All He Really Needs(22)

“Actually, this was before Jack Sheppard was his business rival. They used to be partners. Things went bad sometime after Sharlene and my father broke up.”

Sydney let out a low whistle. “Sometimes the history of Cain Enterprises reads like an Italian opera.”

Griffin looked slightly abashed. “Yeah. Heartache. Epic rivalries. It’s like Les Misérables but without all the singing.”

She chuckled, then asked, “Are you sure she’s not involved? How long were they together?”

Griffin shrugged. “Ten years, maybe.”

“Ten years? Forget what she knows. Forget this wild goose chase after a pregnant nanny who may or may not have even slept with Hollister. If this Sharlene person was your father’s mistress for ten years, then she could be the girl’s mother.”

“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?