*
Sydney held her breath, waiting for Griffin’s response. She knew it wasn’t going to be pretty. He was hurt. He was angry.
But instead of taking out his anger on her, he gave a bark of laughter. “Hell, if Dalton can quit, I can quit.”
“You may not realize it, but Cain Enterprises is who you are. What would you do if you quit?”
“Who cares what I do? We’ll leave. We could travel. Go anywhere we want. Get married. We could—”
She held up her hands, cutting him off. “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait a second. Now you want to get married?”
He stared at her blankly for a second, and she had to wonder if he even realized he’d said it. But then he shrugged. “Sure. Let’s get married.” He smiled, but there was a frenzied look to his expression. “Don’t you get it? I don’t have to be part of that family anymore. I don’t have to be a part of that cycle of misery anymore. I can do anything I want. I can marry anyone I want.”
Oh, crap. This was worse than she thought. She had fully expected him to cling desperately to their relationship out of familiarity. She’d been prepared for that. She had not seen this coming. It simply hadn’t occurred to her that he would try to sweep her up into his rebellion against his family, but that’s exactly what he was doing. Irony of ironies, suddenly she was his wild oats.
Which was not at all the same thing as being the love of his life. Despite him proposing to her in what she could only imagine was a fit of delirium, he hadn’t once mentioned love. And why would he? Sure, they’d been sleeping together for months, and sure, she had a key to his apartment, but neither of those things signified any real emotion on his part. Both the sex and the key were just accidents, really.
If she was a different kind of person, if she wasn’t someone who needed to be needed, she might risk it. She might agree to marry him, hoping that later he’d fall for her just as hard as she’d fallen for him. But Sydney Edwards—Sinnamon Edwards—desperately needed to be loved. Really and truly. Loved for who she was. And so she couldn’t risk it.
But she also couldn’t tell him that, because Griffin was smooth and smart and if he thought she needed the words to convince her, he’d probably say them.
“You can’t run away from your life like that,” she said instead.
“Why not?” He held her at arm’s length, studying her face as he asked, “What’s holding me here?”
“Your job, for starters.”
He looked surprised, then suddenly distrustful. “You care so much about my job?”
“Yes. I do. I care about Cain Enterprises. You do, too. You’re just too stubborn to see it.” She seemed to have his full attention now, so she spoke quickly, not wanting to lose this chance to convince him. “All this time you’ve been searching for the heiress, planning on hiring Dalton back as CEO, and you haven’t seen that you would actually be just as good a CEO as he was. Better, maybe.”
He dropped her hands and stepped away, leaving a gap of several feet between them. When he spoke, his voice was flat and devoid of emotion. “So, what? You think I should just stay here. Find the heiress. Stay on as CEO. Then we’ll get married?”
She ignored his comment about getting married, because this time it felt more like a jab than a proposal. “What’s important is that you find your sister. You have this idea in your head that you can run away to Africa and reinvent yourself, but you can’t. You think that the only way you’ll ever know that someone loves you for you is if you give up all your money. But that’s ridiculous.”
“Is it?” His voice was chilling and as lifeless as a block of ice.
“Yes. You are who you are, regardless of whether or not you have the money. And if you walk away from everything now, you’re only robbing yourself of the chance to be the person you were meant to be.”
“And who’s that? Someone with a lot of money?”
“Someone who might have a sister out there who cares about him. Someone who is a great CEO. Think about all the people who work at Cain Enterprises who you know and care about. Jenna and Peyton and Marion. Are you really just going to walk away from them? You’re just going to abandon the company? You’re really going to do that?”
“So that’s your big plan for the future. We keep searching for the heiress. I stay on as CEO of Cain Enterprises.” Suddenly, as he spoke, his meaning was blaringly obvious. The fog had cleared. “And you’ll be right there by my side. Because, presumably, once I’m worth close to half a billion dollars, you’ll get over this fear of being the EA who sleeps with her boss.”
Okay, so he wasn’t playing dumb, he was being dumb.
“You think I’m after your money?”
“Oh, I think you win either way. You’ve said all along you were in this for job security. So either you get to stay on as the assistant of the CEO of a company or you end up married to the CEO. Either way, your financial security is pretty much guaranteed, right?”
“That’s what you think?” she asked. “That all I care about is the money?”
“Why else would you be so damn desperate to convince me to find the heiress and to stay on as CEO?”
“Because I want what’s best for you, you dumbass. Did it honestly never occur to you that I just wanted you to make the best decision for you?”
“No. That never occurred to me. And you wanna know why? Because if you do know about Hope2O and you really understand what I’m trying to do there, then you’d understand that nothing would make me happier than funneling all that money into a worthy charity.”
“Oh, I understand all right.” He made her so mad, she wanted to launch herself at him and strangle him. Instead, she satisfied herself with merely stalking across the pristine lawn and getting right up in his face. “I understand perfectly well that your family has you so emotionally messed up that you think no one will ever love you for yourself alone. So you think the only way to earn redemption or respect is to pour all your money into a worthy cause.”
“I don’t—” He made a meager protest, but she didn’t let him finish.
She was too furious to stop midrant. “I get that. And that would be so convenient for you, wouldn’t it? Because then when someone fell in love with you, it would be just you on the table. And you’d never have to wonder whether or not they really loved you. And you would never have to suck it up and just learn to trust someone on their own merits. That would be perfect for you, right?”
He was stubbornly silent, refusing to acknowledge the truth to her words.
So she went on. “And maybe that would have worked out for you if your father hadn’t come up with this damn contest for Cain Enterprises. But he did and it screwed up all your plans. Because regardless of whether or not you want to admit it, you care about this company. You care about these people. And if you walk away from it now, you will end up regretting it forever. You know what will happen if you don’t play Hollister’s game, don’t you? Cooper doesn’t want Cain Enterprises. He has his own empire to run. So Cain Enterprises will end up reverting to the state. Sheppard Capital will probably swoop in and dismantle it bit by bit.”
“Cooper—”
“I’m not done yet,” she interrupted him again. “Yes, you’ll know that whatever woman you end up with down the line will really love you for you—you will damn well guarantee that because you’ll both be living in sub-Saharan Africa on the salary of an international aid worker. But guess what? To guarantee your personal happiness you will have sacrificed the jobs and livelihoods of countless people you really care about.”
Finally, finally, she was done with the barrage of anger that had rushed out of her. Her! Sydney, who never lost her temper. Who had never been angry at him, not even when he’d told her about the background check.
But she’d lost her temper now because he was being so damn dense about himself, about what he really needed.
And now he just stared at her, like she’d lost her ever-loving mind. So she asked, “Are you really going to sacrifice all of Cain Enterprises, just so you can have some sort of guarantee that you’re loved? Are you really willing to make that sacrifice?”
“What if I am?”
“Then you’re not the man I thought you were.”
“And let me guess…if I am that guy, if I’m that guy who can walk away from millions of dollars, then you don’t want to be with me.”
“The money is not what I want. It never was.”
“Answer the question, Sydney. If I walk away from Cain Enterprises, I lose you. Do I have that right?”
“That’s what you don’t get. You never had me to begin with.”
“You sure about that? ’Cause I’m pretty sure I had you just about an hour ago.”
“Nice.” She laughed bitterly, even though she wanted to cry. “If you can’t win an argument with logic, then throw sex back into the mix, just to make me feel cheap. You know, for someone who doesn’t want to be cruel and manipulative like your family, you do a damn good job of it.”
“Well, then, you’re going to love this. You don’t want to be the girl who sleeps with her boss to get ahead. Fine. You’re not that girl anymore. You’re fired.”
“I guess I should have seen that coming. If you can’t have what you want, then you’ll damn well make sure no one else does, either.” She let out a bitter laugh. “You know, if I thought you could actually get away with that, I’d sue you. I think we’ll both be better off if we just pretend you never said that.” She turned and started to walk away, but then turned back around and looked at him. “You want to know the real reason I would never marry you? Because you’re wrong—it doesn’t have anything to do with the money or whether or not you get control of Cain. It’s because I saw this coming from a mile away. I knew from day one that eventually you’d get bored or frustrated and you’d push me away.”