She had to be joking. I glanced around the office to see if there were cameras set up, recording my reaction. When I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, I let out an annoyed breath.

“Let me get this straight. If I don’t bring a date to the events, you’ll provide one for me? Is that what you’re saying?”

“That’s what I’m saying.”

I looked at her like she’d gone half-mad because what kind of mother did this shit to her only son?

“You know this is crazy, right?” I shoved out from behind my desk and walked right over to the dartboard on the wall. I pulled the darts out and started throwing them. Hard.

“You call it crazy; I call it creative,” she countered as I continued throwing.

“I can find a different woman to bring to every event if I want, Mom. You know I don’t do that.”

My mom knew that I never brought dates to these things. It was one of my personal rules—no public appearances with someone I wasn’t serious about. That person and the public always got the wrong idea.

She tsked me, her head shaking. “Not a different woman, Joseph. Just one. One girl for all the events you attend, or I will find one for you.”

“The press is going to have a field day with this,” I mumbled under my breath.

They’d been hounding me for the last five years, printing questions and starting rumors about why I always showed up alone at Social Month events. They called me the Anti-Playboy, New York’s Loneliest Bachelor, questioned whether or not I even liked women—spoiler alert: I do—Casanova’s Other Brother, Bad Romeo, Clearly Not a Ladies’ Man, the Un-Seducer, Not Don Juan, Second String, and my personal favorite, Not-So Prince Charming.

“Wonder what they’ll call you now?” The sly grin covering her face made me want to punch a hole in the damn wall.

Was this some kind of joke to her? Messing with my personal life wasn’t funny, not in the slightest. I wanted to be left alone ... to work and close the deal I’d been working on for the better part of the last year. The last thing I needed was to show up at Social Month with the same woman on my arm and send the press into a frenzy. I absolutely did not have the time to handle that kind of crap while running a multimillion-dollar company I was trying to expand.

“You’ve lost your damn mind. You know that, right?” I cracked my knuckles, wondering how the hell this was an actual conversation I was having.

“Sometimes, the people we love need a little push.” She extended her hand from the couch, and I walked over to her, reached for it, and helped her up. She stood tall and brushed out the invisible wrinkles in her skirt with her hands.

“This is more like a shove. With a long fall that’s not going to end well,” I breathed out, my heart racing in my chest.