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You were married for two years. And I noticed. You have no idea how much I noticed.
“I barely remember it,” she lied. “I came home from college, and there you were like always. Except with a wife.”
She practically snarled the last word, and he glanced at her curiously. “You brought a guy home from college that trip, right?”
“You remember that?”
“Sure. I thought Liam was going to lose his mind.”
“Dan was hardly the type of guy to make anyone lose their mind,” Riley said, mostly to herself.
“Well, you must have been smitten enough to introduce him to the family.”
I wanted to make you jealous.
In fact, it had been the bomb of Sam’s wedding that had driven Riley to her first and only sexual experience with poor Dan. So in a warped way, perhaps this very predicament was the result of Sam’s brief and failed marriage. Without it, she wouldn’t have slept with Dan before she was ready. And without that underwhelming experi
ence, she wouldn’t have avoided sex for years only to realize that she’d waited too long and was hopelessly clueless about where to even start.
“What happened with you guys?” she asked, steering the conversation away from her mistake to Sam’s.
He sighed. “Do we have to talk about this?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t Stiletto articles frown on discussing ex-wives on the first date?”
“This isn’t a first date.”
His light blue eyes found hers. “But it’s a first something.”
Riley’s stomach flipped. “Just tell me what happened.”
Sam looked away. “Short version? We got married too fast. We were too young.”
“Then why’d you do it?”
He took a drink. “Honestly? No idea. We were drunk, she suggested it, and I was …”
“You were what?” she prodded when he broke off.
“I was going through a phase. My mom had just broken up with her most recent guy—one she’d sworn she was going to marry, and I just … didn’t want that. I looked at my mom and her string of meaningless relationships, and then I looked at your parents with their constancy and their happy family dinners, and I picked the more appealing one.”
“But it didn’t work out like that,” she said quietly.
“Nah. Hannah was a nice enough girl, but she wanted the title of wife a lot more than she wanted an actual husband. More than she wanted me.”
Foolish girl.
“The divorce was just as quick and quiet as the marriage, and I realized that maybe I’m a lot more like my mom than I knew.”
Riley’s heart twisted at the cold indifference in his voice. No you’re not.
But Sam was right about one thing—this was hardly first-date talk. The last thing she wanted to be thinking about right now was how she’d cried herself to sleep the night she learned he was married.
“So if I were someone else …,” she prompted.
“Believe me, right about now I’m wishing you would be.”
