He pretended to misunderstand. There was no point in her getting upset before he knew what Dalton wanted. “Text me later tonight and let me know what your plans are.”
She caught up with him just shy of the bedroom door and stopped him with a hand to the arm and an unwavering stare. “What’s going on?”
Her stare did him in. Something about her warm brown eyes made it impossible for him to lie to her. “Dalton stopped by. We’re going to lunch.”
“Dalton? Dalton, my boss?”
He grinned, partly hoping to disarm her and partly because her shock was amusing. “You know any other Daltons?”
“Do you think he’s here because he knows about us?”
“No,” he said, perfectly honestly. “I think he’s here because he’s up to his neck in this crap our dad has dumped on him. He may be your boss, but he’s also my brother.” He dropped another kiss on her mouth. “Don’t worry, he’ll never know you were here. I’ll take care of it.”
Then, because he just couldn’t resist, he gave her ass a squeeze beneath the towel before leaving the room. She had a great ass. He only hoped that Dalton showing up today hadn’t spooked her so badly he never saw it again.
She was going to kill Griffin. What the hell did he mean, he’d take care of it? Was he going to take care of it like he took care of that pothos ivy that had been slowly dying in his living room? Or like he took care of … Well, crap, she couldn’t even be properly indignant because she couldn’t very well rant against his lax attitude toward taking care of things because as far as she knew, he had absolutely no responsibilities in life other than keeping that damn potted plant alive. And he appeared to be failing at that.
For several stunned minutes, Sydney stood there beside the door, listening to the murmur of voices from the other side. She could distinguish none of the words and barely registered the tone. But she tried because somehow it seemed deathly important that she hear every nuance of their conversation.
Which was ridiculous because this probably had nothing to do with her. Dalton had a lot on his plate right now. She knew that better than anyone. She was one of the few people with whom Dalton could even discuss the missing heiress. For the previous week, he’d asked her to hand her normal workload off to someone else on the support staff so that she could devote her time to doing legwork in the search.
She and Griffin had never discussed the missing heiress, but it made perfect sense he’d be worried about it. His livelihood was also at stake. The entire company was at risk. Her job, too, now that she thought about it.
So of course Dalton would need to talk to Griffin. That made perfect sense. Totally, completely logical.
Still, she kept her ear pressed to the door until she heard Dalton and Griffin leaving the apartment. After that, she dressed quickly, barely giving herself time to towel dry her hair and apply a quick, but necessary, coat of mascara before grabbing her purse on her way out. But she stopped short with her hand on the front door of Griffin’s apartment.
Crap. The key.
Going back to the bathroom her steps were slower. The key to Griffin’s condo sat on the marble countertop, the brass gleaming against the black-veined white marble. She stared at it for a long minute.
“Ugh. Stop being such a wimp. It’s just a key.”
She grabbed it and stalked to the front door, carefully locking the door before dropping the key into the change pocket of her wallet as she walked down the hall to the elevator. She pointedly did not put it on her key chain. It wasn’t that kind of key. She and Griffin didn’t have that kind of relationship.
No, they had a very casual, sex-only kind of thing. A no-key-exchange kind of relationship.
She punched the down button with a tad more force than was necessary. She was just being responsible. Like when they’d first started sleeping together and he’d presented her with the test results of his most recent physical, proof that he was drug and disease free. At first, she felt weird about it. Like it was wrong having that kind of information about someone she barely knew—even someone she was sleeping with. Sure, the information was nominally about sex. But there was other information in there, too. She now knew his cholesterol number and that his last tetanus shot was in 2010—from the time he’d gotten snagged with a hook while deep-sea fishing, she’d later learned.
But she hadn’t wanted to know about the tetanus shot any more than she’d wanted to know the origin of the tiny scar on the side of his neck. Any more than she’d wanted a key to his apartment.
Which was why, when she got out to her car, she sat there for several minutes, sucking in deep, panic-reducing breaths.
What was she doing?
When was she going to stop fooling herself?
Sex with Griffin was a bad idea. Very bad.
When they’d first started sleeping together, it hadn’t seemed like a bad idea. It hadn’t even seemed like an idea. More like … an accident. Like when she’d accidently adopted her cat, Grommet. She’d come home to find the poor, malnourished kitten huddled on her front porch to stay out of the rain. She couldn’t just leave the pathetic tabby there, so she brought him inside. But he was wormy and sick and even had to have part of his tail amputated. The vet had recommended putting him down instead of taking him to the shelter. A thousand dollars plus weekly allergy shots later and she was the proud owner of the ugliest cat on earth.
Sleeping with Griffin was kind of like that.
Except not at all. Because Griffin wasn’t pathetic and he wasn’t tame and she most definitely was not allergic to him.
But when it came to adopting Grommet, she hadn’t meant to keep him. It was supposed to be just for one night. That’s what she’d told herself about Griffin, too.
Last summer, in the middle of a record heat wave, fresh on the heels of an awful breakup with her fiancé, Brady, she’d slept with Griffin.
It was Brady’s fault, really. Nine months before their wedding—a date it had taken him two years to agree upon—he’d reconnected with his high school girlfriend on Facebook. He’d apologized profusely for breaking up with Sydney. But how could she feel anything past the burning indignation of finding out the guy she’d been with for six years was in love with another woman? So much in love that he quit his job and moved halfway across the country to be with her, when he hadn’t even wanted to sell his condo to move into Sydney’s house once they were engaged.
She’d wanted to punch him. It was the first and last time in her twenty-seven years of life that she wanted to do physical violence to another human being.
Instead, she’d calmly emptied the single drawer he’d allotted her in his condo and done the same for the few items he kept at her house. The whole exchange had required only two empty cardboard boxes. She hadn’t even had to take a day off work. And she’d told herself she was fine. Fine.
She’d continued being fine right up until the point she’d stumbled onto a Facebook post about Brady’s wedding through a mutual friend. Then, all of a sudden, she hadn’t been fine anymore. Less than thirty-six hours after Brady married another woman, she did the unthinkable. When she’d run into Griffin Cain in the coffee
