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.”

Sam was on his feet and across the room in a second, pulling on his jacket. “I’ve told you a thousand times, I won’t discuss Riley with you.”

“Right, right, I always forget that we Comptons aren’t fit to breathe her name.”

Sam paused only briefly. “You know, Mom, for once I think we agree on something.”

He let the door slam behind him.

Chapter Three

“Men are dogs. We already knew this, Ri.”

Riley stuffed a pig in a blanket into her mouth and chewed furiously as she glared at Grace Brighton. “Says the woman dating a man who looks like Hugh Jackman.”

Hugh’s doppelgänger chose that moment to return with drink refills.

“And he brings me my Manhattans,” Riley said, eagerly accepting the cocktail. “Clearly not all men are bad, just the ones who want to set up shop up in here.” Riley gestured toward the vicinity of her lady bits.

“Super classy, Ri,” Grace said, taking a sip of her own drink.

Riley shrugged. She’d always put class in the nice-to-have category. There were some women who had it in spades. Take Grace, whose classic good looks were the kind people put on stamps and shit, all mahogany hair and perfectly even features.

But Riley? While no slouch in the looks department when she took the time to curl her hair and do the eyeliner thing, she knew she had more of the uh-oh-that-one’s-trouble look going on.

She knew the words siren and sex kitten got thrown around whenever she bothered to get dolled up, and Riley didn’t mind a bit. It was a lot easier to convince people you were a sex expert when you looked the part. A tight dress could hide a lot. Like, say, the fact that you’d gone most of your life without anyone seeing what was under the dress.

Jake, Grace’s ridiculously good-looking boyfriend, was watching Riley in amusement as she took a bracing gulp of her Manhattan. “Does your father know that you drink bourbon instead of Bushmills? Isn’t that some sort of crime against your kin?”

“I don’t advertise that little fact at family dinners, no. But for the record, my love for Basil Hayden’s would be nothing if he ever heard you say the word Bushmills to his face.”

Jake’s eyebrows went up. “Your dad doesn’t like Irish whisky?”

“Oh, he does. But we’re Catholic, which puts us solidly in the Jameson camp.” She patted his forearm reassuringly. “Don’t fret about the mistake. It was too much to ask that you be brilliant and beautiful.”

Actually, Jake Malone was both, but Grace would kill her if she pumped up his already inflated ego.

His brow furrowed. “Wait, so you’re telling me he bases his liquor preferences on—”

A hand slid up between their faces, effectively ending the conversation. “Guess what?” Grace said pleasantly. “That’s boring. Also, I want to get the scoop on Riley’s date on Friday, not hear about ancient Irish feuds and Riley’s penchant for Tennessee whisky.”

“Kentucky,” Riley corrected.

Grace pointed to her own straight face. “See this? Uninterested.” She turned her finger to point at Riley’s face. “And that? That is avoiding.”

“Steven Moore was a turd,” Riley said with a shrug. “What more is there to talk about?”

Sam. We could talk about Sam. You could help me figure out how to stop thinking about him.

“I thought you liked this Steven,” Grace said.

“I did. I totally did.” Sort of. “Right up to the point that he brought out the handcuffs before we even made it back to my place.”

Grace and Jake both had the good sense to wince.

“Right?” Riley said with a disgusted shake of her head. “I should have known when the first kiss was lame.”

“I thought you said the kiss was decent,” Grace said.

“Well, that’s every guy’s dream,” Jake said. “To be decent.”

Riley pointed at him. “See? Jake gets it. Decent was my way of saying he didn’t have halitosis, but neither did he exactly rock my world.”

“Do I rock your world?” Jake said, sliding an arm around Grace’s back and pulling her close.

Riley averted her eyes as they exchanged one of those soft, dreamy kisses that seemed so natural for them but were utterly foreign to her. Riley had mistakenly thought that Julie Greene and Mitchell Forbes—Stiletto’s other power couple—were some sort of gross anomaly of in-loveness, but Grace and Jake were giving them a run for their money on the totally smitten scale.

“I’m going to go find the crab cakes,” Riley muttered.

“I’d tell you not to eat too many, but your body literally repels fat,” Grace said, never tearing her gaze away from Jake’s.

Riley ignored her, her eyes scanning for the white shirts of the serving staff. Yeah, so she had a great metabolism. She liked to think it was the universe’s way of evening the score for depriving her of sex.

Ah. There was the crab cake lady.

Riley made her move, stacking three of the appetizers onto her cocktail napkin when best friend number two appeared at her elbow. “Don’t get aioli on your dress. Camille will have a fit.”

“No she won’t. She’ll be too busy lecturing you for being late.”

Julie blushed. “Mitchell and I—”

Riley held up a hand. “Nope. I’m officially off listening duty for all sexy-talk for the next week.”

Julie nodded. “I heard. So Steven wasn’t the one?”

“Not even close. Remind me of this next time I let some guy try to pick me up at the bank.”

And also, remind me to never let myself think of Sam Compton when I’m out with another guy.

But she’d been losing that battle since she was seventeen.

Julie made a sympathetic noise as she scanned the room. “Have you seen the boss? I can’t believe how many people are here. I thought it was just Stiletto staff and plus-ones.”

“Nope, it’s the whole Ravenna gang,” Riley said, referring to the media conglomerate that owned Stiletto and a couple of dozen other magazines.

And thank God this wasn’t one of those small, intimate affairs. Riley would rather go on a kale-juicing diet than be stuck in a room with only her coworkers and their plus-ones. There was a word for that: annual Christmas party.

More commonly known as single person’s hell.

But Julie had a point—this whole affair was a little over the top, especially for a Monday night. It wasn’t even the official Stiletto fiftieth-anniversary party, it was just the announcement of the party and the corresponding issue.

But their editor in chief had gone above and beyond, as always. Camille had reserved one of the private rooms at the top of a new, swanky midtown hotel, complete with an open bar, finger foods, and a freaking champagne fountain.

And the booze was key, because there was bound to be a speech in there somewhere about the theme of the semicentennial issue.

Shudder.

Riley loved Stiletto—she loved the team, the readers, the very pages of the magazine itself.

But for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out how this anniversary issue was supposed to be any different. According to Camille, every issue was “revolutionary,” but as far as Riley was concerned, every issue was simply more of the same.

Unless they were going to have this anniversary issue spit out condoms or chocolate, she couldn’t imagine how they were going to make it stand out.

“Where’s Mitchell?” Riley asked, belatedly noticing that Julie’s fiancé wasn’t affixed to her side as usual.

“Talking to Alex,” Julie said with a wave. “I heard the word soccer and bailed.”

“Ah, well, if Alex is here, Emma must be—”

“Drinking heavily at the bar,” came the husky drawl from behind them.