“I feel like that’s just a dirty joke waiting to happen.”
“Well, then lay it on me. I promise to laugh even if it’s not funny,” he said, clinking his glass against hers.
Riley pursed her lips. “Coming up blank. My mind’s too pure.”
Sam snorted. “Right. The picture of naiveté in a skintight dress.”
“I think you like my skintight dress.”
Sam froze for a split second in the process of rinsing out the cocktail shaker before he very deliberately turned it upside down on a towel to dry and braced both hands on the counter. “What the hell are you up to, Riley?”
She carefully crossed her legs and took a sip of the cocktail. “This is good,” she said, mildly surprised. “Your whisky is perfect in here. Sweet, but not obnoxiously so.”
He made a tsk-tsk noise. “Trying to change the subject by using flattery? I thought better of your moves.”
“Honey, you haven’t even seen my moves yet.”
“So sneaking in the back door of a man’s home, snooping through his stuff, and then startling the shit out of him isn’t your typical MO?”
“How do you know I snooped through your stuff?”
“Didn’t you?”
“Well, of course,” she said, fishing the cherry out of her drink. “But it was a total waste of time. There was no diary or dirty magazine or leopard-print boxers.”
“Clearly you didn’t look in the bottom right drawer.”
“Big secrets there, huh?”
“I’m not really a secret kind of guy.”
“Says the man who guards his whisky-making business more closely than a nuclear plant.”
He looked surprised. “I don’t keep this a secret.”
“Really? Then why haven’t I been here since you first bought the place?”
“Well, I haven’t been hosting a bunch of bridal showers in my place of work. I mean, you haven’t exactly been badgering me to stop by the Stiletto office.”
“You so do not belong in that office,” she said, her eyes going over his jeans and workingman T-shirt.
His eyes flashed in hurt surprise, and she belatedly realized how condescending that sounded. “I didn’t mean … it’s just … you’re so male.”
“No guys at Stiletto?”
“Only Oliver, and let’s just say he gets manicures every Monday and Friday and collects Justin Timberlake calendars.”
“I like Justin Timberlake’s music.”
“Shirtless calendars,” she added.
“So you really didn’t look in my bottom right drawer, then.”
Riley smiled, taking another small sip of whisky. “I’ve missed this. It’s been a while since we’ve done this.”
There was that wariness again. “Done what, exactly? Bickered? Tried to get under each other’s skin?”
“I was going to say talked.”