. Such action is illegal and in violation of the U.S. Copyright Law. Distribution of this e-book, in whole or in part, online, offline, in print or in any way or any other method currently known or yet to be invented, is forbidden. If you do not want this book anymore, you must delete it from your computer.

  WARNING: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  If you find a Siren-BookStrand e-book being sold or shared illegally, please let us know at

  [email protected]

  A SIREN PUBLISHING BOOK

  IMPRINT: Ménage Amour

  HEARTBREAKER

  Copyright © 2014 by Simone Sinna

  E-book ISBN: 978-1-62741-429-6

  First E-book Publication: March 2014

  Cover design by Harris Channing

  All art and logo copyright © 2014 by Siren Publishing, Inc.

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  PUBLISHER

  Siren Publishing, Inc.

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  Letter to Readers

  Dear Readers,

  If you have purchased this copy of Heartbreaker by Simone Sinna from BookStrand.com or its official distributors, thank you. Also, thank you for not sharing your copy of this book.

  Regarding E-book Piracy

  This book is copyrighted intellectual property. No other individual or group has resale rights, auction rights, membership rights, sharing rights, or any kind of rights to sell or to give away a copy of this book.

  The author and the publisher work very hard to bring our paying readers high-quality reading entertainment.

  This is Simone Sinna’s livelihood. It’s fair and simple. Please respect Ms. Sinna’s right to earn a living from her work.

  Amanda Hilton, Publisher

  www.SirenPublishing.com

  www.BookStrand.com

  DEDICATION

  Thanks to the team at Siren for their faith and assistance that has helped me to continually improve as an author.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  All the bombings pertaining to this case are real, as was the ANO and the Achille Lauro. The Odeh case has not been solved and was raised in October 2013 by a US senator and reported in The Guardian (with no known connection to any general as mentioned in this story). Nor is there is no known connection between this and any militia group or the ANO bombings except in the author’s imagination.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Author's Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  About the Author

  HEARTBREAKER

  SIMONE SINNA

  Copyright © 2014

  Chapter One

  Savannah James stared at her stepfather and tried to control her rising panic as she spoke. “I’ve come to get what’s mine.”

  Sal Mazzola’s eyes narrowed, emphasizing his sharp, hook nose. “This is my house.”

  Savannah’s friend Dan glanced at her. They had talked enough over the last week since her mother had died for him to know that the topic left her either furious or a weeping mess in equal measure. Watching Sal peer through the crack of the door of the ostentatious home she had grown up in had her firmly in the former camp. He wasn’t much bigger than her five foot six, though he had an extra thirty kilos of lard oozing over his trouser belt. Could she just push past him?

  “I’ve come to get what’s mine,” Savannah repeated. “Mum told me where it is. A box of photos. Nothing of any value to you.”

  She saw him thinking, wondering if there was any value in playing hardball for the sake of it, or whether to let her in and get rid of her. She didn’t imagine either of them would try to see each other again.

  Sal rubbed his hand over his chin, scratching the old scar that went to the corner of the left side of his mouth, distorting his face and making him look sour even when he tried to pretend otherwise.

  “She won’t be a minute,” said Dan, his foot going into the doorway and the sheer bulk of his six-foot frame ensuring Sal made up his mind. He stepped back reluctantly, eyeing Dan as Savannah strode past him, straight to her old room.

  Sal had been part of her life since she was a baby, the only father she had ever known. But their relationship had never been good. Even as a baby Sal had been unable to soothe her. Savannah had no memory of that, but she did recall that as young as five she had felt uneasy at how he looked at her. At least he had often been overseas on business, one thing that had made life bearable for both her and her mother. She’d moved out at eighteen, as soon as she finished school, almost ten years earlier, and hadn’t stepped back in the house in all that time.

  She had never said anything to her mother, but it had sat between them, known but unacknowledged until the last few days. Savannah had sat with her mother at the hospital from morning to night, while Sal spent less than ten minutes each day, usually harassing and threatening, Savannah’s mother fearful of him until the end.

  “I’m sorry,” Audrey said one day when he had gone.

  “No, Mum,” said Savannah. “I’m the one who’s sorry. I should have helped you leave him long ago.”

  Audrey, little more than a skeleton, her body no longer fighting the cancer that was in its final sta
ges, took sharp shallow breaths. “I meant…” She rubbed her head. “I mean sorry I didn’t leave more for you, and…”

  “It doesn’t matter, Mum. I have all I need.” Which was true. She owned enough clothes to look respectable at work, a beaten-up, twenty-year-old Volkswagen that leaked oil, and not much else. But unlike her friends she didn’t yearn for anything more. Or at least not any thing.

  “There is something I want you to have.” Audrey’s words came out in a rush. She looked around furtively. Savannah wondered if the morphine that was being pumped into the drip was making her mother hallucinate. Mostly she slept and she didn’t always make much sense. “It’s in your old room.”

  “What is, Mum?”

  Audrey’s eyes looked glazed before clasping Savannah’s hand tightly. “I never told him about you,” she whispered. “I’m sorry, I should have. It was wrong of me.”

  Savannah knew her mother was finally, after twenty-eight years, talking about the topic that had been taboo. Audrey had always tensed whenever Savannah had made reference to Sal not being her real father, or when she had asked about her genetic heritage. Sal had hit her once and told her never to bring it up and upset his wife. So she hadn’t. But it didn’t mean she had stopped thinking and wondering.

  “He didn’t abandon you when you were pregnant?” Savannah had a hundred different fantasies about her real father as a teenager. All the usual, like he was a foreign prince when Roman Holiday had been her favorite movie. At seven she thought it starred her mother who shared the same first name as the lead actress. But as a teenager she realized that the likely story was that her father was quite simply an asshole who’d knocked her mother up and left them. If Sal was any indication of her mother’s taste, Savannah had figured she didn’t care to ever meet him.

  “It’s all in the box in your room,” her dying mother now told her.

  “Where?”

  Audrey smiled and patted her hand. “Where you hid your diaries.”

  Savannah stared.

  “It was a great spot. Don’t worry, I never read them.”

  Savannah had hugged her mother and both had let tears wet their cheeks.

  But Savannah’s father had never been mentioned again.

  Now in her old room, Savannah saw everything had been changed. No longer were there posters of Bon Jovi on the wall. “He’s old enough to be your father,” Sal had said snidely. She still wished the rock legend had been. The window ledge, which had once been lined with Pokemon stuffed toys, now gathered dust. When she had left them and everything else behind she had vowed never to be tied to places or things. Yet for a moment she could barely breathe, overwhelmed by the noise of her childhood. All of her dreams about her real father, about her future, about the life she wanted to have had all started here. She would now never return.

  Savannah felt him in the room before she saw him. Maybe it was the slightly sour smell, or the sniff. Sal was leaning against the doorjamb, Dan hovering in the hall behind. Wasting no more time, Savannah opened the cupboard door and started pulling out the boxes of a lifetime of her mother’s accumulated white goods, clothes and souvenirs.

  “Hey, you can’t take those!” Sal took a step closer but her look was enough to stop him.

  “I don’t want them.”

  Once the floor of the cupboard was clear she banged on the loose floorboard and it flipped. In the corner of her eye she could see Sal debating taking another step, hand wiping through the thin strands of hair spread across his forehead. Her hands went down into the darkness. As her mother promised, there was a box. Smaller than she expected, but regardless, it took a jiggle to remove it and she had to take out another floorboard in order to do so without tipping contents out.

  Standing up, holding the box to her, she walked past Sal without meeting his eyes. His cheeks were sucked in from where he was chewing them. Without a word she went out the front door for the last time, Dan running to catch up.

  * * * *

  “Are you sure this is a good idea?” Dan clearly didn’t think so, but then he hadn’t had a childhood of unanswered questions.

  “No I’m not sure,” said Savannah, kissing him on the cheek.

  “Your chances of finding this guy are next to none.”

  “Maybe, but I need to know I tried my best.” Savannah hugged and thanked him but she didn’t look back. In jeans and a shirt and carrying all she owned, she was leaving her past behind. She was vaguely aware of men watching her as she walked, and not just Dan. Most men tended to notice her and she always found it vaguely perplexing. She wasn’t traditionally beautiful, probably a bit skinny, hips narrow and boy-like, and bow-legged if she bothered to look at herself critically in the mirror, which she hadn’t done for a long time. Her black, unruly curls would mean that no one would ever mistake her for a boy. But she knew people thought her eyes, deep green, were mesmerizing, and truth be told, she used them to get what she wanted at times. She had Dan had wanted each other for a while but she didn’t think Dan would be heartbroken. It had only ever been a fling for them both. It seemed she didn’t have the right makeup for long-haul relationships. She figured that she was going to be lonely one day when the eyes stopped working their magic, but she wasn’t sure she could do anything about it. She got restless too quickly. There always seemed to be something missing, no matter how much she liked the guy and he liked her.

  The ticket in her hand—paid for by Dan in return for the VW, which he had always been at least as interested in as he was in her—was an open-ended return ticket, Sydney to San Francisco. The tourist visa said three months, and with her savings, she figured she’d have all that time to find the man that broke her mother’s heart—Todd Wilson.

  Chapter Two

  It was a fifteen-hour flight but Savannah slept for most of it. When she wasn’t asleep she was thinking about how she would work to find her father. When she was sleeping she dreamt of how he might react, waking uneasy and aware that Dan was probably right. Why would a man, any man, want to see a child he had never known existed, twenty-eight years later? He might have a wife and kids—her half brothers and sisters—he would have to explain her to. Even if there had been warmth, love and longing once for her mother, time would have eroded that long ago. No one holds a candle for that long. They get on with their lives. Maybe if she found him she’d just watch and look, never confront him. She didn’t want to create havoc. She just needed to know, wanted to see someone that looked like her, green eyes, porcelain skin and black hair, the Irish heritage presumably, maybe complete with the brogue peppering his American twang. People had often assumed she had been adopted because she had looked so different from her mother’s petite, blonde, ballet-dancer frame and the tan of Sal’s Italian heritage and pudginess that spoke of a fondness for fast food.

  The box hadn’t helped as much as she would have liked. A few newspaper clippings, two in different languages, one of which was undecipherable and the other something to do with an Italian artist. There was only one photo and she had wept, cursed her mother briefly for not showing it to her years ago. But she realized that if Audrey had risked showing it to a child they both may have lost the last connection. Sal would have ripped it up and burnt it in a jealous rage. The same rage that had ended Audrey’s ballet career, because Sal couldn’t abide the flowers and accolades from anyone other than him. He wanted to own her and eventually he walled her off from the rest of the world. In their wedding photo she had looked fragile and he protective. But the protection had become obsessive.

  The photo in the box was of Audrey after one of her performances, in a full-length white dress, tiny straps over her shoulders. Swan Lake, Savannah supposed, but it had been many years since she had been to the ballet. Savannah’s visions of such costumes and preparation by her mother were at the edge of her memory, a vague recollection of being allowed to sit in the dressing room and watch her carefully apply makeup that later Sal was to ban them both from, then standing in the wings watching the magic of tull
e, silk and color interwoven with the music of Tchaikovsky.

  Next to Audrey in the photo, with an arm around her, was a man of maybe thirty. Tall, lean and with dark, curly hair, and she imagined green eyes, just like her. There was no name, just San Francisco Ballet Company 1986. The year she was born. Judging from the man’s coat and how slim her mother was, it must have been late winter in the USA. She would have been born at the end of the year in Australia, as the seasons turned around again. They looked happy, Savannah thought. Happy in a way it was hard to remember her mother ever being. Except the few times Sal allowed them to go together to see the ballet, dropping them off and picking them up but not staying because he thought ballet was boring and lame. Once the house lights dimmed and music started her mother became another person, age and worry falling away as she was captivated by another world. It was this Audrey James that radiated out of the photo.

  The box held two letters from the same year, signed Todd Wilson. Both made it clear he was in love with Audrey. The second asked why she hadn’t returned his calls, begging her forgiveness though mystified about what he had done. Savannah looked at the date. June 1986. Her mother would have been known she was pregnant. And what Audrey had told her before she died was that Wilson had never known. The question that was burning in Savannah’s mind was why not? Her mother could no longer tell her. If she found her father, maybe he could.