“No.”
“But you said yourself that your father was selective about who he let get close to him.”
“Sharlene doesn’t have any children.”
“Maybe she gave the baby up for adoption.” She was really warming to the idea now. It just made sense. “And if she did, that would certainly explain the bitterness in the letter.”
“No,” Griffin said. “Sharlene was never pregnant.”
“You can’t know that for sure. Sometimes when women don’t want people to know they’re pregnant, they hide the pregnancy for as long as they can. They go away for the last few months, give birth in private. They—”
“Sharlene wasn’t the type. She and my father never hid their affair.”
“As far as you know.”
Griffin’s hands rested low on her waist and he rubbed his thumb across her hip bone absently as he spoke. “You’re right. I’m not a hundred percent certain. But Sharlene was like another mother to me.”
He seemed completely unaware of what his hands were doing, but it drove her crazy.
She tried to step away, but his grip on her was surprisingly strong. “So it’s only natural you don’t want to consider that she might have been the one to write the letter.”
“Actually, what I was going to say is that when I was a kid, I saw her at least once a week, sometimes more often. If she’d been pregnant, I would remember it. If she’d gone away, even for a few months, I would have noticed.”
Sydney frowned, realizing he was right. He probably would have remembered it.
“Besides,” he continued, finally letting her go. “When they broke up, it was nasty. If she’d had the kind of leverage a kid would have given her, she’d have used it then.”
“You don’t know—”
“I do know.” His tone was harsher than she’d ever heard it before; all traces of the easygoing charmer she knew so well were gone.
For a moment, all she could do was stare at him blankly. Then she nodded. “Okay. So Sharlene isn’t the girl’s mother. But we should still talk to her. She might know something.”
He stared at her for a long moment before finally nodding. “Okay. I’ll give her a call. See if she knows anything.”
Before she could say anything else, Griffin disappeared back into his office and she was left standing beside the conference table, wondering exactly what she’d said that had driven a wedge between them. And what she’d gotten herself into.
If she was honest with herself, it wasn’t the family drama that surprised her; it was Griffin’s reaction to it. She’d been with him for four months, for goodness sake. They’d had sex countless times. Spent entire weekends in bed eating takeout and watching cheesy monster movies on Syfy.
So how was it there were so many things she didn’t know about him?
Before she could ponder that question anymore, her phone buzzed. She glanced down to see a text from Jen.
As she typed in a quick response, she shrugged off the question altogether. There were plenty of things he didn’t know about her, either. Things she would never tell him. That wasn’t the kind of relationship they had.
Suddenly, that made her sad, even though she wasn’t quite sure why.
It felt as though their relationship had shifted inexplicably in the past few days. Yeah, sure, there was that huge obvious shift. He was her boss now. They weren’t sleeping together anymore. Yeah, all that stuff had happened. But there was something else going on, too. She was seeing a side of Griffin that she’d never seen before. Something beyond that surface charm she’d originally been attracted to.
The problem was, now that she knew there was more to him than that, could they ever go back to the relationship they’d had before? She didn’t think so. Now that she’d seen this Griffin, this guy who cared about the company and who worked as hard as he played, she’d never be able to forget he existed. Even if Dalton did come back and she was no longer working for Griffin. She’d never be able to go back to just sleeping with him, either. So where did that leave her?
Even before Griffin had taken over as CEO, she’d worried she was in over her head. She blamed that damned key. Why had everything become so complicated? Working with him every day constantly strained her willpower. She didn’t know how much longer she’d be able to keep him at arm’s length.
She could only hope they found this girl soon. Once Dalton reclaimed his position as CEO, she’d have a little distance from Griffin. Going cold turkey would be so much easier without having him tempt her constantly. But what if Dalton never came back? It was a possibility she couldn’t let herself consider. They would find the girl. Dalton would come back. Griffin wouldn’t be her boss forever.
She just had to make damn sure they found her soon.
Six
“How’s it going?” Griffin asked from the doorway to the conference room.
Sydney looked from the stack of papers in front of her to Griffin and back with her eyebrows raised. “How does it look like it’s going?”
That signature smile of his crept across his face. “Slowly. It looks like it’s going slowly.”
She gave an indelicate snort. “Exactly. Your powers of observation are astonishing.”
It had been two days since the conversation about Sharlene. That conversation that she’d been so sure had changed everything. And yet…nothing had changed. By the time she’d left work that day, Griffin had returned to his normal self. The next morning, she’d briefly considered asking him whether he’d actually called Sharlene, as she’d suggested. Instead, she gritted her teeth and started going through the Cain household records. Forty-two boxes in all. Sydney had dug into the boxes and started looking for any references to a nanny named Vivian.
Part of her said she was being a coward. The other part pointed out calmly that she was just doing her job. This was what Griffin had asked her to do, so she was doing it. If he wanted her doing anything else, he’d tell her.
The part that thought she was being a coward noted that Griffin was stubbornly ignoring the obvious. That he needed to go talk to Sharlene—and possibly his mother also—because a real conversation with an actual human would get him further than countless hours searching through boxes would.
The problem was, as much as she wanted to pretend otherwise, Griffin wasn’t just her boss. He’d been her lover first. She knew his personal needs and his professional ones. If this was Dalton she was dealing with, there’d be no question. She would just trust her gut. But with Griffin, she had no idea if her gut was telling her to do what was right for the company or what was right for her man. Or maybe it wasn’t her gut doing the talking at all. Maybe this was unfulfilled sexual tension speaking. Because once she found the heiress, maybe she could justify getting back in Griffin’s bed.
She looked at him, trying not to appreciate his broad shoulders or the little bit of stubble scattered across his jaw. Since taking over as CEO, he’d traded in his rugged jeans for twill slacks and his linen shirts for crisp, pressed cotton. Somehow the fact that he still left the shirts untucked until right before he went into meetings made the look that much more appealing. The result was that he always came across as just a little rumpled and disreputable. It lent an air of intimacy to the office. And, frankly, it made her want to rip his clothes off.
To keep her hands occupied—and off his buttons—she flipped the lid off box number nineteen. “I’ve been at this for days now. I’m not even halfway through these records. And so far, all I can tell you is that your mother spends too much on shoes and your parents’ accountant pays the bills on time.”
“I could have told you that,” he said with a smile.
“We’re never going to make any progress here.”
“You think the information is buried too deep?” he asked.
She picked up a sheaf of papers. Printouts from the early eighties. Old reams of accordion-style paper. The ink from the dot-matrix printer was faded and damn near impossible to read. In addition, the pages were so damn musty, she was pretty sure an entire colony of dust mites was vacationing in her sinuses. She lifted the bottom edge of the stack with her thumb and let it fan through the hundred or so pages.
“I’ve been through every page of your parents’ household records. From the year Laney was born and for two years in either direction, just to be sure. There is no mention of anyone named Vivian. Not anywhere in these records.”
Griffin was watching her in that way he had, quietly attentive. The way that made her think he caught all the subtleties going on beneath the surface. That he knew that her eyes ached from staring at the blurred ink. That her back twitched from sitting too long. And, most especially, that every time she’d gotten sleepy from just sitting there going through the pages, she’d given herself a two-minute break to fantasize about locking his office door and doing crazy things to his body. And about the way he liked to drive her completely crazy with lust before taking her. And the powerful way he drove into her. And the way he hooked her ankles up over his arms so her h*ps were at just the right angle.
And she knew, instantly, that she should not have let that image flit through her brain because she could feel her cheeks heating up. And damn it, now he would definitely know what she’d been thinking, even if he was only guessing before.
Hoping to distract them both, she pushed her chair back and stood, walking over to the water cooler beside the credenza on the far side of the conference room and pouring herself a tiny cup of water.
But when she turned back around, it was to find him watching her. His gaze was hot and she could feel the weight of it against her skin as potent as a physical touch. Crap, she’d distracted him all right, but not in the way she’d meant to.
She swallowed most of the water in one gulp, nearly drowning herself.
“Is it too hot in here for you?” he asked, his voice pitched low with innuendo. “’Cause I could turn the air-conditioning back on for you.”