Just One Night: Sex, Love & Stiletto Series (3 page)

Good one
.

Steven was shifting his weight, leaning into her so that he could pull something out of his back pocket.

Riley stared in horror at the shiny object in his hand before looking up at his eh-not-bad face. “Handcuffs?”

“Portable ones.”

Was there any other kind?

“I know you probably have your own, but—”

Riley held up a finger to stop him. “What part of me not mixing business with pleasure went over your head? Just because I write about something for my job doesn’t mean I want it in my personal life.”

Steven pulled back. “Is this part of the routine? Acting like you don’t want it?”

“No!”

He grinned. “Whew. For a second I thought the legendary Riley McKenna was a bit frigid.”

There it was. Her breaking point.

She may not have known how this all worked, but she
did
know it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Why did it always end this way? Just once she wanted to be treated like a
woman
instead of some sort of novelty lay.

Riley’s Irish temper officially snapped.

“Get out.”

Steven frowned in confusion. “We’re there?”

“No, we’re stuck in traffic. But get out.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Is this why you asked me out? Because you wanted to see if I lived up to my articles?”

“Oh, come on. It wasn’t just about that,” he said, holding out a placating hand. She slapped it away. “You know you’re hot.”

She continued to stare at him, and he relented. “Okay,
and
it’s a little bit like bedding a Bond girl, you know? Bragging rights, baby.”

“No, I don’t know. I’m not your Bond girl,” she snapped, trying to push him closer to the door and out of her cab. “And I’m definitely not your
baby
.”

“Jesus, what’s your deal?”

The guy looked confused, and somehow that just made it all worse. He genuinely had no clue that beneath the sex expert lay Riley McKenna the
person
. Or maybe he did know, and he didn’t care.

She couldn’t even get
that
mad at him. After all, she wasn’t exactly dying to know the person beneath the boring brown hair and ugly Italian shoes either.

“Christ, if you treat all guys this way, I don’t know how you get any material for your slutty articles.”

Maybe she could get a
little
mad at him. Still, she refused to let her expression change. No
way
was she letting him know he’d hit her weak spot. She hadn’t revealed it to
anybody
, and she wasn’t going to start with a too-tall douche bag.

The taxi driver had figured out there was no budding romance in the backseat and had pulled over despite the traffic having started to move again.

“Out,” she said again.

“This is nuts,” he muttered. “This was supposed to be an easy lay, and instead I’m getting dumped in the middle of a rainstorm.”

Easy lay, my ass
.

“Careful with your shoes!” she called as he slid into the wet night.

She saw his middle finger raised seconds before the door slammed.

Riley sucked in a breath. Mr. Good Enough just became Mr. Good for Nothing.

The cab resumed its slow crawl home, and Riley stared unseeingly out the blurry window, feeling nothing and everything all at once.

Anger. Regret. Confusion.

She’d done it again. She’d royally screwed up a chance to actually
experience
what it was she wrote about.

But he hadn’t been the right one.

Because with the right one, she wouldn’t be scared. With the right one, she knew she wouldn’t need to hide the truth.

And the truth was a whopper.

There was a running joke at the
Stiletto
office that Riley’s sexual partners outnumbered the New York City pigeon population.

But the truth was far worse.

The truth was, she could count her sexual encounters on one hand.

On one
thumb
, actually.

Because Riley McKenna, sex expert extraordinaire, was exactly one tepid, beer-fueled college encounter away from being a virgin.

But that wasn’t even the real problem, she thought as she pulled out her cellphone and turned it on. The
problem
was that the reason for her near-virgin status came down to one very sexy, very
off-limits
Sam Compton.

The only man she’d ever wanted. And the one man in New York City who didn’t want into her pants.

She glanced down at her phone. Nothing from Sam, but there was one more from her
mother.
You did that THING, didn’t you?

Riley rammed her head against the headrest.
You know, Mom? I think I did
.

For most New Yorkers, the chance to escape upstate was a welcome breath of fresh air. A chance to get away from the fast pace and frenetic energy of the city.

For Sam Compton, going upstate meant old cigarette smoke, stale crackers, and nonstop guilt trips.

He’d rather be anywhere else. Hell, driving Riley and her friends to the freaking outlet mall had been better than this, and that included a high-pitched debate on the advantages of waxing over shaving.

The view in the rearview mirror had been worth it though. Riley had been wearing this purple dress that kept climbing up her thighs …

Knock it off. She was on a date last night. With a guy she actually liked
.

Who
also
happened to be a guy Sam would like to punch, but that was pretty much par for the course when it came to his feelings on Riley’s men. He’d learned over the years to deal with it.

His mother let out a rough smoker’s cough, drawing Sam’s attention back to the family obligation at hand.

He made the trip every couple of months or so, and depending on his mother’s mood—and sobriety level—that was either too much or not nearly enough to make her happy.

His mother always seemed to want the opposite of whatever it was Sam was currently doing.

“I guess you can just set it on the shelf over there,” Helena Compton groused. “Don’t know why you brought it. You know I only drink gin and beer.”

Sam’s fingers tightened briefly on the bottle of whisky he’d brought with him, carefully nestled on the front seat of his truck all the way from Brooklyn.
His
whisky, from his first batch, from the distillery he’d created from nothing.

Granted, it wasn’t his first
bottle
. He wouldn’t waste
that
honor on her. But somehow he’d thought that maybe, beneath all the bitterness, she’d want a little piece of what Sam had been pouring his heart—and savings—into for the previous two years. So he’d brought her one
of the special first bottles, complete with the label he’d designed himself and had carefully applied just that morning.

He shouldn’t have bothered. Giving even a little bit of himself to his mother had always been a mistake.

“I know you like gin, Mom,” he said tersely as he set the bottle on a small beat-up bookshelf that served as her and her boyfriend’s home bar. “But Carl likes whisky, so I thought—”

“Carl likes Johnny Walker, not that overpriced, local organic shit.”

“It’s not organic,” he ground out. “And it’s not overpriced considering I brought it as a gift.”

Actually,
none
of his whisky was overpriced. It wasn’t priced at all. But he wasn’t about to tell his mom that he wasn’t making money from ROON Distillery. Yet.

Cashing in his 401(k) in order to open a distillery had given his old financial advisor a heart attack, but so far it had been worth it every single morning when Sam woke up and realized he didn’t have to put on the dreaded suit and tie and do the dog-and-pony dance in an office that he hated.

But his savings would only last him so long.

It was time to shit or get off the pot. Soon.

He’d deal with that later.

Sam took a deep breath, only to regret it when the smell of cigarette smoke singed his nostrils. You’d think a childhood’s worth of inhaling the stuff secondhand would have made him immune, but to him the scent was still reminiscent of yelling and disappointment.

“Where is Carl?” he asked, sitting carefully on the edge of a cracked-leather sofa.

“Working,” his mother snapped. “Some people have to do that, you know.”

Some
people didn’t include her, though. Sam seemed to remember her getting unemployment checks in the mail more often than she ever got a paycheck. Or alimony from one of her—count ’em
—six
ex-husbands. Carl at least had had the good sense not to marry her, but Helena had been so desperate to get out of their crumbling house in Brooklyn that she’d jumped at the chance to move upstate even without a cheap wedding ring on her finger.

And it was better for Sam too. Increased distance between him and his mother could only be a good thing.

“Where’s Carl working, still at that bar and grill up the road?”

“It’s not a bar and grill, Sam, it’s a just a
bar
. A shitty, run-down dive bar. He hates it, but he doesn’t have the luxury to up and quit and follow some piss-in-the-river dreams.”

Piss-in-the-river?
That was a new one.

She was always coming up with weird sayings that weren’t actual sayings, but they all pretty much conveyed the same sentiment: Only a loser would quit a promising career as an investment banker to start a distillery in a warehouse in Brooklyn.

The hell of it was, she’d hated it when he was an investment banker. He’d made the mistake of wearing a suit when he dropped by with her birthday gift four years earlier, and she’d accused him of being a yuppie poser.

Best as Sam could tell, she just didn’t want him to be happy.

But too bad for her, because he was the closest he’d been in years.

In his professional life anyway. On the personal front …

“Heard from Hannah lately?” she asked, pushing herself out of her recliner and finding a half-empty bottle of Beefeater’s on the shelf. At fifty, she was still pretty. That baffled him. Sure, there were some telltale lines around her mouth from the frowning and the smoking, but otherwise, for a woman who’d thrown away her life to laziness and alcohol and bad men, she was still inexplicably lovely. Granted, her clothes weren’t high-fashion, and they were too young for her age, but her hair was still thick and blond, her eyes still wide and blue, and she’d managed to avoid any middle-aged weight gain.

He watched her, not saying anything about her having unnecessarily shoved his own whisky out of the way to get to her gin. And he certainly didn’t bother mentioning that it wasn’t even two in the afternoon. It’d be a waste of breath.

Sam pushed his fingers into his eyes, wondering, as he always did, why he bothered coming here at all. “No, I haven’t heard from my ex-wife, Mom. I haven’t heard from her since we signed the papers and very amicably parted ways six years ago.”

But thanks for bringing it up
.

Although that wasn’t even fair. Hearing Hannah’s name didn’t cause so much as a pang. The shitty part of it was, not only could Sam not remember why they’d gotten divorced, he couldn’t even remember why they’d gotten married in the first place. And he wasn’t even sure either reason mattered. He and Hannah had been wrong for each other from the very first minute,
and by the end, they’d both known it.

Helena sniffed. “You can’t blame her for leaving you. If you were half as inattentive a husband as you are a son—”

Sam flopped back onto the couch. “Let’s have it, Mom. Just get it
alllll
out now. I’m listening.”

She angrily twisted the cap off a bottle of tonic. There was no fizzing noise, and certainly no ice, but she didn’t seem to care or notice as she dumped a splash into her glass. “All I’m saying is that it would be nice to see you once in a while.”

“Because you seem
so
happy I’m here.”

She returned to her recliner and studied him, and not for the first time he wondered why she disliked her only son so much. He’d like to think it was resentment over his father’s having knocked her up and disappeared. Getting stuck with a kid she didn’t want might turn even a nice woman a little bitter, and Helena Compton wasn’t a nice woman.

But blaming a man he’d never met seemed like a cop-out, and after a childhood of watching his mother blame every other person for her situation, Sam was big on responsibility for one’s lot in life.

Which meant his mother’s dislike of him was
his
failing.

But on days like today, he just couldn’t seem to care.

“So, you seeing anyone else?” she asked after several minutes of silence.

Sam sat up with a sigh, reaching out a hand to fiddle with the remote on the coffee table. Small talk. He could do this. “I was. Angela. Didn’t work out.”

“How come?”

Because a certain black-haired, blue-eyed bombshell sabotaged it by putting genital-wart pamphlets into my glove box, which Angela found when she was looking for a napkin
.

“Just didn’t work out,” he snapped.

“Why?”

Really?
The woman had six failed marriages under her belt, and she didn’t understand that sometimes—
most
of the time—relationships didn’t work.

She jabbed her cigarette in his direction. “I bet this Angela figured it out.”

Don’t bring up Riley. Don’t bring up Riley
.

“Figured what out?” he asked tersely.

“That you’re hung up on that McKenna whore.”

Sam froze even though he’d been ready for it. His mother knew his one weak spot and never
ever
failed to exploit it. His fingers clenched hard on the TV remote he’d been fiddling with. “Don’t. Don’t you
dare
.”

His mother sniffed and took a sip of her drink. “Riley was a nice-enough girl once, but she writes trash, Sam. One doesn’t get that kind of sexual experience without plenty of leg spreading.”

Sam saw red. “She could be the biggest name in
porn
, and I wouldn’t let you talk about Riley that way.”

Helena gave a mean little smile. “Like I said. Hung up on her.”