Riley fanned herself with the bar menu she’d snatched up. “You must have to beat the women off.”

She froze as soon as the words escaped. “Oh God. You’re not seeing anyone, are you?”

Sam gave her a dark look. “You really think I’d agree to your stupid sex plan if I was seeing someone else?”

“You mad I ruined things with Angela?”

“Nah. Wasn’t really going to work out anyway, you know?”

“Um, yeah. I’ve had one or two of those,” she said dryly.

“Brent?” he asked.

She shifted nervously. “Um, Brent was …”

“A tool to make me comply with your plan?”

“I knew you knew,” she muttered, before turning to order her drink. She wasn’t exactly thrilled to have used Brent, but she’d assuaged her conscience slightly by setting him up with one of Stiletto’s copy editors.

One of Stiletto’s very cute copy editors, who was just vain enough to not mind that Brent occasionally checked his reflection in silverware.

It didn’t really surprise her that Sam had figured out her plan. What did surprise her was that he’d known about it the whole time, and still let himself go along with it.

Interesting.

“So you’re not seeing Brent, and I’m not seeing anyone,” he said as the bartender placed the Manhattan in front of her.

Riley tapped the tip of her nose with her finger. “Nothing gets by you.”

He let out a long-suffering sigh. “I’m glad to see that you’re not any less difficult to get along with when you’re about to sleep with a guy.”

Her pulse skipped into overdrive. She’d sat with Sam so many times like this over the years, that she’d almost—almost—forgotten the reason they were here.

She felt him studying her.

“You’re jumpy,” he said. “For someone who does this for a living …”

“Now hold on there,” she snapped. “I don’t do this for a living. I write about sex for a living, I don’t have sex for a living. There’s a huge difference.”

“Is there?”

You have no idea. “Yes. One’s a journalist and one’s a hooker.”

“You’d make a terrible hooker,” he muttered.

“Taking that as a compliment.”

“Wasn’t meant as one. You’d be an awful prostitute because you’re too mouthy.”

She gave him a hooded look. “Mouthy’s a bad thing?”

Sam merely rolled his eyes. “Leave it to the sex journalist to pounce on double entendres.”

Riley refused to let herself scowl. He wasn’t at all acting like a man overcome with lust. Instead he was acting like a slightly disgruntled friend who’d been asked for a favor. In fact, she’d seen this version of Sam a number of times before. For example, when he’d grudgingly helped her move. Or when he came over to fix her garbage disposal because her landlord was in Russia.

“Tell me something,” she said, turning in her seat to face him.

He grunted and tipped his whisky to his mouth. “I don’t suppose I have the option to pass?”

She ignored this. “What would you normally be doing right now?”

“You mean on an average Friday night when I haven’t been roped into the worst idea in the history of sex?”

“You won’t think it’s such a bad idea when you see my black lacy lingerie.”

He choked. “Seriously?”

She gave a little cat smile. So he wasn’t immune. Good. “I mean what would you be doing right now if you were on a real date with someone else?”

He signaled for another drink. “I’d be doing what most guys do with a hot woman. Trying to get into her pants.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “On the first date?”

“Always worth a shot.”

She was intrigued in spite of herself. “Does it usually work?”

“Sometimes—if the mood’s right. More often it’s laying the groundwork for whatever date she will sleep with me.”

“So it’s all about sex.”

His eyes flicked to hers. “Pretty much.”

“But not with Hannah.”

He groaned. “We are not talking about the ex-wife.”

“You never want to talk about her,” she said, taking a sip of her drink and trying to disguise just how badly she wanted the details on his failed marriage.

“That’s because we were married for all of, like, twelve minutes. I’m surprised you even noticed.”

You were married for two years. And I noticed. You have no idea how much I noticed.

“I barely remember it,” she lied. “I came home from college, and there you were like always. Except with a wife.”

She practically snarled the last word, and he glanced at her curiously. “You brought a guy home from college that trip, right?”

“You remember that?”

“Sure. I thought Liam was going to lose his mind.”

“Dan was hardly the type of guy to make anyone lose their mind,” Riley said, mostly to herself.

“Well, you must have been smitten enough to introduce him to the family.”

I wanted to make you jealous.

In fact, it had been the bomb of Sam’s wedding that had driven Riley to her first and only sexual experience with poor Dan. So in a warped way, perhaps this very predicament was the result of Sam’s brief and failed marriage. Without it, she wouldn’t have slept with Dan before she was ready. And without that underwhelming experience, she wouldn’t have avoided sex for years only to realize that she’d waited too long and was hopelessly clueless about where to even start.

“What happened with you guys?” she asked, steering the conversation away from her mistake to Sam’s.

He sighed. “Do we have to talk about this?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t Stiletto articles frown on discussing ex-wives on the first date?”

“This isn’t a first date.”

His light blue eyes found hers. “But it’s a first something.”

Riley’s stomach flipped. “Just tell me what happened.”

Sam looked away. “Short version? We got married too fast. We were too young.”

“Then why’d you do it?”

He took a drink. “Honestly? No idea. We were drunk, she suggested it, and I was …”

“You were what?” she prodded when he broke off.

“I was going through a phase. My mom had just broken up with her most recent guy—one she’d sworn she was going to marry, and I just … didn’t want that. I looked at my mom and her string of meaningless relationships, and then I looked at your parents with their constancy and their happy family dinners, and I picked the more appealing one.”

“But it didn’t work out like that,” she said quietly.

“Nah. Hannah was a nice enough girl, but she wanted the title of wife a lot more than she wanted an actual husband. More than she wanted me.”

Foolish girl.

“The divorce was just as quick and quiet as the marriage, and I realized that maybe I’m a lot more like my mom than I knew.”

Riley’s heart twisted at the cold indifference in his voice. No you’re not.

But Sam was right about one thing—this was hardly first-date talk. The last thing she wanted to be thinking about right now was how she’d cried herself to sleep the night she learned he was married.

“So if I were someone else …,” she prompted.

“Believe me, right about now I’m wishing you would be.”

“Hey!” she said, stung.

Sam pulled his earlobe. “That came out wrong. I just meant that I wish it wasn’t my best friend’s baby sister whose lingerie I can’t stop thinking about.”

“Huh,” she said, not bothering to hide her smile. “So guys really are suckers for black lace.”

He gave her a curious look. “Don’t you know?”

Riley’s smile slipped. Right. A sex goddess would know that.

Backpedal, backpedal …

“Don’t try to change the subject,” she said. “If I were someone else … if you weren’t already one hundred percent confident that I was going to put out at the end of this, what would you be doing now?”

She tried to keep her tone light and conversational, but Sam Compton had known her far too long and gave her a knowing look.

“Riley McKenna, are you asking me to put my moves on you?”

She pretended to consider this. “Your moves … I’m pretty sure I’ve seen all of those when you’ve been with Liam. That’s like where guys stare at boobs and grunt, right?”

Instead of getting defensive, Sam merely grinned. “Honey, you’ve never seen me in action.”

And why not? she wanted to ask. I’ve been right here the whole time.

“So show me what Sam Compton looks like in courtship,” she said boldly.

He shook his head. “Too late for that. Your whole let’s-have-sex-so-I-can-write-about-it proposal threw off my timetable.”

“What, is your whole routine scripted or something? Did you miss the crucial cues?”

“The only cues I missed from you were the boring ones. I caught on to the ones that mattered. Like the flaunting of a guy who was all wrong for you in my face like a red flag in front of a bull.”

Oh, well done, you. It only took you ten years.

“So what’s next?” she asked, letting the tip of her boot “accidentally” brush against his calf as she inched closer. “Let’s pretend we did this the slow, boring way, and have jumped through all the dull courtship hoops. What now?”

Sam tossed back the rest of his drink. “I thought you’d never ask.”

His lips took hers.

The kiss was more restrained than the first one, given that they were in a public place, but it was no less potent. He kept his hands to himself, keeping her close with the sheer skill of his mouth against hers.

It wasn’t the kiss of a man exploring a new woman.

It was the kiss of a man who knew his woman—knew what she liked.

And Riley liked it all. She liked the way he tasted like whisky and mint, liked the way his kiss was slow and unhurried.

But mostly she liked that it was Sam on the other end of this perfect kiss. It was a moment she’d dreamed about since she was seventeen.

It blew her fantasies out of the water, and he hadn’t even gotten his hands on her yet.

This was the moment she’d waited for for so long. That moment when a kiss wasn’t enough. That moment when she wanted more, and wanted it now.

Sam pulled back long before she was done with the kiss, and it took her a full thirty seconds to reorient herself.

“So?” he asked. “How were my moves?”

She lifted her cocktail glass to her lips, careful not to look his way. “Not bad.”

“Not bad?” he growled.

“It was good, really. But is that all you’ve got?” Riley licked a drop of whisky out of the corner of her mouth.

“Hell no, it’s—Jesus. We’re not going to get through dinner if you keep doing that thing with your tongue.”

“So let’s skip it.”

“Skip what?”

“Dinner.”

Sam stared at her, and she stared right back. “Somehow I didn’t think the day would ever come when I heard those words come out of Riley McKenna’s mouth. You love food.”

Riley’s hand found his leg. Scratched slightly against his jeans. “Maybe tonight I want to love something else.”

He closed his eyes, shaking his head slightly. Then he shifted, pulling out his wallet. “We’re going to regret this.”

“Maybe.”

“You have about thirty seconds to change your mind, but after that …”

Riley’s fingers found his wrist, tilting the face of his watch toward her. “Twenty-two seconds … seventeen …”

“Riley.”

Her head snapped up at the seriousness in his tone.

“This is a onetime deal. One night to get whatever you need for your story, and then we go back to normal.”

She swallowed. Nodded.

For now, she mentally added.

“Say it out loud,” he said. “This can never be something.”

She wanted to ask why. Wanted to demand that he open his eyes and see how good they could be together. But because she knew him—knew everything about him—she knew if she pushed too soon, he’d run.

“Okay,” she whispered. “Just one night.”

He searched her face as though for any indication that she was going to keep him chained up in her closet until the end of days.

Then he smiled. “Let’s go make it a hell of a night.”

Chapter Nine

Sam had booked a hotel room for the night, and no matter how much she protested that it was ridiculous when she lived a short cab ride away, he refused to go back to her place.

“That’ll make it personal,” he insisted. “What happens when I have to stop by your apartment to change a lightbulb or pick up the free Yankees tickets you always seem to have access to? I’ll be forever thinking of you naked.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing,” she grumbled as he helped her out of the cab.

Sam’s fingers tightened on her hand, stilling her as he looked her over. “Believe me. I don’t think any man would ever say that you na*ed is a bad thing.”

“Hotels are expensive,” she said, staring up at the nice, if not trendy hotel before them.

“Riley,” he said, squeezing her hand. “Let me do this, okay?”

Fine. On the bright side, the time it took him to check in at the front desk gave her a second to gather her thoughts. She guessed she had about five minutes to figure out how to play this.

Did she tell him that when it came to sex, she talked a good game and knew precisely where the male gen**als were located, even if she hadn’t—ahem—handled them?

Or did she fake her way through it in hopes that an above-average sex IQ on paper could disguise lack of actual experience?

Sam glanced over his shoulder as the hotel desk clerk did her thing on the computer screen, and the smile he gave her was pure sex.

She’d been on the receiving end of that look before, of course. But this was the first time she intended to act on it. No, that wasn’t true. She’d intended plenty of times.