All He Really Needs(19)

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 climax 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.”