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“Have you thought of what’s best for Harper?”
“Repeatedly.” Scarlett could be a force of nature when she sank her teeth into something. “Drop it.”
Harper couldn’t take it anymore. “Stop it, both of you. I need to know what’s going on. Who’s blackmailing my mother?”
“I don’t know,” Scarlett admitted, as somber as Harper had ever seen her.
Harper persisted. “But you know something about it.”
“I think so.”
“And you weren’t planning on telling me?” The room suddenly felt cold, as if the air conditioners were working at twice their normal capacity. Harper rubbed her arms. “Why?”
“Because no good will come of it,” Scarlett said.
All the more reason for her to know. “It’s about my mother and the affair?”
“Yes.” Violet reached out and took Harper’s icy fingers, rubbing them to bring back some warmth. “Tiberius had files on all of us.”
“I already knew that.”
“Including your mother.”
“When I was attacked and the files were stolen,” Scarlett explained, her voice quiet and reluctant, “the one on your mother was taken.”
“That explains where the photos came from and why the blackmail began now.” One question answered. But was that all there was to the sharp looks and tense exchange between Violet and Scarlett? “Is there more to it?”
“If you don’t tell her, I will,” Violet declared.
“It’s about the timing of the affair,” Scarlett said. “It happened nine months before you were born.”
“That doesn’t mean...” Harper wasn’t sure she wanted to make the connections Scarlett was hinting at. “The affair only lasted two weeks.”
“And from what we’ve determined about your father’s travels, he was gone for almost six weeks around that same time.”
Bile rose in Harper’s throat. It couldn’t be possible. It certainly wasn’t fair.
She wasn’t a Fontaine.
These two wonderful women weren’t her sisters.
She had no right to run Fontaine Ciel, much less become CEO of the company.
Suddenly, Harper couldn’t breathe. She put her hand to her chest. “I have to go.”
She pushed back from the table so abruptly her chair crashed to the ground. Scarlett’s office spun as Harper struggled to figure out where the door had gone.
“Harper, are you okay?”
Okay? Would she ever be okay again?
“Fine. I just remembered that I was going to...” She never finished the sentence. The door had come into view and Harper made for it.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” Violet had pursued her from Scarlett’s office into the hallway. “I know this must be a huge shock. But it doesn’t matter. You know that.”
“Of course it matters.” Harper didn’t know how to make Violet understand. Everything she’d worked for. Every sacrifice she’d made. Was it all for nothing? “I’ll talk to you and Scarlett later. Right now I just need to grab some air.”
Scarlett appeared on Harper’s other side, her fingers biting hard into Harper’s arm. “You are our sister. You will be Fontaine’s next CEO. It’s what you’ve always wanted.”
