Free A Sweetheart For The Single Dad (The Camdens Of Colorado Book 8) by Victoria Pade

be certain in these situations if they had all the facts.
    “My side of what happened.” He took a bite of his sandwich, clearly to give himself time to consider whether or not to answer.
    Lindie merely waited, eating a potato chip.
    After a moment he’d apparently made his decision because he said, “According to my dad, he met Tina Larson when he did some work on the Denver Country Club.
She
asked
him
out the first time and they hit it off. She was even the one to start talking about marrying him. That was what led to him proposing. But Howard Camden wanted her—my dad says that he’d seen it when they’d all been at the country club or at parties and things at the same time. He said the guy couldn’t take his eyes off her. He even flirted with her right in front of my dad after they were engaged. But my dad’s not an insecure guy, he wasn’t threatened. Tina was his and he wasn’t worried about it. Instead he felt pretty much on top of the world—a beautiful rich girl had pursued him and wanted to marry him. He had his own construction company and it was doing well. He’d won bids on four different major projects so he needed to hire more people and expand. Top of the world,” Sawyer repeated.
    Another bite of sandwich, another pause. More silence from Lindie as she merely waited and listened when he spoke again.
    “Dad was busy, but not so busy that he had to neglect Tina. Until things started to go wrong.”
    “Things like what?” Lindie asked.
    “Expensive mistakes started being made in orders for materials. Wrong addresses for deliveries, then there were delays and extra costs for reloading and getting the materials to the right places. Shoddy workmanship caused all kinds of problems—failed inspections, time and money to bring things up to code, some damage to the company’s reputation. Fights broke out among the workers, which had never happened before. There were walkouts. There were scheduling mistakes that left clients mad and put Huffman Construction in breach of contracts. The IRS suddenly came out of the woodwork to do an audit of the books—”
    Instigated by a Camden connection within the IRS—that was one of the things she knew. But she didn’t tell him that.
    Sawyer took a breath, shook his head and said, “Within months of getting engaged to Tina my dad was overwhelmed with business problems. The company was in serious trouble. He was on the verge of losing everything. He had an obligation to his workers and his clients to get things back in hand. His focus had to be on that. He had no choice but to spend long hours dealing with one disaster after another.”
    “And he needed to postpone his wedding to Aunt Tina on top of having hardly any time to spend with her.”
    “You got it,” he confirmed. “My dad says that Tina was patient and understanding at first. But he’d had to leave her in the lurch over and over again and after a while...” Sawyer shrugged. “There were parties and country club functions, weddings of friends—not to mention celebrating their own engagement—and a whole slew of other social obligations that she wanted and needed to go to. She got tired of going to everything alone.”
    “Enter my uncle,” Lindie supplied.
    “Right. Enter Howard Camden. He ran in the same circles Tina did. He was at the same parties and weddings and whatnot. And there he was...understanding and sympathetic.”
    “And also handsome and charming and fun. That’s how I remember my uncle.”
    “Little by little Tina was spending more time with him than with my dad. All the while—my dad had no doubt—Howard Camden was making it clear to her how much he wanted there to be more between him and Tina.”
    “Until there was.”
    “What put it over the top was a rumor that surfaced that it wasn’t only business keeping my dad busy. That he was having an affair with a woman who worked for him. He wasn’t. But when Tina confronted the woman—encouraged to do so by your