Total pages in book: 77
Estimated words: 75929 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 75929 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 380(@200wpm)___ 304(@250wpm)___ 253(@300wpm)
“When do you not think I’m an idiot with my money?” I asked.
“That’s true. What can I say? I’m a mom with three kids—God willing—going to college in the next few years. Money is always on the mind.”
Teresa’s three boys had college funds in their names that I’d set up after her eagle-eyed attention to detail caught something in a piece of paperwork that would have cost me millions in losses had it gone through. A damn comma in the wrong place. But once it was signed, it would have been legally binding.
She saved me millions.
I saved her from having to worry about funding her kids’ schooling. But I was saving that little tidbit until Mother’s Day.
“But I have to say—my feelings about your coffee, mugs, and shipping aside—I’m pretty proud of your general restraint. Usually, men like you, with all that money, have eight penis-shaped cars and are snorting lines off their desks.”
“What would I need more than one car for?”
“Exactly!” she said, throwing up a hand like the thought of men who had multiple cars kept her up at night. “Anyways, I’m proud of how far you’ve come in the past few years. That’s all I’m saying. Even if this so-called ‘business gift’ is stupid.”
Teresa had no way of knowing how much those words meant to me. I didn’t have a family of my own, hadn’t my entire life. And while Teresa wasn’t exactly old enough to be my mother, she certainly liked to play that role at times. No one nagged at me like she did, forced me to eat my greens, checked in on me when I was sick, or—yeah—ever told me they were proud of me.
“Don’t think I didn’t see the way you were looking at her,” Teresa went on, snapping me out of my familial thoughts.
“What? Who?”
“Right, who?” she repeated, rolling her eyes. “You were looking at her like a nice, juicy slice of meat when you’ve been fasting for a month.”
“That’s… descriptive.”
“Listen, it’s not my place to say that it’s a really bad idea to start mixing business with pleasure. Especially when that business could be making you tens of millions of dollars over the next few years. So I’m not saying that.
“But the mother in me who doesn’t want to become a grandma before she hits fifty is gonna say to you what she says to all her boys: make sure if things are looking wet out, you wear a raincoat. And that’s all I’m gonna say about it!” With that, she held up her hands, palms out, then took her salad and went back out to her desk.
I leaned back in my chair, a laugh caught in my throat.
Had I just gotten a condom lecture from my secretary?
I sighed, smiling at my ceiling at the absurdity of that. As if I was some starry-eyed virgin who didn’t know the consequences of not wrapping it up. Hell, I was pretty sure Teresa was the one who’d stocked the condoms at my place when she dropped off my dry cleaning the one time, since I hadn’t been the one to buy the last box.
Not that I needed the lecture.
Did I want to screw Saff Amato up and down the building and through the floor? Yeah.
But that wasn’t going to happen.
Teresa was right; this job was too important.
I mean, did I need the money? No. But when you grew up with nothing, when you were intimately acquainted with the way an empty stomach would claw at you from the inside when you were trying to go to sleep at night, when you had to beg and steal to get basic necessities, you never lost that need to keep acquiring more, keep stockpiling resources for the next famine.
That hunger made me so good at what I do. It gave me the drive to push a project to the end, but also the prudence not to move too fast, risk too much, or make a decision that I would regret.
I ate my salad while lost in my thoughts. About all the other clubs, the business in general.
Until one startling thought burst out of nowhere, knocking the wind out of me.
I’d risk it all for her.
What the hell was that?
I didn’t even know the woman.
I wasn’t willing to risk the one club, let alone the whole business. For what? A tour of her sheets and a couple of orgasms?
That wasn’t worth everything I’d busted my ass building over the years.
No matter how gorgeous she was.
With that fresh in my mind, I checked my watch, then tossed the rest of the salad, grabbed my phone and the box on the table, and headed out.
“Enjoy your meat,” I called to Teresa as I passed.
“Yeah, if those vacuum cleaners I call sons save me any,” she said, starting to gather her things as well. “Go get that deal worked out. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”