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Like the obedient soul she had always, secretly, imagined she was not.
And then everything seemed to speed up again. The priest was going on in Italian. Lionel was responding. Geraldine was beginning to frown as she stared down at her hand that no longer looked like her own—because there was now a great honking stone plunked down on her ring finger with another band, all heavy diamonds, next to it. It looked ridiculous in and of itself, a finger bedecked and bejeweled like that, given she had the sort of hands that were meant to dig fields rather than loaf about in Italian chapels.
But then the man beside her was turning her to face him, his hands on her shoulders.
Her breath vacated the premises entirely.
His head was descending and she almost felt as if she was dreaming because Lionel Asensio—Lionel Asensio—was pressing his mouth to hers.
Everything inside Geraldine simply...stopped.
Innocent Stolen Brides
Married by convenient demand, awakened by passion!
Overlooking the shores of Lake Como, a seemingly perfect high-society wedding is about to take a dramatic and unexpected turn...
As Hope makes her way down the aisle toward her convenient husband-to-be, she finds herself picked up and unceremoniously carried out of the church by a stranger, whose claim on her goes back decades! Once the storm clears, will Hope be able to resist the desert king who stole her away?
Find out in:
The Desert King’s Kidnapped Virgin
Being jilted at the altar is an inconvenience Lionel just won’t tolerate. So, the commanding billionaire plucks a replacement bride out of the astounded congregation and demands she marry him instead!
Read on in:
The Spaniard’s Last-Minute Wife
Both available now!
CHAPTER ONE
GERALDINEGERTRUDECASEYdidn’t mean to laugh.
Truly, she didn’t.
One moment she was sitting with an appropriately poker-faced expression, as suited the occasion, and the next...well. She let out what could only be termed a cackle.
A rather loud cackle, she could admit.
It was involuntary.
Really, it was—though it was also true that she’d had some or other vague notion that she might slip in her objections to the wedding today, assuming that priests here in Italy actually asked if anyone harbored any. Geraldine wasn’t certain if they did or didn’t and more, harbored no particular certainty that she would understand such a question even if it was asked, as she did not speak Italian.
But another, more salient truth was that she was delirious from flying all the way here on a remarkably uncomfortable overnight flight from Minneapolis via Chicago. She had been crammed into the back of the alarmingly oversize jumbo jet in the middle of a row of tiny, uncomfortable seats with limited recline. Her mother and she had been pressed up against each other from knee to shoulder as they’d passed the unamused baby back and forth between them while pretending that the peace between the two of them wasn’tquiteso precarious in the wake of Geraldine’s decision to travel to Italy in the first place.
And while Geraldine and her mother were close, and had always been close, she was fairly sure that the last time she had been thatphysically close to her mother had been in the womb.
Geraldine had not been all that keen on landing so early in the morning, having slept a total of five minutes, only to have to sort herself out sufficiently to drive her mother and a screaming child from the airport outside Milan all the way to Lake Como, locate the overpriced yet aggressively bland hotel room she’d managed to secure a mere two days before, and thennotcollapse on one of the narrow, monastic beds waiting there. She’d left that to Mama and little Jules, who had been headed into her fifteenth tantrum that morning. Geraldine had changed into a dress, because she was crashing a wedding after all, and had set off to traipse about in the bright heat until she could find her way to this wedding chapel.
What had pleased her was that she’d found it.
Despite the fact there had been no specific information about it anywhere, which had required some next-level sleuthing skills.
Geraldine had expected some kind of security. Quite a lot of security, actually. She had assumed, the groom being the sort of nightmarishly rich billionaire that he was and the bride an heiress in her own right, that she’d be stopped well before she made it to the door of this place and would be required to argue her way inside.
She might even have been looking forward to that argument. A cross she had long been forced to bear—and had thus made it into a weapon—was that no one could ever imagine that a woman who did nothing to enhance her appearance and, in fact, was happy to wear clothing considered “dowdy” so long as it was comfortable, could ever truly be up to no good.
