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Sydney believe. He wasn’t worried about the day-to-day
stuff, but the prospect of dealing with the board damn near had him breaking out
in a cold sweat.
    The board of directors that Hollister had amassed for Cain
Enterprises was a bunch of vultures. If they knew what had happened in the past
couple of weeks, they’d be circling for sure. First, Hollister—who had never
displayed any sign of weakness to his business opponents—had made a very
irrational decision when he’d sent his sons on this quest. The whole company
hung in the balance as a result.
    And now that Dalton had resigned, from the outside, it had to
look like they’d all lost their minds. The board members weren’t fools. If they
knew how unstable things really were, they’d start swooping down to peck out
bits of flesh from what remained of his inheritance.
    Right now, the company needed strong leadership more than
anything. The company needed someone who could command respect. Unfortunately,
Griffin knew he wasn’t that man.
    He was all too aware of his limitations as a leader. He lacked
his father’s cutthroat business tactics and his brother’s stolid determination.
Perhaps even more importantly, he had no interest in running Cain
Enterprises.
    At the moment he had two interests: completing his work for
Hope 2 O and the very tempting new assistant that came along with the CEO job.
Apparently, being CEO was going to interfere with both of those pursuits. Which
was why he had to get this yoke off his neck so he could get back to his real
life. He had to find this damn missing heiress.
    He dropped into the chair. Testing the springiness of the seat,
he rocked back but there was very little give. Damn, even Dalton’s chair felt
stiff and unyielding, much like his brother was.
    Griffin glanced down and saw that the chair was actually the
same model as the one in his office down the hall. Thanks to an array of knobs
and levers, he could easily adjust it to suit his taste. Instead, he rolled the
chair closer to the desk, flipped open the file Dalton had given him and started
going over the notes Dalton and Laney had made. He left the chair exactly as it
was. He wouldn’t be sitting in it long enough to bother changing it.
    *
    Sydney stared at the closed door to Dalton’s office,
trying to squelch the sinking feeling in her gut. Except it wasn’t the door to
Dalton’s office anymore. It was the door to Griffin’s office now. This was not
good.
    Oh, this was so not good.
    Feigning a calm she didn’t feel, she turned back toward the
computer at her workstation and mindlessly pulled up her email. If someone came
into the office, she wanted it to look like she was busy. And competent. And not
sitting here fantasizing about her boss.
    Her boss.
    Ugh.
    She was absolutely not going to be that woman.
    Her mother had been that kind of woman. The kind who casually
slept with men to get favors from them. As far as she knew, her mother had never
strayed into actual prostitution. She’d traded sex for rent, or car care or so
her boss would overlook the fact that she was late for the seventeenth time that
month. Even if that wasn’t real prostitution, it had cast a pall over Sydney’s
childhood. Poverty, drug use and bad decision-making had dominated her life
until she’d been taken away from her mother at the age of six. From there, she’d
bounced from foster home to foster home for years before finally settling in at
Molly Stanhope’s house when she was eleven.
    Molly’s house had been a haven for the last seven years she was
in the foster care system. In fact, Molly was still the closest thing she had to
a mother. It was Molly who had been her moral compass since then. It was Molly
who would not approve of Sydney sleeping with her boss.
    Well, who was she kidding? It’s not like Molly would have
gushed with approval over Sydney sleeping with Griffin Cain in the first
place.
    Sleeping with her boss compromised her position in the company.
It meant he