All He Really Needs(38)

Griffin lost patience with Caro before Sydney did. He leaned forward. “Do you remember the woman or not?”

“Not off the top of my head.”

“I have pictures of her, if that would help.” Sydney pulled the file from her bag and pushed the pictures across the table to Caro.

Caro glanced at them without a flicker of surprise or recognition.

“Do you know this woman?” Griffin asked.

“Perhaps. I don’t know.” Caro waved dismissively. “If there was a pregnant girl who worked for us, she certainly didn’t stand out. That is the point, isn’t it? That they were the help. Good help isn’t seen or heard.”

Her tone fairly dripped with derision, making it perfectly clear she thought Sydney was well outside her bounds.

Yeah, Sydney got the point. But she hadn’t clawed her way out of poverty by feeling the sting of every subtle insult. Caro would have to work a lot harder to scare her off.

Sydney took a long sip of her iced tea. As she set down the glass she said, “You’re a smart woman, Mrs. Cain. I can’t believe there could be anyone in your home, help or otherwise, who could make a play for your husband without you knowing about it.”

Caro’s expression froze into an icy mask, and for one long moment she neither moved nor spoke. Then, abruptly, she smiled with smooth ease. “Well, there’s your mistake. You seem to be under the impression that there was only one nanny making a play for my husband.”

“There was more than one?”

“Of course. They all made a play for him. Hollister has always been quite charming. Add in his personal wealth and his power, and he was virtually irresistible. Every secretary at Cain Enterprises, every female geologist in R&D, every young nanny who cared for the boys—every last one of them was susceptible to his charms.”

“Every single one of them? That’s hard to believe.”

“Really?” Caro tilted her head to the side, her expression all innocence. “Can you honestly not imagine that a smart and beautiful young woman might try to use sex to align herself with a wealthy and powerful man?”

Aha. And there it was. The cutting jab she’d been expecting ever since they’d returned to the table. Sydney opened her mouth, readying her own defense, but before she could speak Griffin leaned forward. “That’s enough, Mother.”

Caro blinked innocently. “Excuse me?”

“Enough with the thinly veiled barbs. Do you remember the name of the nanny or not?”

For a long moment, Caro studied her son, her gaze cunning in her assessment. Then she cut her gaze to Sydney for an instant before her lips turned up in a coy smile, leaving Sydney with the impression that Griffin’s defense of her had revealed precisely the information Caro had been digging for.

“In the months she worked for us, I barely spoke to her.” Now that Griffin had called her on her attitude, Caro’s tone was clipped and irritated. She was obviously a woman who liked to play with her food but didn’t like it when her food swatted back. “How am I supposed to remember her name?”

Sydney found herself frowning. “You barely spoke to her? How long did she work for you?”

“Maybe five, six months.”

“You had no interaction with her in six months? When she had sole responsibility of caring for your children?”

“She was competent and kept the children out of my hair. Why on earth would I speak to her?”

“Because they were your children.”

Caro just waved her hand dismissively, clearly as disinterested in her progeny now as she had been then.

Sydney glanced at Griffin, expecting to see pain flash across his face at his mother’s matter-of-fact dismissal. Instead, his expression was shuttered, his eyes unreadable. If his mother’s carelessness hurt him, he didn’t show it.

Somehow, his carefully hidden reaction made her ache even more deeply. She didn’t want to see him openly in pain, but she would have understood that. She could have pitied that. But this? This emotional distance? This careful detachment with which he held his emotions in check? This was much harder for her to see. Because it was achingly obvious that he had expected his mother’s reaction. Not because that was how she really felt, but because she’d obviously crafted the barb to punish him for standing up for Sydney.

And suddenly, she got what he’d been trying to tell her earlier about his family. About how ill-equipped she was to deal with their mind games.

She understood something else, too. He hadn’t been protecting only her. By keeping her away from his mother, he’d also been protecting himself. However clever they were at hiding their relationship while they were at work, his mother had seen right through the ruse. She now had information about Griffin that she could use against him. He was now vulnerable to his mother’s manipulations. Because of her.