Page 70 of Scandal Queen

My head shook and it splattered my tears onto the desk. “She’s mine, Janine. Just mine and no one else’s.”

“Darling,” Janine reached her hand for mine squeezing my fingers. “We know that, but we want to protect you.”

A boiling rage pressurised my chest cavity, but it was dragged down with an enormous weight of shame. The two things tempered each other, boiling and cooling, boiling and cooling, two opposites. The truth and the secret.

The truth. I didn’t know who Daisy’s father was.

The desperate secret that I’d never wanted to find out. Never wanted to give anyone the chance to take her away from me.

Never wanted to be judged for not being good enough.

But being judged all the same.

“Leia, Oliver is trying to help. He’s got a team looking into this before the news can break.”

I huffed a breath.

“Oliver?”

“I didn’t know what else to do. I knew it would hurt you, so I reached out to the person I knew would protect you.”

My mouth opened, no words to be found.

“Leia, it’s okay. No one is going to take Daisy away. She calls the future king Daddy for God’s sake; no one is going to argue with that.”

“Oliver knows?” I barked. “How long?”

Janine flinched. “Just a few days, that’s all. He said he’d get a team to look into it and then he’d talk to you.”

“I can’t believe you’d keep this from me.” Janine keeping a secret wasn’t the worst of it. Ollie had promised. He’d promised me in that cottage in Cornwall that he would never do anything like this again.

Betrayal stung like poison.

“Leia, it’s not like you think, I promise. I called him because I wanted to know the facts first. Better we know everything before—”

“Before someone sells their story. Tells the world I got high one night and had sex with a total stranger.” I shuddered a breath. “Before someone tells the paper the future king’s girlfriend has no clue who the father of her child is because she took so many pills and smoked so much weed in one evening she passed out and never knew what had happened.”

Janine sat in silence while all my words bubbled to the surface.

“If that story breaks it will kill us. The press will never ever let it go. The royal family will never be able to accept Daisy and me; the shame would be too great. That’s worse than my own mother being a heroin addict. That’s me admitting that I’m like her. That just like she never knew who my dad was, I’ve done exactly the same thing.”

Janine still waited.

“Oliver’s going to cover it up, isn’t he? He’s going to make it disappear to keep us together.” I grabbed at my chest, trying to keep myself together. “This is why he wouldn’t agree to his father’s suggestion of giving Daisy a title, because he knows he can’t until the story is dead and buried.”

Bending at the waist, I gagged. Tears splattered the stupid moleskin skirt, rolling down the expensive leather boots.

“Leia. Look at me.”

I couldn’t. Janine, she’d saved me, so many times. Now she’d kept a secret unlike any other.

“Some man is going to tell the world he’s Daisy’s dad and that I never told him.”

That dark secret; the wish I could keep Daisy to myself for all eternity, crashed to the surface of my consciousness. “It was never intentional.” My words blurted. “Mum died and it all happened so quickly. I’d only done the pregnancy test a couple of days before I found her. I’d gone to school. I’d been looking at all the boys, trying to see if anything could jog my memory. I didn’t know who to talk to, who to ask. What do you say to someone?”

“Leia. It’s not Daisy’s dad.”

I blinked at her, more tears dropping. I needed to get a grip.