The Trouble with Love (Sex, Love & Stiletto 4)

“It’s just . . . it’s complicated, Cassidy. These past couple weeks have been great, but we’ve never dealt with what happened back then, not really.”

He spread his arms to his sides, his expression confrontational. “Okay then, Emma. Let’s deal with it. Where should we start?”

She licked her lips. “I don’t want to do this now.”

He stepped closer. “Have you ever stopped to think there’s nothing to do? That maybe there’s nothing to deal with? We were two idiotic kids who got in an epic fight the day before their wedding and called it off without listening to the other person. Maybe we chalk it up to immaturity.”

“I listened to you!” Emma said, yelling now. “What was it that I was supposed to hear? That you didn’t know that I existed when my father basically bribed you to ask me out? That you readily agreed only because you thought you’d be getting to date my sister, who was the one you really liked?”

His face shuttered, and Emma pressed on.

“I could have gotten over that. I really, really could have. But you can’t blame me for stumbling over the part where you proposed twenty-fours after my father told you he’d only pass his precious company onto family. A company you wanted. Did my father get that part wrong, Cassidy?”

“Look, the part about Daisy . . . I said it back then, and I’ll say it again: Daisy and I were sort of friends. We had several classes together, she was friends with my ex-girlfriend, we ran in the same circles. I didn’t know her well, but I thought she was cute. Something you should take note of as her identical twin.”

He stepped closer. “You can’t get mad at me for not falling in love with you before I knew you existed,” he said quietly.

“But I knew who you were!”

“The whole school knew who I was,” he snapped. “And, no, that’s not an ego trip. It’s just the way it works when the soccer team is the defending national champ and I was a starter. Okay?”

“And I was a nobody,” she said.

“Don’t,” he pointed a finger. “You’re above that little game. Emma, I swear to you that when I asked you out that day in the bookstore, it was because I wanted to. By then I knew that I was asking out Emma. Not Daisy.”

She tried to go back to washing dishes but he pulled her around again. “Would you just listen to me, damn it! Apparently we do need to talk this out, because you’re obviously not over it.”

“We did talk it out, and it didn’t do any good! I’ve already heard all this. Next you’ll be trying to tell me that it was only coincidence that you proposed the day after my dad dropped his little bomb. That you’d been planning on it for weeks.”

“I had been planning it for weeks!”

“You can’t prove that,” she said quietly.

“I shouldn’t have to, Emma! Goddamn it, I shouldn’t have had to prove to the woman I was about to marry that I loved her. You were supposed to believe me. You were supposed to know.”

His voice sounded ravaged and tortured, like the words were torn from the darkest part of him, and Emma wanted to believe him. Desperately.

But she couldn’t. Because if it wasn’t true she’d risk spending the rest of her days desperately loving someone who didn’t love her back. Not really. For a girl who’d always lived in her sister’s shadow, who’d always been second best, his word wasn’t enough.

Cassidy watched her face, and then she watched his shoulders slump. “You don’t believe me.”

“I want to,” she whispered.

He shook his head. “All this time, I thought our past was about temper more than anything else, but it was more than that, wasn’t it? You didn’t love me enough to trust me.”

Emma’s heart twisted. In all the times she’d relived that night, it had never occurred to her that she wasn’t the only one who hadn’t felt loved enough.

She wasn’t blameless in this. She’d always known that, but she hadn’t realized that the damage she’d inflicted on him was just as real as the damage he’d done to her.

Emma shook her head. “We can’t do this, Cassidy.”

He shifted closer, his hands closing around her face. “No. No more vague, noncommittal answers. If you don’t want me, you’ll have to say so, straight out. If you don’t want us, you’ll have to say that, too. If you want me to leave, I will. But you have to say the words.”

Emma made a little whimpering noise and she closed her eyes.

Then she realized that was exactly the cowardly kind of behavior he was calling her out on, and she forced herself to meet her eyes.

“Say it, Emma,” he commanded, even as his eyes pleaded otherwise.