“What were you and your mom talking about?” he said, following her toward the front door. “Looked like I walked in on something awkward.”

“Nice subject change,” she said, using her toe to open the front door she’d left cracked. “And it was awkward. My mom wanted to know if my most recent BDSM article was based on personal experience.”

Sam whistled. “Whew. Go Erin.”

“Speaking of mothers, how’s yours?”

His easy smile vanished. “Fine.”

Riley tilted her head and gave him a look. “Don’t fine me. I know you.”

He rolled his shoulders. “Okay. She’s nasty and mean and still hates my guts. Good enough?”

“Sam—” She set a hand on his arm, but he jerked back.

“Drop it, Ri.”

Riley saw the pain in his eyes and was desperate to hug him, but she knew better. He wouldn’t push her away, but the emotional wall he had around himself would grow even thicker.

Instead she forced a smile and returned them to safer territory. “Aren’t you going to ask?”

His brow furrowed, his expression still wary. “Ask what?”

“About the spanking. If it’s based on personal experience.”

To her surprise and dismay, he laughed. “God no. I don’t need to ask.”

It was her turn to frown. “Because you don’t care one way or another?”

His gaze flickered and his smile faded. “Well, for starters, your brother would kill me if he knew I even so much as glanced at one of your articles. But mostly I don’t need to ask because I already know the answer.”

He edged by her, heading through the hall toward the kitchen.

“You do not!” she called after him.

Sam turned around, walking backward with a little smirk. “Ri, most of the city knows you have more bedroom experience than the average Las Vegas showgirl. But don’t worry. I won’t tell your brothers. Or your dad.”

He turned back around, disappearing into the kitchen, and thank God for that, because letting Sam Compton see her tears was one path she was never going down.

But beneath the tears threatening to overflow was something else. Something deeper and darker.

It was the desire to tell Sam just how wrong about her he was.

Chapter Five

Sam Compton already knew what would kill him one day: Riley McKenna.

Or more precisely, it was keeping his hands off Riley McKenna that would kill him.

Because a heterosexual man didn’t spend a decade in the company of a woman who looked like Riley without touching her.

Not unless he wanted to die a slow, torturous death by sexual frustration.

Riley, on the other hand, was blissfully unaware of Sam’s plight and was quite likely to die as the hottest old lady on the block, completely blind to the fact that she’d killed ol’ Sam Compton simply by being the most gorgeous woman alive.

But it wasn’t just her killer body that would do him in. Oh no. It was the entire package. Because Riley was a serious pain in the ass. His ass.

Also?

He was a jerk. A first-rate shit.

Just days after telling off his mom for calling Riley a whore, he’d all but done the same thing.

He hadn’t meant that crack about her job like that. At all.

But still …

He was an ass. The biggest.

And now, ever since they’d fetched the margarita fixings from the truck, she’d been avoiding him. That wasn’t normal.

He didn’t like it.

“Hey, does Riley seem weird to you tonight?” Sam quietly asked Liam as the two of them tag-teamed dish duty.

Liam gave him a look. “You’re asking me if I think my little sister is weird. That’s like asking the pope if he goes to mass on Easter.”

“Kate and Megan aren’t weird.”

“Sure they are. Did you not hear Kate go on for twenty minutes on Nietzsche’s perspective on dichotomy? I couldn’t keep up with that shit even without the margaritas.”

Sam took the wet dinner plate Liam held out and dried it, his eyes never leaving the kitchen table, where Riley sat reading a story about a friendly blue ferret to her niece.

The effect of them together, the gorgeous woman with the little girl … unsettling.

Five-year-old Lily was the spitting image of her aunt. There was no sign of her mother’s dark red hair, nor her father’s dirty blond. With the little girl’s tilted blue eyes and long, shiny black curls, he could have been looking at Riley twenty years earlier.

And the sight of the mini Riley on the real Riley’s lap looking very mother-daughter did something treacherous in the vicinity of his chest.

Do not go there, Compton.

The self–pep talks sometimes worked. Most of the time they didn’t.

“Kate has a philosophy exam on Friday. She’s entitled to be preoccupied,” Sam replied, jerking his attention back to the conversation with his best friend.

Liam shook his head. “My point is, all my sisters are weirdos. I mean, look at Megan. She’s currently raiding my mother’s baking supplies for a dolphin-shaped cookie cutter. Hardly normal.”

“It’s normal for moms,” Sam said easily.

At least it was for the good moms. His own mom’s idea of making cookies was a package of Oreos, which would inevitably be stale because neither she nor her boyfriend of the week had bothered to seal the package back up.

“I’m just saying, Ri just seems edgier than usual,” Sam said as he added the dry 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*ed 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.

Which was fine. He did the same. It was just …

Hell no. It wasn’t fine. And that was the problem.

The only person who should be spanking Riley’s swimsuit-model-worthy ass was him. There were just a few hiccups.

First, her father might kill him. And Liam likely would kill him, because he’d sworn to his best friend that he’d keep his hands off his baby sister.

And the biggest problem? He wasn’t even remotely worthy of her, and he was pretty sure she knew it. Sure, maybe there was that … thing that happened whenever they made eye contact or accidentally touched.

Even she couldn’t deny that there was some serious physical chemistry there.

But it wasn’t something she’d act on. Riley’s men were brokers in bespoke suits (a term he hadn’t even known until he’d had to meet one of these overpaid bores at Kate’s birthday party last year), who stopped off to get manicures on their way to overpriced cocktail bars. They were the ones who had access to luxury suites at Yankee Stadium, rather than saving their pennies for an extra seat in the nosebleed section.

Riley’s men certainly weren’t rough-around-the edges Brooklyn natives who only owned one pair of pants that wasn’t denim. And he didn’t even know where those were.

In other words, it didn’t matter how badly he wanted her—and he did want her, acutely.

But at the end of the day, she wasn’t for him. Wouldn’t ever be for him.

“Dude. I think it’s dry.”

Liam grabbed the pot that Sam had been absently drying for the better part of five minutes.

“Liam, honey, would you walk Riley to the subway station?”

Sam snapped to attention. Riley was leaving?

Sure enough, she was shrugging on her fancy trench coat and doing a damn good job of not looking at him.

“Ma, I don’t need someone to walk me to the subway station,” she protested. “I’ve been doing it on my own since third grade.”

Erin moved in to fuss with Riley’s collar. “Yes, but that’s before Mr. Blanton thought he saw an intruder in his front yard last week.”

Riley rolled her eyes. “Mr. Blanton also mistakes his own cat for the mailman. I think I can manage the five-minute walk.”

Her mother ignored this. “Liam?”

Liam popped the top on his beer. “Is Dad still doing his nightly walk? Maybe Riley can tag along and they can detour to the train stop.”

“Your father’s ‘nightly walk routine’ is simply on his weekly rotation of reasons he can’t do the dishes.”

Liam’s beer can paused halfway to his mouth. “Wait. Rotation?”

Erin gave him a look.

“Damn,” Liam muttered. “So his arthritis isn’t aggravated by water?”

“What arthritis?” Erin said with an amused lift of her eyebrows.

“Wily old bastard,” Liam muttered. “Fine. I’ll take baby sister to the subway. But you’d better have your MetroCard this time, Ri, because I’m not falling for the old—”

“I’ll walk her.” The words were out before Sam realized he’d opened his mouth.

Riley’s head snapped around, fierce blue eyes boring into his. No.

“I don’t need anyone to walk me,” she said through gritted teeth.

Liam patted her head and made his way toward the living room. “Mom says you do.”

And in the McKenna household, that was enough.

Riley’s shoulders sagged only briefly before she straightened and lifted her chin. “Fine.” She leaned in and pecked her mom’s cheek. “Love you. Thanks for dinner.”

Erin cupped her daughter’s face. “You remember what we talked about, okay? The passion?”

“Ma!”

“Told you she was a prude,” Kate muttered not so quietly to Megan.

Sam’s eyebrows crept up. Now, this was interesting.

Riley pointed at both sisters, her glare livid. “We are not having this conversation right now.”

“Definitely a prude,” Megan whispered.

Riley let out a huff of frustration before heading toward the front door. “Come on, guard dog,” she snapped, not bothering to look at him as she stormed past.

Wordlessly Sam trailed after her, grabbing his leather jacket on his way out the door, hoping it was cooler out than when he’d arrived.

The irate Irish wench marching down the sidewalk needed to cool off.

“Wait up,” he called.