She handed him the folio folder from her desk. “Here’s your copy of the agenda. I kept it simple.”
He flipped it open and read over it as she spoke. “Looks good.”
He was about to walk out when she stopped him. “Wait a second. Is that what you’re wearing?”
“Yeah.” He glanced down as if seeing his jeans and shirt for the first time.
“You don’t look the part of the business executive.”
“I haven’t exactly had time to go home and change.”
She held up a hand to ward off a protest. “Just give me two minutes.” She dashed into Dalton’s office and dug around in the coat closet for a minute before returning. She held out what she’d found. “Here, put this on.”
Griffin held it out in front of him. “A sweater?”
“Come on, trust me.”
“A sweater?” he repeated, even as he pulled it over his head.
“I didn’t have a lot to work with here.” She helped him with the hem, tugging it over his hips. “Dalton keeps a couple of jackets here, but your shoulders are broader than his, so you couldn’t wear one of those.” Griffin stilled as she fussed over him, adjusting the sleeves of the V-neck sweater so a half-inch of cuff showed. Then she grabbed the two ties she’d found and held them up. “What do you think? Yellow or green?”
His lips twitched, dazzling her with a hint of white teeth and dimple. “How about no tie?”
“A tie says powerful and important,” she argued.
“A tie with a sweater says Mr. Rogers,” he countered, still smiling.
She rolled her eyes. “Trust me, nothing about you says Mr. Rogers.”
Still, she conceded the point and set the ties aside, but she couldn’t stop herself from reaching up to straighten his collar. Her fingers lingered on the warm skin of his neck and the faint bristle of growth along his jaw. He hadn’t shaved this morning, she knew, but he must have shaved the night before. She thought about what the past twenty-four hours had been like for him. He’d called her as he’d left the airport—that had been around midnight. He must have shaved as soon as he’d gotten home, just before she showed up. She’d never thought about that until now…the way he always shaved just before they saw each other. The way his jaw was always smooth when he kissed her on her neck. And anywhere else.
Suddenly she realized they’d both gone completely still. Her breath caught in her chest as she looked up into his eyes, which were the exact same shade of blue as his shirt. Heat swirled through her body, turning her insides to mush and her knees to jelly.
Was he thinking about it, too? About the way he’d nuzzled her breast just last night? About the way he’d spread her body out before him like a feast and kissed every inch of her? How she’d done the same to him?
Abruptly, she dropped her hands and stepped away from him.
And this was why it wasn’t a good idea to sleep with her boss. Up until now, she’d been so worried about the financial implications, she hadn’t considered the emotional ones. How sex colored every interaction. How it could distract her. How it could mess with her priorities.
She grabbed a folder off the desk and thrust it toward him. “Here’s the agenda.”
He waggled the folder already in his hand. “You already handed me one.”
“Oh.” She glanced down. “This is a spare. In case you need it.”
She looked up to see him watching her, the smile on his face broad, his eyes twinkling with amusement. As if he knew just how much he distracted her. “I think I’m good.”
Oh, yeah. He was good. So damn good it damn nearly killed her.
“Okay then,” she said, her tone overly bright. “Go hit it out of the park. Or whatever sports analogy fits.”
“Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”
As he headed off to face the board, she had no doubt. He did have it.
He would win them over. He would convince them that he was fully qualified to be the CEO, just like he’d convinced her in the past few hours. He clearly understood how the company operated and what it needed. He even grasped the finer details of the personalities involved. He got people in a way that even Dalton had not. In that regard, he might even be a better CEO than Dalton had been.
But that didn’t change any of her plans. She still needed to find the heiress because she needed to get Dalton back. If the past few minutes had shown her anything, it was that she couldn’t do her job effectively if she was working for Griffin, not just because he distracted her and muddled her senses, but also because he made her doubt her own judgment. And because he was dangerous to her in a way no other man ever had been.
Five
“What do you think?” Griffin asked as he strolled into the conference room.
Three days had passed since the board had named Griffin interim CEO. As she had predicted, he’d won them over with little difficulty. They were not having the same luck with the search for Griffin’s missing sister.
Sydney had laid out all her research on the conference table. In addition to the notes that Dalton had passed on to Griffin, she had stacks of her own notes and forty-two cardboard boxes Griffin’s mother had had sent over. She hadn’t even touched those yet. Frankly, she was hoping something like an actual lead would come along and she’d be saved the trouble.
Now, she glared up at him. “Seriously? Why are you out here again? You’ve checked on me every thirty minutes.”
A mischievous smile spread across his lips. “This is how I work.”
“Oh, really? When you were in your office down the hall, you’d come out every five minutes to distract Marion?”
His grin broadened. “Well, I do love Marion—and she does make a fantastic chocolate bread pudding for me every year on my birthday. But still—” he gave a hey-what-can-you-do kind of shrug “—come on.”
“Right.” She sighed. He didn’t even have to finish the sentence. But she said it aloud anyway. “You’ve never slept with Marion.”
“Of course I’ve never slept with Marion. I’ve known her since I was ten. She’s like a mother to me.”
Sydney scowled at him, even though it was herself she was irritated with. This was not the time to be flirting.
He must have taken her scowl to heart because he said, “Just to be clear, in addition to not sleeping together anymore, are we not supposed to talk about the fact that we slept together? Are we pretending it never even happened?”
She nearly snorted. If only it were that easy. How could she order him to pretend it hadn’t happened if she couldn’t do it herself?
“Let’s just try not to talk about it, okay? My point is,” she said sternly, or rather shooting for stern but landing somewhere vaguely in the area of disconcerted, “that even though you have every woman in this building wrapped firmly around your little finger, you’ll find I am not so easy to—”
She broke off before she could get the rest of the sentence out of her mouth because she could practically see the innuendo forming on the tip of his tongue.
She waved aside his comment. “Yes, yes. I heard it. Can we just skip over all the jokes relating to the word easy?”
His grin broadened to the point he looked like the damn Cheshire cat.
“Look,” she continued. “I’m trying to do the right thing here. Stop making this so difficult.”
“But I’d hate to be the one accused of being easy.” Before she could protest, he held up his hands in surrender. “Okay, okay. I’ll let it go. I promise.”
Although a smile still teased his lips, there was nothing malicious in his gaze. He wasn’t teasing her to be mean; he just enjoyed the game too much to stop.
It was one of those unexpected things about him that she found so hard to resist. And this constant exposure to his charm made her feel…nervous. Off balance. Pursued in a way she never had experienced when they were merely sleeping together. Why was it so much easier to be around him when all his energy was focused on making her cl**ax rather than on making her smile?
“Look,” she said, “just stay on your side of the conference table and this will all go a lot more smoothly.”
He frowned. “So it’s not going well?”
She flipped closed the file in front of her. “You know this is insane, right?”
Griffin nodded with mock solemnity. “I do.”
“Your father spent his entire life building this company and now he’s threatening to throw it all away based on some anonymous letter he got.”
“Exactly.”
“And he’s pitting you and your brothers against one another to try to find this girl.”
“He is.”
“Has it occurred to any of you that this girl might not even be real? I mean, obviously, whoever wrote the letter did it just to drive Mr. Cain crazy. She—or he—obviously—”
Griffin interrupted her. “He? The letter was written by a woman.”
He reached over her to flip the folder back open and tapped his finger on the first page—a photocopy of the letter.
She picked it up and waved it around. “No, the letter was written by someone claiming to be a woman. Someone claiming to have had an affair with Hollister and claiming to have bore him a daughter. But there’s no proof. No real evidence.” She put the letter back on the top of the folder and considered it. “Which brings me back to my point. Whoever wrote the letter knew him well enough to want revenge and to know this would drive him crazy. But that doesn’t mean that the person who wrote the letter was actually the girl’s mother. Or that there even is a girl.”
“Hmm.” Griffin stood, stroking his chin as he paced the length of her office and back, considering her words. “Good point. But it’s irrelevant.”
“How so?”
“It doesn’t matter who wrote the letter or even whether or not there’s a girl to find. Proving there isn’t a girl would be harder than finding one. It’s like proving there isn’t life on another planet. It’d be damn near impossible.”