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Riley wondered if she wasn’t the only one who was starting to feel a bit lonely in her role as sexy bachelorette.
    “And it’s this success of our very own
Stiletto
starlets that planted the seed for the theme of our fiftieth-anniversary issue,” Camille was saying.
    Riley’s attention snapped back to her boss, dread creeping up around the edges of her boredom.
    For the most part, Riley had a good relationship with the editor in chief. Sure, they butted heads every other week over whether Riley’s articles were too risqué, but at the end of the day, Camille Bishop’s sense for what
Stiletto
readers wanted was spot-on. And more important, Camille treated her team like family. A family that threw food at the dinner table, perhaps, but beneath her immobile orange hair, affinity for Botox, and bark that would have cowed Robert E. Lee, Camille was a bit of a mother hen. And it was kind of nice.
    However, that didn’t mean Riley liked the direction of her long-winded speech. She was hearing an awful lot of words that sent alarm bells off in her brain.
    Personal, intimate, exposure …
    “She’s not going where I think she’s going …,” Riley said to Emma out of the corner of her mouth.
    “Yup,” Emma said, taking a long pull on her wine. “We should probably all invest in pink fuzzy diaries like we had when we were ten, because this shit’s about to get personal.”
    “When I was ten, my diary had a
lock
,” Riley growled.
    Camille continued undaunted, and unaware that two of her best columnists were less than enamored of the direction she was heading. “… by now you can all guess what I’m suggesting …”
    Please no, please no
.
    “The theme of
Stiletto
’s semicentennial issue in December will be ‘
Stiletto
Gets Real: The Truth Behind the Headlines.’ ”
    Oh shit
.
    “Catchy,” Grace said, earning a snort from Julie.
    But Riley was too horror-stricken to join in even thinking about joking, especially when she heard Camille’s elaboration on the theme.
    “… each of our columnists will write this issue’s story in first person. A sort of real-world account of how they live the
Stiletto
way in their own life.”
    “ ‘The
Stiletto
way’?” Emma asked. “Is that a thing? I mean I know I’m new here, but …”
    Riley didn’t answer. Instead she pushed her cocktail glass at a surprised Julie and headed for the bathroom, where she was quite possibly going to puke.
    The truth behind the headlines
.
    The truth.
    She’d always known there’d come a breaking point. A time when she’d either have to come clean or get laid.
    The trouble was, she didn’t know how to come clean without losing her pride. And worse, she wasn’t at all sure she could get laid without losing her heart.
    Because when Riley was completely honest with herself, she wasn’t celibate because of lack of opportunity, or because guys like Steven Moore carried around handcuffs in their back pockets.
    When it came right down to it, there was only one man for Riley Anne McKenna, and she’d pretty much made a career out of telling herself he wasn’t interested.
    But if she was going personal for the story—if she was going to tell the
truth
—first, she had to find out the most important truth, once and for all.
    It was time to find out if Sam Compton wanted her back.

Chapter Four
    “Um, Mom? Does Dad know we’re having tacos for dinner?”
    “No, he does not. And neither of you will mention it until it’s too late for him to start hollering about the ways of our motherland. It’s a stubborn, rigid mind-set, if you ask me.”
    Riley exchanged a glance with her younger sister, Kate, both of them wisely opting not to mention the chunks of potatoes nestled in with the meat on the stove. Her mother probably hadn’t even consciously included them. For her potatoes were like salt. Never the meal, but always an unspoken
part
of the meal.
    Both Erin and Joshua McKenna had been born and raised in Cork, Ireland, but