The 23rd Deletion Bride novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: Cullen's POV

Cullen's POV

At midnight Linnea was asleep on Hattie's couch with one hand over her stomach and the other tucked under her cheek.

I stood in the doorway of the loft with my coat on and didn't go.

I told myself I was checking the lock.

The truth was that I had waited eight months to see her in a room.

I was not ready to leave it.

Hattie came out of the kitchen in her socks and looked at me, and then at the sleeping woman, and then at me again.

"You can sit in the chair," she said. "I won't tell."

"I'm leaving."

"Sure you are."

I sat.

I had met Linnea when she was twenty-one, at her father's boathouse on a Sunday in June.

She had come down the dock barefoot with a sandwich in her hand.

She was arguing with him about a school loan she refused to let him pay.

She had won the argument.

He had stood there looking pleased and a little afraid.

"That's the only person I've ever lost to," he said to me afterward.

I was twenty-eight.

I had a plain, sensible plan for my life, and she wasn't in it.

Then she married Dalton Amory at twenty-three, and her father shut his study door for a week.

When he opened it, he asked me to build a fund.

"Watch her," he said. "Don't ever let her know."

"Make sure the boy doesn't fail. If he fails, she'll pay for it, and she'll never take a dollar from me."

I'd said yes.

I had done it for six years, from a distance, with a spreadsheet and a clean conscience.

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