“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.