The 23rd Deletion Bride novel · Chapter 17 of 24

Chapter 17: Cullen's POV

Cullen's POV

"In April," I said again, because she had not opened her eyes.

I took my hand off her stomach, and it was the hardest thing I had done all year.

"After my fifth email, I drove to your house."

"You came to the house?"

She had gone up on one elbow, and the monitor belts pulled across her.

"I stood at your gate for ten minutes. I had a letter in my pocket I meant to hand you myself."

"Nobody told me."

"Delaney Frost came out."

I watched her face as I said the name, and she shut her eyes again.

"She wore a cream blazer, and she smiled the whole time. She said you'd asked her to speak for you."

"She said, Mrs. Amory doesn't want to hear from the Anchor Fund, Mr. Stroud, and she'd like you to stop writing."

"I never said that."

"I know. I know that now."

"But I didn't then, Linnea. I thought, she's twenty-nine, she's married, she has every right."

"Eleven emails and three registered letters," she said. "And you believed a stranger on a doorstep."

"Yes."

"You're sorry." She sat up all the way, and the nurse's alarm chirped, and neither of us looked at it. "I was alone in that house, Cullen."

"I know."

"You were ten feet away."

"I know."

"Why didn't you ring the bell?"

I told her the rest.

A week after the gate, a courier brought a letter to my office on the Anchor Fund's thirty-first floor.

It was from Dalton's lawyers, and it said that my continued attempts to contact Mrs. Amory were distressing her.

It said that any further approach would be treated as harassment, and as a breach of my duty to the fund.

It said they would petition to freeze the fund's shares while the court decided.

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