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still needed to be needed.
    She’d known this day was coming. She’d even thought she’d been
prepared, back before her boss up and quit, back when her job was stable and her
life still made sense. Now? Well, in the past few hours her life had unraveled
at an alarming rate. But Griffin was right: panicking wouldn’t help anything.
What she needed was a plan. Part one: stay out of Griffin’s bed. At least until
this was all over with. Part two: find the missing heiress.
    Of course, both of those things were going to be harder than
they sounded. She’d been helping Dalton look for the missing heiress before he’d
gone off the deep end. She’d already scoured hospital records and county court
records. So far, she’d found diddly.
    And then there was the matter of Griffin. If she had any
resistance against him at all, she wouldn’t be in this mess in the first
place.
    She didn’t need a plan. She needed a miracle.
     

Four
    M iracle or no, she wasn’t going to sit
around here just waiting for…for what? For Griffin to come out of the office
and pounce on her?
    She needed a little emotional distance. A way to remind herself
that Cain Enterprise’s new CEO was now her boss. Not her lover. A way to
reestablish the professional footing of the boss/executive assistant
relationship.
    Her very first boss, for example, had always insisted she call
him sir or Mr. Thornton. And she’d never once made out with him at her desk.
Never mind that Mr. Thornton was seventy-four, humpbacked and mean-spirited.
Still, maybe there was something to this formal professionalism.
    Maybe if she just focused on the job, she’d be able to push
aside her personal desires. So she did the only thing she knew how to do in a
situation like this. She did her job.
    She started with the basics. She contacted Marion, Griffin’s
former assistant, and had her send over his schedule. Marion clearly hadn’t
heard anything yet from Griffin because she seemed to think the request came
from Dalton.
    After that, Sydney generated a short action list. Things that
had to get done to ease this transition. When Dalton came back, she wanted him
to be impressed as hell by how smoothly everything had run in his absence.
    She sent everything over to her iPad and marched to the office
door, knocking only briefly before letting herself in.
    She found Griffin sitting behind Dalton’s desk, a file open on
the blotter in front of him. He didn’t look up when she walked in. His
hair—which always looked a little scruffy—was even more disheveled than usual.
He held a pencil in his hand, tapping the eraser end against the desk at a
frenetic pace. His expression was a mask of intensity and she felt a little
shiver go through her. Despite his blasé attitude, he took this very
seriously.
    Did she know him at all? Sure, she knew many things about him.
Like that he had a scar on his neck and that he didn’t like chocolate but would
eat anything with caramel. And that he watched the Star
Wars trilogy every year on Christmas. But was knowing all of that
stuff the same as really knowing him?
    Confused, she automatically took a step backward, intending to
sneak out and then knock, but his head snapped up and he saw her standing there,
clutching her notes and her iPad in front of her. She was struck again by his
expression. By the fierceness of it.
    Then his countenance cleared, a smile slipped back onto his
lips and he looked like himself again—all easy, laid-back charm. Nevertheless,
she was left with the feeling that perhaps the Griffin she was used to seeing
was the mask and the intensely focused Griffin was the real man. God, that was
an unsettling thought.
    “You need something?” he asked, his voice oozing that kind of
breezy cool that she’d been aiming for on the phone with Tasha.
    “No…I mean, um, yes. But I can come back later. Dalton never
minded if I just walked in. Is that okay? If it’s not, I can just—” Stop talking! she ordered herself. Jeez,