Kissed and Missed: A Forbidden, Girlfriend’s Dad, Valentine's Day Novella (Daddy Issues Book 2) by Cleo White

Author:Cleo White [White, Cleo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2025-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

13

HONOR

We’re given orders to stay where we are.

Julian’s PR team—which seems to be comprised of well-dressed, blood-thirsty jackals—arrives late at night, just a few hours after I walked out of the hotel and got the shock of a lifetime. They sit us down at the suite’s long dining table and explain the current state of things. Basically, the two of us look like monsters, and Riley—who sent Julian’s four earlier calls to voicemail—looks like the victim.

The easiest, most straightforward path would be to correct that misconception. There were suggestions of leaking the screenshots of her cheating on me, or paying the woman who sent them to speak about the affair publicly.

I knew without Julian saying a single word that he wouldn’t throw his daughter under the bus to save either of us. Sure enough, they’d barely finished explaining this potential course of action before he was telling them, firmly, it wasn’t going to happen.

“Thankfully, Honor, you are a dream PR client,” the head of the team informs me cheerfully, not the least bit perturbed by the fact that half the internet is calling me a slut, and the other is calling me a revenge queen.

I went online to check my sparsely used social media accounts and immediately regretted it. My DMs were chock-full of nasty or crude messages from strangers, and even the comments on a picture I’d posted of me and Sophie’s brunch waffles from a few weeks ago were full of people telling me how disgusting a person I am. After only thirty seconds of scrolling through the virtual dumpster fire, Julian snatched the phone out of my hand and told me, more firmly than he ever had before, to not touch it again.

No freaking problem.

“We ran a background check on you as soon as we got Mr. Ballard’s call and nothing concerning came up. You work at a nonprofit, volunteer, and come from a good family. Nobody is disputing that your relationship with Riley ended long before your relationship with Julian began, and the two of you haven’t been spotted together since August. I don’t think we’ll have much trouble spinning this into a case of: right person, wrong circumstances.”

The final “plan of attack” is fairly simple. We will release a joint statement, acknowledging we are in a relationship, that we never meant it to happen, but grew close as Julian leaned on my expertise in nonprofit management. The founding of The Ballard Fund, which still isn’t public information, will be hinted at but not confirmed.

Putting me in place as the head of the brand-new family foundation will reinforce me as a decent, respectable person, a long-term fixture in his life rather than a dirty little secret, and hopefully the media will forget about us. The goal is that in three days’ time, Julian and I will be written off as a slightly weird but unproblematic couple.

This was the point where Julian asked them to step out.

“You don’t have to do this,” he told me in a low, urgent rush.

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