All He Really Needs(52)

He was gone. Completely.

Which she should have been okay with. After all, it wasn’t as though she actually wanted to talk to him herself. She was too emotionally fragile for that. Too vulnerable.

Still, Griffin’s silence unnerved her. He had said absolutely nothing since they’d gotten back in the car. She didn’t ask where they were heading. She didn’t have to. He was whipping the car through the streets of Houston like a stunt driver on a closed course.

Clearly, he was pissed that his mother had manipulated him. Hey, Sydney couldn’t blame him for that. By the time he pulled onto the loop at about sixty, she figured she had to say something.

“Do you think that—?” she began.

“No. I don’t.” His tone was hard as nails and his gaze didn’t even flicker from the road.

“Maybe you should wait until—”

“No.”

“Look, I know you’re upset, but—”

“Give it a rest, okay?”

She twisted in her seat to face him. “No, I’m not going to give it a rest. Pull over.”

“What?” Finally, he looked at her. Just shot a glance in her direction, but at least he was loosening his death grip on the steering wheel.

“Just get off the highway.” When he didn’t so much as turn on his blinker, she added. “Look, you’re pissed off. I get it. You’re in no shape to drive, let alone talk to your mother.”

“I’m fine.” But then, as if to prove his point, a car darted in front of them and he had to slam on his breaks. Muttering a curse under his breath, he eased his foot off the gas.

She watched in silence as his hand twisted on the steering wheel.

“I’m not…” He broke off, muttering another curse.

He didn’t finish the sentence, but he didn’t have to. She could think of about ten different ways to finish it for him. He was not fine. He was not ready to talk about it. He was not nearly as in control as he wanted to be.

Tension practically radiated from him. His control was whisper-thin and it was all she could do not to rub her hand across his thigh. To try to soothe him. Maybe she would have if she hadn’t feared that he would snap altogether.

He flicked on the blinker, eased across the road and a second later exited the highway and pulled into the mostly empty parking lot of a strip mall near the off-ramp. He parked at the back of the lot, under the shade of a sprawling oak. He killed the engine and just sat there for a moment, his hands clenched so tightly around the steering wheel, she thought it might snap under the pressure.

She watched him struggling for a long minute, trying to give him the space he needed to process everything they’d learned in the past few hours. Obviously, his mother knew who the girl’s mother was. She’d known and she’d deliberately misled them. Caro Cain’s behavior was incomprehensible to Sydney. She couldn’t imagine why the woman would purposefully throw roadblocks into Griffin’s path, but she did know this. As frustrated as she was with Caro’s behavior, it had to be a hundred times worse for Griffin. Who didn’t want this job or this responsibility in the first place. Who had been sick of his family’s manipulation before this even started.

And the truth was, she didn’t know what to say to make any of this better. She didn’t know if there was anything she could say to make it better. So instead of trying, she reached out and put her hand on his leg. She felt the muscle twitch beneath her palm. His hands stilled on the steering wheel. Every muscle in his body seemed to freeze. Then he slowly turned and leveled a gaze at her.

She felt stripped bare by the intensity of his Cain-blue eyes. Naked and vulnerable. Completely at his mercy.

“Griffin, I—”

Before she could finish the sentence, before she even knew what she was going to actually say, he threw open the door, unclicked the buckle on his seat belt and propelled himself out of the car.

“Damn it,” she muttered before fumbling with her own seat belt buckle and scrambling out of the car.

She rounded the hood and just stood there for a minute, watching as he paced restlessly. He traversed the distance from the car to the tree and back again in long, restless strides. He clenched and unclenched his hands as he prowled, giving the air of a caged beast. But where the panther in the zoo was trapped by the fence and the electric current pumped through the wires, he was confined by his anger.

“Griffin, this isn’t as bad as it seems.”

He whirled to glare at her. “Are you kidding? I always knew my family was a mess of crazy, but this? This is beyond crazy.”

“You don’t know that.” Yeah. Maybe he did know that. Maybe it was as bad as it seemed, but she figured, for now, her best bet was to get him calmed down before he did something he really regretted.