Hot as Sin by Bella Andre

couldn’t make himself get out of the chair and say good-bye. He just wasn’t ready to leave her. Not yet.
    Not when looking at her and talking with her still did funny things to his insides, made him wish things had turned out differently for them.
    There was only one solution to his problem, only one way to get his ass moving out the door. He needed to rewind back to that day when he’d walked in the front door of their tiny apartment, into the silence, the emptiness, and realized she was gone. And wasn’t ever coming back.
    For ten years, he’d been in the dark about why she’d left him. He could deal with being dumped. People got out of relationships all the time.
    What he couldn’t stand was not knowing why.
    It was finally time to find out.
    “I’m going to head out in a minute,” he told her, more than a little surprised by the answering flicker of disappointment in her eyes. “But before I do, I’ve got a question for you. It’s something I’ve been wondering for a very long time.”
    For a split second, her eyes widened with alarm. Remorse for the pile of bones he was about to unearth hit him square in the chest. If she were injured at all, he wouldn’t have gone here, he told himself, as if it was some kind of absolution.
    She straightened her spine, moving away slightly from the pillows, and lifted her chin. “Go ahead.”
    Shit , Sam thought. He should have taken the high road. Instead, he’d started down a road with no exits.
    And now he couldn’t leave without hearing the truth.
    “Why did you leave?”
    Her mouth opened. Then closed. She shook her head, disbelief clouding her beautiful green eyes.
    “You honestly don’t know?”
    He was at least as surprised by her response as she seemed to be by his question.
    He bit back a quick retort, knowing he’d regret it. And then her cell phone rang and she seemed glad to turn away from him and pull it out of her bag.
    She quickly flipped it open. “April?”
    And then suddenly, Dianna’s face lost all of its color and she kicked the blankets off of her legs to stand up too quickly.
    Forgetting the need to keep his distance, Sam reached for her before she could fall and held her steady against his chest. He could feel her heart beating rapidly, and instinctively knew it had nothing to do with their close physical proximity.
    Something was wrong.
    “Where are you?” She held her breath as she listened to April’s reply, then urged, “You need to tell me more than that. You need to tell me exactly where you are so that I can find you.”
    A few seconds later, Dianna pulled the phone away from her ear and began frantically pressing buttons before the phone dropped to the floor. When she looked up at him, he saw eyes as bleak as the ones that had stared back at him after her miscarriage.
    “What’s wrong?” he asked as carefully as he would a fire victim who’d just seen her house and all of her possessions go up in flames.
    “My sister’s in trouble. She needs my help.”

CHAPTER SIX
    APRIL KELLEY hated how scared she was.
    Her jaw was throbbing and there was tape around her mouth, hands, and ankles. Blinking hard to clear her foggy vision, when she looked up she realized she was sitting on the floor of a coat closet.
    She’d never been a big fan of small, enclosed spaces, not after one of her foster families had made her sleep in a windowless room about the size of a closet for a couple of weeks when she was seven. The long hanging jackets brushing against the top of her head and shoulders made her feel even more claustrophobic, and she shivered, her teeth somehow managing to clank together behind the tape.
    She wasn’t asthmatic, but the various pediatricians she’d had over the years claimed she hovered right on the brink of the disease. Feeling her lungs start to seize up, she forced herself to take long, slow breaths in and out of her nose. Dianna had been really into meditation for a while and even though she’d thought it was