The 23rd Deletion Bride novel · Chapter 21 of 24

Chapter 21: Cullen's POV

Cullen's POV

She stopped at the top of the stairs with her hand on the loft door and did not open it.

"My question," Linnea said.

"I'm listening."

"What do you want?"

I had been waiting for something about the fund, or her father, or the baby.

"I don't understand."

"You never ask me for anything. You bring tea, and you read me shipping reports, and you stand one step behind me on every staircase in the city."

"I've never once heard you say what you want."

"It isn't my place."

"I'm giving you the place." She turned to face me. "Say it out loud. Not what's right. What you want."

I had spent eight months being careful, and six years before that.

There was nothing left in me to be careful with.

"You," I said.

"Cullen."

"Not for the fund. Not for your father. I wanted you at the boathouse, when you were twenty-one and walked down the dock with a sandwich and beat him in an argument."

"I was twenty-eight and I told myself it was admiration."

"It was a lie, and I've been telling it for eight years."

She stood very still.

"There," I said. "That's the answer. You can have the door now."

She opened it.

She went in ahead of me and switched on one small lamp.

The loft was quiet and smelled of bread.

She put her keys down, took off her mother's coat, and turned around.

"Trustees do," she said. "Ask anyone."

"You remember that."

"I've been thinking about it for a month."

She crossed the floor in her socks and took my face in both hands.

She kissed me slowly this time.

There was nothing hurried in it, and nothing polite.

I put my arms around her, and my palm went to the small of her back, and I felt her whole body lean into mine.

Her belly pressed between us, warm and round and alive.

I had never held a woman with another heartbeat in her.

I was afraid of nothing I could name, and afraid of everything.

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