Page 42 of Forbidden Boss (Manhattan Billionaires)

We ate for a few minutes as I glanced around his office. Last week, we’d had one of these office debrief dinners on the Friday of the luncheon, but I’d been so focused on not spilling food on myself that I hadn’t really looked around. He had his degrees up on the wall, and a large piece of abstract art behind his desk. Everything looked expensive. The view was great.

The whole room was extremely impersonal—except for one thing. When I got up to toss my takeout container, I paused beside Rome’s desk to look at the only photo in the entire room. It was a young Rome with a beaming smile on his face, a basketball under one arm while the other was hooked around an older man’s waist, who was busy ruffling his hair. The man wasn’t his father.

“Who’s this?” I asked.

Rome glanced up from his food, then looked away. “Coach Reggie. Basketball. Reg coached the team through high school.”

I set the frame down carefully. “I hadn’t realized you played.”

“Stopped when I graduated, but I kept in touch with Reg until he died.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

He set his empty plate down and leaned back. “It’s fine.”

“You were close?”

“Closer than I was with my own father,” he admitted. “He’s the one who told me I could build companies if I wanted to. He told me the only thing that would hold me back was my own mind.”

“And was he right?”

“About most things, yeah.”

“What was he wrong about?” I sat down across from him, crossing my legs as I leaned back. A deep, unquenchable curiosity opened a pit inside me. I’d spent hours with this man at various events over the past week, but I knew precious little about him, other than the fact that he was great at closing business deals and his family sucked.

But there’d been a mentor. Someone who had cared about Rome Blakely, the boy, and not just Rome Blakely, the business mogul.

“He told me if I didn’t let people in, things would crumble in the end. No man could stand on his own, he said. But I’m here, and I’m standing.”

“On your own.”

“Precisely.”

“On the other hand, my dad once told me that lighthouses don’t run around looking for boats to save. They just stand there and shine.” I grinned at the memory. My dad was a cheeseball.

“Maybe I missed the shining memo.” A hint of a grin twitched over his lips in response.

Encouraged, my smile widened. “You just stand there and wait for unsuspecting boats to crash at your feet.”

That coaxed a chuckle out of him, and he asked, “What about you? Close with your dad?”

“I was,” I said. “He passed when I was fifteen.”

Rome nodded. “Sorry.”

There was no pity in his voice. No discomfort that usually came with people hearing about loss. He seemed to understand me without me having to say a word. We sat across from each other, separated by several feet and a food-laden coffee table, but I felt closer to him than I ever had before. “Thanks. Stomach cancer. It was horrible.”

“I can imagine. Reg was a smoker. Got his esophagus in the end, and then spread. But it’s funny; after he died is when this really took off.” He waved a hand around his office. “Sometimes I think it was his final gift to me. The last push I needed to make something of myself.”

Or maybe, I thought, he channeled his grief into work, because the alternative was standing on a windblown coastline watching ships shatter on the rocks.

My phone buzzed, interrupting our conversation. I glanced at the notification and let out a frustrated huff.

“Everything okay?”

Glancing up, I saw the frown on Rome’s face. I shook my head. “It’s fine. I’ve just been applying for rentals for weeks and I keep getting rejected. I don’t get it. My new salary should be more than enough to satisfy these people. But they don’t just want an employment contract, they want months of pay slips. They want deposits. They want my firstborn child. It’s never-ending.”

His frown deepened. “A rental for what?”

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