Page 16 of Keep Him Like Secrets

“Hey, don’t knock it. Three blissful hours all alone, stocking up on essentials, then getting some cheap hot dogs at the food court? Bliss. Anyway, eat your salad. You don’t eat enough green.”

“I do when I cook.”

“What’s that, once a month? You’re never home.”

She wasn’t exactly wrong about that. I made it home just to sleep and shower most days. It just seemed pointless to be there when I could be at the office getting something accomplished.

“Get anything else good?” I asked, breaking off the plastic seal, then splitting half of the salad onto the inverted top to give to Teresa.

“A slice of meat as thick as my thigh,” she declared. “Marty’s gonna cook it off tonight. Which is why I’m glad to hear I’m getting outta work early for a change.”

She said it a bit pointedly. In a very ‘You better not back out on me’ kind of way.

“No, you’re free to go home and enjoy the steak as big as your thigh as soon as you’re done with whatever you’re doing.”

Teresa was always fiddling around in my office. Going through drawers, putting shit in the supply cabinet. This was no exception. She’d pulled a box out of the supply closet.

“Here it is,” she said, putting the white box down a few inches from my hand. “Came in this morning. I still think you’re an idiot for spending that much money to get it shipped here so fast, considering you’re going to be seeing this woman for months while you work on this project.”

“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 lookingwetout, you wear araincoat. 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.

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