Page 12 of Valentine's Day Daddy

“Fine. But you know I can go around you if I wanted to.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

“What is it about her that’s gotten under your skin?” she asks.

“I’ll tell you later,” I say. “I’ll tell you everything if this goes anywhere.”

She eyes the cards in her hand and then looks up at me for a couple of beats. “Okay. I’ll bend the rules for you,” she says. “But I want you to tell me everything about her. I want to know exactly why you’re pushing so hard for this. I want to know what it is about her that’s inspired you to crawl out from under your bridge.”

“Deal,” I say. “If this goes somewhere, we’ll go out to dinner, and I’ll tell you everything.”

“You got yourself a deal—and I’ll hold you to it,” she says.

“By all means,” I tell her and feel a burst of warmth inside of me as I consider the possibilities starting to open up in front of me.

6

“You have an email,” Emma calls out in a sing-song voice. “Funny you forgot to tell me that you’d received your Soulmate matches.”

I step out of the kitchen to find her hunched over my computer at the dining room table. She looks up at me with a wicked grin on her lips and turns my laptop so the screen is facing me.

“Are you snooping through my computer?” I ask.

“No. You left it open on the table and I just happened to see it.”

“So… you’re snooping.”

She flashes me a wolfish smile. “Yes. Yes, I am.”

“And why are we doing that?”

“Because we know you weren’t going to tell me about the email from Soulmates even though you made me a promise.”

“I was totally going to. I’ve just been busy and hadn’t gotten around to it,” I protest.

“You’ve had this email for more than a day,” she replies with an arch of her eyebrow.

I grimace knowing I’ve been busted. It’s my fault for not deleting the email when it first came across. I should have. And honestly, I don’t know why I didn’t. What I didn’t intend was for Emma to go snooping through my computer and find it. But then, I probably should have expected her to. When she gets her teeth into something, she’s like a dog with a bone. And in this case, finding me a boyfriend is the bone.

What she’s going to find when she opens that email though is going to be disappointing to her. It’s also probably going to make her mad. Of the two reactions, I’m not sure which one I’m dreading more.

“Why didn’t you open it though?” she asks.

“I was waiting for you?” I offer weakly.

"Uh-huh. Nice try,” she replies. “Let’s open this up and see the flood of matches.”

“Yeah, about that… I’m not going to have any matches.”

“What are you talking about?”

I shrug. “I didn’t write anybody’s number down.”

Emma frowns at me. “Why not?”

"I only went to appease you," I tell her. "It's not like I was looking to find a match there or anything.”

She sighs. “Are you kidding me? We went for you—”

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