Free Just One Night: Sex, Love & Stiletto Series by Lauren Layne Page A

invitations got lost in the mail. Damn post office.”
    Riley narrowed her eyes. “You’re cranky.”
    “You’re trespassing.”
    She waved this away. “I came to ask a favor,” she blurted out, going for broke.
    His head tilted back slightly. “Am I going to need a drink for this?”
    “Definitely. And also,
maybe
an attitude adjustment. This whole cranky-hermit thing you have going on …” She waggled her hand back and forth as if to say
it’s only so-so
.
    He ignored her and moved toward the front corner of the warehouse. She followed, her eyes widening in surprise when she saw that he had had a full bar installed. “Fancy.”
    “Necessary,” he said, moving behind the polished wood bar.
    She plopped uninvited onto one of the barrels that doubled as bar stools.
    He pulled down a couple of bottles, and she recognized one of his own labels. “Using the good stuff?”
    He smiled a little. “The best.”
    Huh
. So definitely not modest around her. Just the rest of the world.
    Riley watched as he poured an amber liquid from a ROON bottle into a shaker, followed by some sort of Italian liqueur, a couple of dashes of bitters, and some ice. Pulling a jar of cherries out of the fridge, he dropped one into each of two tumblers before deftly shaking and straining the drink into the glasses.
    He handed one to her, not meeting her eyes when their fingers brushed.
    She glanced at the cocktail in surprise. “A Manhattan?”
    He didn’t answer her unspoken question. She could buy that he knew her favorite drink. He’d fetched her enough over the years when their social lives overlapped.
But why did he have all of the ingredients on hand?
    “Chicks dig the cherries,” he said.
    “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 hisglass 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