And for the life of him, he didn’t know how to maintain the easy camaraderie and that deeper, something-more connection.

But he was beginning to think he wanted to try.

“You like your job at Stiletto,” he said, hoping to draw her into casual conversation. “It’s obvious from how comfortable you are with your coworkers, and the fact that you’re just as excited about Mondays as Fridays.”

Confusion flittered across her face, and he felt a tiny stab of regret that she was surprised by his interest in her life. Not that he could blame her. They’d been pushing and pulling for so many years, they’d nearly forgotten how to just be present in each other’s company.

It was time to change that.

“Of course I like it,” she said.

Sam shook his head. “There’s no of course about it. Trust me, liking one’s job is a rarity these days.”

She tilted her beer back and watched him. “Speaking from experience?”

“Hell yes. Opening and running a distillery is a full-time job and then some. Wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t hated the alternative.”

“Investment banking wasn’t your thing? I’m shocked.”

He gave a rueful smile. “Translation: Sam Compton didn’t have what it takes to succeed in the real world.”

Riley shifted in her seat to study him, and he resisted the urge to squirm. “Why do you do that? Scratch that. I know why you do that. Your mom has filled your head with crap about how you’re not a good guy. But why do you believe it?”

Shit. Shit. He had not meant to take them down this path of conversation. What had happened to the good old days when she would respond to his slipups with a joke and let it go? Why now was she deciding to push?

Maybe because he’d had his tongue down her throat, his hands on her breasts. Maybe because he’d accidentally opened the door just the tiniest bit and now was paying the price.

“Can we not talk about that?” he asked, forcing a smile.

She opened her mouth to protest, but he forged ahead again. “We were talking about you. And how you’re lucky to have found a career path that suits you.”

Her smile dimmed just slightly. “You mean because I write about sex.”

Emma’s cryptic words hovered in the back of his mind. She’s not what you think.

“I’m not sure that’s what I meant at all,” he said, keeping his voice casual. “I just meant it’s clear that you’re right where you belong.”

“And you’re not?”

Leave it alone, Riley. But he wasn’t being fair. He should have known that his longing to be her friend would be reciprocal. He should have known that wanting her to confide in him would likely be a two-way street.

“ROON is everything to me,” he said, finally opting for the direct, honest approach.

Something sad flitted across her face, but her smile never slipped. “Doesn’t look that way to me.”

It was too close to something his mother might say, and his shoulders automatically tensed. “Meaning?”

“Meaning that everyone who’s tasted your whisky thinks it’s up there with the best they’ve had, and yet hardly anyone has tasted it.”

Sam’s eyes narrowed. “I’m tweaking it.”

“Bullshit. You’re hiding.”

He wanted to slam the wall down. To get up and leave before she could go there. But she already had. And oddly, he didn’t want the wall down. Not with Riley.

“I want to get it right,” he said, meeting her eyes. I have to get it right.

Her fingers found his forearm, just briefly, and although the touch was far more sisterly than the darkest part of him wanted, it calmed him.

“You don’t have anything to prove, Sam. Not to us McKennas anyway.”

He knew she was right.

He also knew that he wasn’t a McKenna. He was always aware of that. He was a Compton, and Comptons didn’t do success easily.

“You wanna get out of here?” he heard himself ask. “There’s a hole-in-the-wall whisky bar over on Tenth.”

She gave a little shrug. “Sure. But no more copping a feel like you did out on the field.”

“I know not to what you refer,” he said, standing to pull back her chair, a little surprised that she’d mentioned it.

Maybe she wasn’t playing games after all. And if she wasn’t … did that mean she was done with him?

The thought was more depressing than he cared to admit.

“Let’s just say Liam’s hugs don’t feel at all like that,” she said, giving him a meaningful look.

Sam waited for the old familiar tug of guilt at the mention of his best friend’s name, and it came, fast and sure. But interestingly enough, that long-ago promise he had made to Liam not to touch his sister felt a lot less important than the promises he wanted to make to Riley.

What sort of fresh hell have I gotten myself into?

“I got confused,” he said finally, deciding to keep these in a joking place. “I thought for a second you were actually attractive.”

Riley clucked as she tucked her arm in his companionably. “Happens all the time. Lucky for us, there’s nothing like a failed sex experiment to send two people to a permanent friend zone.”

Fuck the friend zone, Sam thought as he held the door open for her. It wasn’t enough.

Friendship would never be enough. Not with Riley.

Chapter Fourteen

Riley liked Sam.

Somehow she’d forgotten that in recent weeks. They’d been so busy trying to get into each other’s pants, or stay out of each other’s pants, that she’d pushed aside the basic fact that beneath the simmering physical attraction, they were friends.

“Try this one,” he said, pushing a small tumbler toward her. “Tell me what you smell.”

She sniffed. “Horse butt.”

“Leather, good. What else?”

She rolled her eyes and tried again. “Vanilla?”

He took the glass from her hand and gave it a sniff. “Nope. That’s almond you’re getting.”

“You’re worse than a wine snob,” Riley said, grabbing the glass and taking a tiny sip. Sam knew the bartender, which meant they’d tasted at least a dozen different whiskies. The pours were tiny, so she wasn’t drunk—just a sip or two of each—but there was a distinct warmth developing low in her belly.

Riley tried to tell herself it was the alcohol, but she knew it wasn’t just the whisky.

It was Sam and the way he looked in his layered T-shirts and perfect-fitting jeans and messy man hair. It was the way his eyes lit up when he talked about stills and casks, and the way he managed to make the word fermentation sound sexy.

It was the way he’d taken her to this run-down hole-in-the-wall, with its beat-up wood bar and slightly crotchety staff and worn bar stools. There was no foie gras, no weird berry compote, no fancy cocktails … just whisky, and a handful of pub-food options if you wanted them.

It was completely different from anyplace she’d been with a man in the past several years, and she loved it.

“Whisky has just as many nuances as wine, just not as many varietals,” Sam said, taking the glass back from her. He tilted it, watching the way the amber liquid slid along the side of the glass. “That’s part of what I’d like to change. I’m all for bourbon being bourbon, and Irish whisky being Irish whisky, plus rye and all the rest of them, but there’s room for something modern. Something new that tastes good without having all the rules.”

“And that’s what you’re doing?” she prodded, keeping her voice soothing but not condescending, as though talking to a skittish colt. He was weird when it came to his accomplishments with ROON. As though he didn’t know how to accept praise or success.

Or, and this was haunting, as though he didn’t deserve it.

As expected, his mouth pressed into a firm line. “ROON doesn’t fit into any of the classic whisky profiles. It’s whisky, sure, but it’s not distilled in bourbon country, so it can’t be bourbon. It’s not from Scotland, so it can’t be Scotch—”

She interrupted his barrage of things his product wasn’t. “So what is it? What’s your vision?”

He lifted a shoulder. Took another sip of whatever it was his bartender friend had poured. “Making something for the average but discerning drinker, I guess. Something without pretense. In the same way the wine world is slowly accepting bottles with screw tops, I want the whisky world to accept something that’s simply whisky. No subtype needed. Just ROON whisky. No judgment if you want to drink it neat, or in a Manhattan, or with fu**ing prune juice. I can’t stand those liquor connoisseurs who jump down your throat for adding an ice cube to a fifteen-year-old whatever. Fuck that. Drink what tastes good.”

As a reward for him speaking bluntly for once, she told him the unvarnished truth. He needed a little positive reinforcement. “You know, if we weren’t so solidly in the friend zone these days, I’d tell you that your passion about your company is kind of sexy.”

Sam didn’t miss a beat at the flirtatious turn. “Sweetie, if we weren’t so solidly in the friend zone, we’d be drinking my whisky na*ed in bed, not someone else’s whisky in a bar.”

Riley’s mouth went dry, and she reached for her water glass, wondering just how inappropriate it would be to dump it over her head in an effort to keep from jumping his bones in public.

His tone had been flippant, but the mental image he’d created had all of her nerves tingling.

This wasn’t going according to plan. She was supposed to have a couple of casual buddy-buddy beers with him and the rest of the gang and then head home with nothing more than a cuff on the shoulder and a “thanks for the favor.”

Instead she’d left with him. Alone.

She hadn’t checked her phone since they’d left the Irish pub, because she knew what she’d find there. A slew of text messages from her friends, ranging from pep talk to lecture.

Julie: Go get some already.

Grace: The tiger stalks her prey—go get him. PS: I know you’re new at this, but you know not to forget the condom. Right?

Emma: Code Red! This was not the plan …

And it was Emma’s text that she was dreading the most because she knew that out of the four of them, Emma was the most rational about this kind of thing. Once upon a time, that dubious honor had gone to Grace, but then Grace had gone and snared a jet-setting ladies’ man, and her loins and brain had turned to sex-addled mush.

A transition that had Riley simmering with jealousy.

She wanted that kind of hormone-driven awareness. Wanted the glow of morning sex and the soreness of rough sex and the soul satisfaction of meaningful sex.

All of which she was pretty sure were simmering just beneath the surface of the man next to her.

The question was how to get beneath the layers of resistance. And God knew she wasn’t up for another rejection.

“I should go,” she said quietly.

“Wisely avoiding my bait, I see,” he teased.

She rolled her eyes and slid off the stool as she fished some cash out of her wallet. “Puhlease,” she said. “Even if I wanted to bite, we’d both know the ‘bait’ would get snatched back at the last moment. You talk a good game, but—”

His fingers wrapped around her wrist, and for a second she thought he was going to acknowledge what was between them. But when her eyes flew to his, he merely nodded in the direction of the money in her hand as he pulled out his own wallet. “Put that away. I’ve got this.”

She shrugged, knowing Sam well enough to see that it wasn’t up for debate. She put her wallet away.

“Walk me to the subway?” she asked, not quite ready to see the evening end.

He pulled out several bills and gave a wave at his friend, who was at the end of the almost-empty bar flirting with a pixie-cut blonde. “What would Liam do?”

Like any overprotective big brother, Liam would have marched her all the way to her front door while giving a complimentary lecture on how loose-fitting clothes were all the rage and was she sure she didn’t want to become a nun?

But Riley wasn’t at all sure she wanted Sam to walk her to her front door. Not when her brain was all addled with whisky, and the high of winning the game, and the intoxicating awareness of a man who was supposed to be off-limits.

“Ehhhh—”

“Exactly,” he said, knowing Liam as well as she did. “If I’m relegated to a brotherly role, this will be a door-to-door excursion, McKenna. I won’t be able to look your mother in the face at dinner next week if I let you get wooed by some creep on the subway.”

“Yeah, because the New York subway system is where all women search for eligible men. And while you and my mother are having this little chat, are you going to mention you were the last creep to woo me?”

He glanced down at her as he held the bar door for her. “Wooed, huh? What happened to that oh-we’re-all-wrong-for-each-other-and-it-was-awkward-and-icky talk?”

Riley shivered a little feeling the unexpected chill in the air and didn’t object when he slid the jacket he’d been carrying over her shoulders. It smelled like leather and soap and Sam.

Riley thought about her response as she let him hail a cab, noting how different it was from her last date, in which her companion had cowered under an awning while she’d stood in the rain.

“Let’s just say I had a moment of weakness,” she said as he held open the taxi door for her. “I thought you were more than merely tolerable to look at.”

He slid into the cab next to her. For a second Riley considered sitting in the middle of the seat just to feel him against her, but she didn’t want to risk putting him on edge. Not when he seemed relaxed around her for the first time in weeks. Actually, make that years. Hell, had they ever been relaxed around each other? Truly?

But sitting on opposite sides of the car did nothing to ease the awareness that had been steadily growing over the course of the evening. Only the tension was different this time. It lacked the usual resentment. As though they both recognized the attraction and were on the verge of accepting it.

On the verge of doing something about it.

Oh, Emma. Don’t kill me.

“Tolerable, huh?”

Her eyes snapped back to his. “What?”

“You said my looks were merely tolerable.”

She shrugged and gestured a finger over his flat stomach. “Well, duh. Because clearly you’re letting yourself go.”