Hot as Sin (Hot Shots: Men of Fire #2)(15)
Author: Bella Andre

But before latent anger could get the best of him, he told himself to get over it. They’d both started fresh. They’d both come out of the relationship just fine. He still had his wildfires. And she had the whole world at her feet. Neither of them had a damn thing to complain about—apart from her car accident, of course.

“I saw you on the airplane,” her friend said. “If I’d known that you were coming to see Dianna, I would have given you a ride.”

She turned to Dianna and whispered, “This is the guy I was telling you about,” loud enough for him to overhear.

Dianna and her friend had been talking about him? Interesting.

He let one side of his mouth quirk into a charming half smile. Ellen responded as expected, her eyes and mouth growing soft, an answering smile on her lips.

She was clearly still trying and failing to cover her shock at hearing that he and Dianna had once been an item. Practically husband and wife, with a white picket fence and everything.

“I heard Dianna was in a car accident,” he said to the woman. “And I wanted to see for myself that she was all right.”

“I’m fine,” Dianna said, her warm, slightly husky voice washing over him, making a beeline for his groin.

Her colorless face and tightly pinched lips belied her relaxed words and he was selfishly glad to know that he wasn’t the only one having a hard time with their impromptu reunion.

“I’m glad to see that,” he said, even though the truth was, he hadn’t expected to come all this way to find her sitting on the edge of the hospital bed in designer clothes that probably cost more than he made in a week.

What an idiot he was for actually thinking she needed him.

At the same time, he wanted to drop to his knees to give thanks that she’d survived the head-on, that she wasn’t wrapped head to toe in bandages, that there weren’t doctors hovering over her, pumping blood into her, stitching up her organs while they tried to keep her alive.

The air in the room was strained and heavy. Ellen’s eyes jumped between the two of them, back and forth several times, as if they were playing a tennis match.

Finally she offered, “I’ve got some phone calls to make for this week’s lineup. I’ll give you two some privacy.”

Dianna nodded, her lips still pursed tightly, two pink spots of color emerging beneath her cheekbones.

“Sounds like a good plan.”

“Call my cell when you want me to come back,” Ellen told Dianna before she squeezed past him out the door.

Closing it behind her, Sam finally moved toward the bed.

Dianna’s scent used to be fresh soap. The green Irish Spring bar. Now, she smelled expensive. Foreign. Out of his reach.

He didn’t like it.

As much as he didn’t like the inch of makeup she’d applied to her face with a spatula. She’d never needed anything to “fix” her beautiful, golden skin. Maybe all that makeup worked on TV, but it looked all wrong to Sam.

Those months they were together a decade ago, he’d thought he knew her. But when she left, he’d questioned everything. Seeing her now only confirmed those doubts. The old Dianna would have been simply glad to be alive after the car crash. The new one was clearly concerned with looking pretty.

Moving his gaze back to her face, he could see her mind racing behind her clear, apparently calm green eyes. She was trying to figure out how best to deal with him.

Hell, he was working out the same thing.

“What are you doing here, Sam?”

He didn’t know how he’d expected her to react to his showing up unannounced, but given the sparkling jewels on her fingers and ears he’d have bet on cold and distant, that he was merely one of the many peons coming to worship at her feet.

He was surprised by the heat beneath her words, the unspoken accusation that he shouldn’t have come—and that she didn’t want him here.

Didn’t she realize he hadn’t had any other choice but to get on the next plane to Colorado? That hearing about her accident had sent him into a tailspin, into his own head-on collision with the past?

He’d never been one for telling lies. He wasn’t going to start now.

“I needed to make sure you were okay.”

He wasn’t saying anything she couldn’t have figured out for herself and he didn’t feel as if he was giving away a deep dark secret. But when her eyes suddenly softened and she unclamped her jaw, he found himself adding, “Connor told me about your accident and I was worried about you. I couldn’t sit at home without knowing how you were doing, without seeing you for myself. Considering how bad they said the crash was, you look good.”

He desperately wanted to reach out to her, to touch her skin, to see if it was still silky soft.

“You don’t just look good, Dianna. You look amazing. Simply amazing.”

Dianna was stunned not only by his presence, but by everything he was saying.

She didn’t know what to think. What to say. Where to look.

She wanted to stare at him, drink in his tanned skin, the sexy new lines on his face. She wanted to continue studying him until she figured out when and how he’d changed from the hot young firefighter she’d loved to this mature man, who looked rough and hard in all the right places and soft in none.

She forgot everything as she looked at him, her worries about April and the accident shrinking to a small glimmer in the back of her mind. All this time she’d convinced herself that she’d left her past behind her, but simply seeing Sam was pushing every last one of her painful emotions back up to the surface.

She was frightened by the attraction that still simmered between them. But most of all, she was alarmed by how much she loved seeing him, by how much it mattered to her that he came all the way to Colorado to check on her.

The last time she’d cared this much about Sam, he’d broken her heart.

Somehow, she needed to stop herself from falling all over again.

Thus far, she hadn’t managed to play it cool, which was crazy. She was a master of cool. She’d been in a hundred uncomfortable situations on her TV set. She needed to draw on those experiences and pull herself together.

So although she was dying to know every last detail about the last ten years of Sam’s life, she wouldn’t allow herself to give in to her curiosity. Instead, she’d assuage it by asking about his brother. She’d be polite. Interested, of course, because she’d always liked Connor. But she’d pull back before the conversation had any chance of going too deep.