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