All He Really Needs(60)

“What?” he asked. He wanted to keep moving. To get into his car, slam it into gear and tear down the highway. It was the same adrenaline fest he’d experienced earlier today, but instead of being fueled by anger, this time it was the sweet heady buzz of freedom.

Sydney took a step back from him. Almost as if she was afraid of him. “You’re making a mistake.”

“What?” This time it was flat-out confusion. What did she mean a mistake?

“Giving up on the search. Quitting Cain Enterprises. It’s a mistake. You need to go back in and tell them you’ve changed your mind.”

He let out a bark of laughter. “Are you crazy? Did you hear that conversation in there? I’m not going to change my mind. I quit.”

“You can’t quit. You can’t leave Cain Enterprises.”

*

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.”