Free Heat Up the Night by Skylar Kade Page A

took a moment and folded everything atop his dresser, then left.
    He debated leaving her a note, but he’d only be gone an hour, and Tovia would sleep late. She’d confessed, during one of their late-night chats, that she loved working the mid shift so she could sleep in and stay up late. The Vegas life suited his woman.
    Besides, given everything he needed so say, a note just wouldn’t suffice.
    With a soft click, he closed the door behind him and headed for the stairs, eager for his run to begin. He needed a little clarity, and it could come none too soon.

Chapter 12
    A ringing phone yanked her from a dream chock full of warm fuzzies. She fumbled for it, not wanting the noise to wake Keilor. Through bleary eyes, she checked the caller ID and saw her sister.
    “’Lo?” She cleared her throat and shoved a hand through her hair to get it out of her face.
    “Oh thank God!” Her melodramatic sister had an added panic to her voice this morning. If this was the result of her first breakup, maybe Amelia Douglas was right to keep her youngest daughter away from men.
    “You know it’s the asscrack of dawn, right?” Not a morning person was an overly generous description of Tovia, who didn’t quite feel human until after long, hot shower and industrial-strength coffee ran through her veins. She turned over to make sure she hadn’t woken Keilor, then frowned at the empty bed.
    It was only seven a.m., so he should still be asleep. They kept near the same schedule, and he didn’t have a crazy sister calling him at all hours. She thought.
    Her frown deepened. They hadn’t really talked about family. She’d always steered away from that conversation, not wanting to explain…any of it, not more than she had during The Great TearFest.
    “…Mom’s in the hospital!” Her sister’s dog-whistle exclamation retracted Tovia’s attention from her missing…lover? Partner? Dom? In a chill rush, last night’s events flooded her, superseded only by her sister’s last statement.
    The hospital? “Rachel, calm down. Amelia checked herself in just a couple weeks ago for nothing.” If this was another bid for attention, then Tovia didn’t have one ounce of guilt over their conversation yesterday.
    Silence. Dread pooled in her stomach. Rachel was never silent. One sniffle, then another, came through the line. “She had a heart attack.”
    Rachel’s statement was so soft, so unbelievable, that Tovia did a mental double take. As the avalanche of panic started falling on her, Tovia partitioned, walling herself off from everything—her sister’s panic, her mother’s health, Keilor—except the facts. “Rachel, where are you now?”
    Another sob. “Spring Valley Hospital.”
    What the fuck? “Why are you here and not in Boston? Don’t you have exams coming up?”
    “They called me last night and I caught a red-eye. They said they couldn’t get hold of you.”
    Guilt crashed through her triage walls. “When is your next final?” Tovia put her cell on speakerphone and searched the room for the clothes she’d balled up on the floor, supremely confused when she found them folded on the dresser.
    “My econ professor is letting me take the final tomorrow. But I don’t know if I can make it and I haven’t finished studying and they won’t tell me when Mom’s getting out and I had no idea where you were and—”
    “Rachel!” Tovia let her eyes sink closed. Her sister’s panic sank teeth into her neck, which was already prickling from the state of her clothes. Her neatly folded outfit, the empty bed, the silent apartment, all implied a polite get out . Whether she was reading into it or not, she needed to leave, now. Glancing around the room, then poking her head out to look over the main room, Tovia hoped she’d see a note from him. She wanted certainty. Closure, maybe.
    He’d left nothing and she wouldn’t wait around for Keilor to return. She’d put him before her mother once already, and that had blown up in her