His Test Cost Him a Wife, Not a Negotiation novel · Chapter 19 of 24

Chapter 19: Who Passed

The room had gone so quiet I could hear the chandeliers tick.

"The first girl who ever returned it," I said into the microphone.

"Mrs. Whitstable, that's a strange thing to say if it was only a gift."

"It was a test," Eleanor said. "I have said so."

"Then I'd like to ask about the others."

She did not answer. She waited, which was her way.

"At my rehearsal dinner, Rosalind stood up and toasted a family tradition," I said. "She told me she'd gone through the same test. She said it again in the hotel lobby, to a room full of phones."

"Rosalind, I'm told, is the family's authority on girls like me."

Behind me, near the stage, I heard a heel scrape the floor.

"So I'm asking you, Mrs. Whitstable, in front of all your donors." I took a breath. "Did Rosalind pass?"

Two hundred faces turned to Eleanor.

She stood with her cane planted and the leather folder in her other hand.

I watched her think.

She was not a woman who could be hurried, and she was not a woman who lied where she could be checked.

Somewhere in the second row, a man cleared his throat, and the sound carried.

"Eleanor," Rosalind said, from the foot of the stage. Her voice was light and a little too high. "Don't dignify this."

Eleanor did not look at her.

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