The Trouble With Love(51)

Emma’s eyes snapped back to her father as he continued his story.

“Now, most of you don’t realize that while Sinclair Media Group has a robust internship program, taking on as many as two dozen interns every summer, only one of those internships ever turns into a job offer. The competition is fierce; the standards impossibly high. And while I value the usual qualities in a candidate—hard work, ambition, quick thinking—I also appreciate an enterprising thinker…a candidate who thinks outside the box, who’s not afraid to be crafty.”

Her father paused long enough to gesture toward the bartender that his glass was near empty.

“Anyway, you’ll pardon an old man for being long-winded, but you can probably see where I’m going with this.”

“Oh God,” Daisy whispered.

“Cassidy was on the short list for the job from the very beginning, but the truth is, the boy owes me for more than his professional life, isn’t that right, son?” Winston said, grinning at Cassidy.

Cassidy didn’t grin back.

“See, I did offer the job to Cassidy. But with one rather unusual request,” Emma’s father continued, finally glancing at Emma. “Emma, sweetie, bet you didn’t know your old man was such a skilled matchmaker.”

What was he talking about?

Daisy was at her father’s side now, and he held out his glass to her for a refill, and Daisy took it, but made absolutely no move to hand it to the restaurant employee who was standing nearby with a bottle of Knob Creek.

Daisy’s smile never slipped as she moved toward their father, whispering something. He either didn’t hear or didn’t listen, because he kept right on talking.

“Cassidy here was only too happy to do an old man a favor by asking his daughter out on a date in exchange for a guaranteed job after graduation, isn’t that right, son?” Winston Sinclair beamed around the room like some sort of benevolent matchmaker, and, incredibly, most everyone beamed back at him.

No doubt they figured Emma was already aware of this “charming” aspect of Cassidy and Emma’s history—the doting, interfering father who set his daughter up for true love.

Only this was the first time Emma was hearing of it. She wasn’t surprised that her father hadn’t told her about his interference. He knew she hated it when he messed with his daughters’ lives.

But Cassidy…how could her fiancé not have mentioned it?

She stared, stunned, at Cassidy, her ears ringing. He’d asked her out because her father had asked him to?

Their encounter in the campus bookstore that summer before her junior year and his senior year…

That had been staged?

Planned?

She shook her head. This couldn’t be right. Her father was wrong. Certainly I would have noticed something was up, right?

This wouldn’t have alarmed her so much if Cassidy would just look at her. But his gaze was still locked on her father.

Emma couldn’t have been this blind. Could she?

At least until he looked at Daisy. Who looked right back at him, her gaze panicked.

Oh my God.

Emma instinctively braced, knowing there was a piece of the puzzle not yet said.

“Thing was, joke was on Cassidy, at least at first,” her father was saying. “Turns out he didn’t know I had two daughters. When he fell all over himself accepting my offer, it was with the expectation that he’d be asking out Daisy.”

World. Tilted.

Cassidy had wanted to date…Daisy?

He hadn’t even known she existed?

Emma stared blindly at her father for several seconds, waiting for him to get to the punch line of the joke.

When he merely grinned as his audience chuckled, not bothering to look at her, Emma’s gaze shifted to her sister, who was watching her helplessly. Her expression was devastated…but not surprised.

Daisy had known.

Finally, finally, she looked at Cassidy, silently begging him to deny it.

Deny that not only had he needed to be bribed to ask her out, but that she’d been his second choice.

Please, somebody, anybody, deny it!

But when she looked at the man she was going to marry the next day, he didn’t look puzzled or outraged.

He seemed…resigned. As though somehow he’d known this part of their past would come back to bite him.

Only…he’d never told her.

They’d been dating for more than three years. Plenty of time for him to say, “Oh, by the way, you know what’s funny? Your dad totally set us up, only at the time I didn’t realize Daisy was a twin.”

But he hadn’t. He’d never once let her think that their chance encounter in the bookstore that day was anything less than serendipitous.

She watched as his eyes closed in guilty resignation, and she shook her head in denial. She was dimly aware that the other partygoers had started to notice that this wasn’t a good-natured how-they-met story, and the whispers started.

Daisy hissed something to their father before heading back toward Emma, her expression fiercely protective. But Winston Sinclair was too far gone on his bourbon. Too busy enjoying the microphone and the chance to grandstand.

This time when he motioned for the bartender to get him another drink, Daisy wasn’t there to stop him, and he got an unneeded refill, still unaware, or uncaring, of the turmoil exploding in his daughter.