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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.
&
nbsp; 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 had 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 two 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.
Daisy arrived at her side, and Emma’s expression must have revealed every horrible emotion rolling through her, because her sister wrapped her arms firmly around Emma’s biceps and started to tug her toward the exit.
“Let’s go to the ladies’ room,” she said softly, smiling widely at the rest of the attendees as though to say Nothing to see here.
Emma started to let herself be hauled off, her eyes never leaving Cassidy. He finally seemed to snap out of his daze, because his head whipped around toward her, and he started to move in her direction, his expression desperate.
