Sam, his face panicked, righted me on my feet, but my legs buckled underneath me. I dropped to the floor with all the grace of an elephant on ice skates.
My mind reeled through a Sam-induced fiery haze, and...
Oh my god I was half naked!
Sam ushered me behind the cover of the island, scooping up my shorts as we went, while the front door closed. And my underwear? The black thong that read Shh! across the crotch that I’d been saving for the first day of my internship since undergrad, torn and ruined, and ripped from my body in a fit of passion? I couldn’t get that tearing sound out of my head, which did nothing to help me find them. Where were they?
I yanked on my shorts while Sam pulled up his zipper, and like some kind of comedy duo, we stood at the exact same time just as Riley rounded the corner into the kitchen.
Riley’s face brightened when he saw me, and I hoped I appeared more put-together than I felt. Which was totally scattered and more turned on than I’d ever been.
He hadn’t been here hardly at all for three days, so of all the times to finally come home, why now? But, of course, thinking that surged a wave of guilt through me because this was his house and he was letting me stay in it for free.
“There you are,” he said.
“Yep.” My voice pitched higher with fake innocence. “Here I am.”
He gestured at the spices scattered around the floor. “What happened here?”
“Earthquake,” I mumbled because my brain was done braining and I could still feel Sam’s hands all over me.
Sam leaned against the island top, one eyebrow cocked, the rest of his expression bored. “We were checking the labels, and would you believe these are actuallyspicyspices?”
Despite seeing Rick again that afternoon, despite what had just happened between Sam and me, I bit back a laugh. Sam was making fun of me. This man who had sparked all sorts of unholy thoughts inside my head was making fun of me, and I wanted nothing more to give him a good tongue-lashing for it.
Riley stared at his brother, a question in his eyes. Did he know he’d walked in on something? Because we weren’t exactly earning any best acting awards tonight.
“Why are you home, SamRam?” he asked.
Sam crossed his arms, the corded muscles drawing tight, and glared bullets through Riley. “Not the same reason you are, I bet.”
Wow. Whatever animosity existed between the brothers, it somehow made me feel as if they were always speaking code when I was around. As if they were purposefully hiding something from me. Something Rick might like to know about the Cleary family but that I would never tell him.
Riley flicked his gaze to me and relaxed his stony expression into a smile. “You hungry? I’m starving.”
He sauntered to the refrigerator through the minefield of fallen spice bottles, and when he passed me, I searched once again for my thong.
“We were about to start making dinner, and then...” Oh god, and then.
I glanced at Sam for a little help and found him holding my thong in the palm of his hand. The intense heat from his gaze lit me up all over again, and I reached out for them more to touch him than anything else. A lascivious grin curled his mouth. He snatched his hand away, shook out the thong to display the Shh!, then stuffed it in his jeans pocket right next to the obvious swell there.
Message received, but what would Riley do if he found out what his younger brother and I had just done? I didn’t think he would be mad, but this Riley was different from the one I knew seven years ago. His and Sam’s relationship wasn’t as secure as it once was, and I didn’t want to be the cause of an all-out brother brawl.
Riley closed the refrigerator door, then kicked spice bottles across the floor on his way toward me. “Tell you what. Let’s go out, just you and me, and you can tell me all about the first day of your internship.”
I almost glanced at Sam to gauge his reaction, but that would be too telling. So would saying no.
“Sure,” I said. “Where?”
Sam strolled around the island toward the living room without a word. Had I hurt him by agreeing to go with Riley? I wasn’t even sure why I said I would. God, Sam had royally fucked with my head with the same thoroughness he’d nearly fuckedme.
“You’ll find out when we get there.” Riley ticked his gaze toward Sam’s back. “You can fend for yourself, right, SamRam?”
Without turning, Sam flipped his hand in a half-ass wave then disappeared around the corner.
“But wear that dress you wore the other night,” Riley said to me. “The hot one.”
His voice sounded like a dare disguised as a purr, and I didn’t like it or his order for ‘the hot one.’ Was I a curried ham at the local meat market?
