“Sorry,” I immediately apologized, but Sutton was grinning.

“I’m not,” she said.

I wanted to strip her naked and fuck her in the backseat until she lost her voice from screaming my name, but I stopped myself.

“Time to get you home,” I said before doing exactly that, fighting my desires the entire time.

I’D CROSSED A LINE last night. Eventually, it would have been crossed anyway, but it would have been done because it was part of the deal, a perk of the arrangement. Last night had had nothing to do with either of those things and everything to do with my inability to keep my dick in my pants, so to speak.

When Mother walked into my office and closed the door behind her, I wanted to throw punches. I wasn’t in the mood to be lectured, and I knew that was what I was in for.

“What is it, Mother?” I asked, my tone snarky and rude.

“Don’t take that tone with me. And you know damn well why I’m here,” she said, her head shaking in disapproval.

“Spit it out then.”

“That poor girl. Do you know what you’ve done to her? I meant what I said last night, Joseph. Have you even thought this through? What bringing her to Social Month will do to her life? It will be in complete upheaval. It will be invaded. She will no longer have privacy of any kind. Ever. Please tell me you at least thought about that before I brought it up.”

She made an irritated sound, followed by the clucking of her tongue. “No, you couldn’t have. Because if you had, you wouldn’t be in this predicament.”

“Stop!” I shouted. “Just stop for one second. Listen to yourself.”

“It’s you who needs to listen to me. Did you even see the pictures this morning?”

This was news to me and got me to take a breath.

“What pictures?” I pulled up a search engine and started frantically typing my name in an image search.

“They’re grainy, but it’s you. In some alleyway. Kissing your new”—she shrugged her shoulders—“whatever she is.”

The pictures immediately flooded my desktop screen. They weren’t clear, like Mother had said, but you could definitely tell that it was me. And since we’d already made a public outing the other night, you could tell it was Sutton as well.

I put a hand up. “Okay, hold on a second,” I said before gathering my thoughts. “You were the one who was going to set me up with random strangers in the first place if I didn’t bring a date to Social Month, remember?”

“Yes, and your point?”

“You didn’t care about the press destroying those women’s lives? You only care about them messing with Sutton’s? Why is that? Do you not think she’s good enough for me or something?” I felt myself getting extremely defensive. If my mom was about to tell me that I shouldn’t be with Sutton, I was going to lose it.