Just One Night(18)

plate to the clean stack.

Liam grunted. “Edgy is what Riley does. She’s not happy unless she’s pushing

buttons.”

Yeah. Usually my buttons. “Maybe it’s a guy,” Sam said, keeping his voice

carefully casual, hoping Liam wouldn’t sense that he was fishing.

Liam scowled and cast a look at his middle sister. “You think?”

I hope not.

But in Riley’s case, it probably wasn’t a guy. It was more likely guys. Plural.

Because despite the way he’d shut down his mother’s implication that she slept

around, it was no wonder Liam was so protective of Riley.

Riley’s career choice didn’t help matters. The woman was an honest-to-God sex

columnist.

Granted, Liam was protective of all his sisters. But of Riley in particular. Those

long legs, bright blue cat eyes, and sex-kitten waves were a big-brother

nightmare.

Just one more way in which the woman was trying to send him to an early grave.

If she’d done wonders for his fantasy life when she’d been a tomboyish soccer

player, her transformation into a sassy bedroom expert was pretty much

impossible to ignore.

Of course, he brought it upon himself by reading every single one of her articles.

It was torture. He couldn’t read her words without hearing her voice. And he

couldn’t hear her voice without picturing a na**d Riley giving him a front-row

demonstration of every one of her tips and tricks.

He thought about her article from a couple of months earlier, about taking charge:

It’s about control, ladies. Figure out if you want him beneath or above you. Ride

him or let him ride you. Own it.

Sam used the back of his hand to wipe the sweat from his forehead.

“Dish duty too much for you, Sammy?” Erin said as she moved around to put

away the salt and pepper shakers.

Christ. Just what he needed. Mrs. McKenna wanting to make small talk when he

was about half a dirty thought away from having a boner over her daughter.

“Didn’t Liam and I have dish duty last week?” he complained, pushing his

thoughts to safer territory.

Kate made a scolding noise from the kitchen counter, never looking up from her

enormous textbook. “The coin doesn’t lie, Sam. Heads means the men are on

dish duty.”

“Yeah, but there are more of you women,” Liam countered. “It’s not fair.”

Megan poked her head out of her mother’s baking drawer. “It’s not our fault that

Patrick got a hair up his butt to move to Boston and that Brian’s on diaper duty.”

“Actually that last one is your fault, seeing as your husband’s changing the diaper

of your son,” Kate told her sister, ever the pragmatist.

“Thank you for that bit of useful logic, dear,” Erin said mildly.

Sam snuck a look at Riley as Liam launched into demands to see the coin

(because clearly the damn thing had two heads). This sort of ridiculous McKenna

family spat was usually right up Riley’s alley. But her eyes never left the book

where Lily was painstakingly sounding out every syllable.

Sam knew he should maybe apologize for what he’d said about her vast sexual

experience. It had been out of jealousy, but she wouldn’t know that. Instead she’d

just looked … stung.

Still, Riley herself had fostered her brand as the queen of sex. Not in front of her

family, obviously—Liam would have a heart attack, to say nothing of her poor

father—but how many times had she thrown her many men in his face when there

were just the two of them?

Just like he threw his occasional woman in hers.

It was part of the game they played. He just wasn’t exactly sure why they played

it. All he knew was that he let Riley think things with Angela were a lot more

serious than they had actually been.

Which raised another nagging thought … if he was misleading her about his love

life, might she be misleading him about hers?

It would explain why she looked like he’d slapped her with his crack about her

rather busy sex life. He hadn’t meant it as a swipe—he wasn’t so much a

Neanderthal that he didn’t think women deserved a healthy, varied sex life every

bit as much as men did.

But if he was wrong …

Didn’t he know firsthand how much it sucked to have people make unfounded

assumptions?

His eyes fell on the Stiletto magazine her mother had laid out as he moved to put

a stack of plates away. Nah. He couldn’t be wrong. No way could she write the

way she did, with that candid, sultry style, unless she was speaking from personal

experience. And since he’d never known her to have a serious relationship, that

meant she was doing a lot of playing the field.