The 23rd Deletion Bride novel · Chapter 20 of 24

Chapter 20: Print It

By the time Cullen's car turned onto Wharf Street, there were forty people outside the bakery.

Cameras, phones on sticks, a van with a dish on its roof.

The red door was lit by a dozen camera lights.

"Drive past," I said.

"No."

"Cullen."

"You live here," he said. "You're not going to be chased out of your own door by a photograph."

He parked at the curb and came around to open my side.

Hattie was already on the step in her socks, with her phone at her ear.

"I called the police twenty minutes ago," she said to me, without hanging up. "They said soon."

"Soon."

"That's what they said."

I got out, and the shouting started.

"Linnea! Is it true?"

"Are you and Mr. Stroud together?"

"Did you cheat on your husband?"

"Mrs. Amory, how long has this been going on?"

I stood still on the pavement in my mother's coat with my hand on my stomach, and I let them finish.

I had been the quiet one for six years.

I had closed a door softly.

I was done with soft.

"My name is Linnea Carrick," I said.

I didn't raise my voice, and they stopped to hear me.

"I was divorced on Tuesday. I'm twenty-nine, and I'm free."

"An hour ago I kissed Cullen Stroud, in my father's office, on my father's desk."

"Print it."

A flashbulb went off, and then ten.

"I'm going to kiss him again tonight," I said. "I'm going to take him upstairs, and you can print that, too."

Somebody at the back whistled.

Cullen, beside me, made a small choking noise.

"Careful," he murmured. "I'm a very private man."

"You're a very photographed one."

A woman in a gray hood pushed through the reporters at the left, fast.

She had dyed her hair dark, and she carried a camera bag on her shoulder.

She stopped on the pavement, forty feet from me.

Under the hood, Delaney's face had gone thin.

"She's lying!" she called.

Every lens in the crowd swung toward her.

"She was sleeping with him the whole time! The letters, the funeral, all of it is a cover story!"

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