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And up.
And still farther up.
To find the would-be groom standing above her, a thunderous look upon his face.
This close to him, Geraldine made the entirely unwelcome discovery that he was significantly more attractive in person than she had imagined.
She had researched this man exhaustively. She had therefore spent a lot of time imagining not only him, but what she would do and say should she encounter him as she’d planned to do. She had any number of lectures in her back pocket, but the sight of him in real life was...
Unexpected, somehow.
And he wasgloweringat her.
Thehein question was Lionel Asensio, born to a revolting amount of wealth in Spain somewhere. He was the result of generations of affluence, the very notion of which sent a bolt of dismay straight to Geraldine’s deeply understated Midwestern soul.
Lionel himself had come of age more serious by far than the family playboys and international Lotharios who had preceded him. He had spent rather longer in educational pursuits than at least the three previous generations had done. He’d gotten a double first at Cambridge, no easy task, no matter how well-connected the student. And it was with a coveted graduate degree in business from Harvard that he had marched, grim-faced if the pictures were any indication, into the sad little family business that was likely no more than a tax shelter and turned it into a vibrant multinational corporation that some spectators claimed must have tripled his inherited wealth within ten years.
In other words, he was mind-numbingly, incomprehensibly wealthy, and yet that was not her objection to him.
It was not even his excess of male beauty, which she had expected to be harsh and off-putting. Every picture she’d seen of him had featured him glowering about just as he was now, either at the people he was with or straight into the camera itself.
She’d thought he looked surprisingly pugilistic, if not downright mean, for a man who could have no battles to fight.
It was true, she saw. He still did.
But in person there was a magnetism to this man that no picture could possibly convey. She felt her whole body shiver into a shock of awareness, as if she had no choice but to sit up straighter. As if the force of his regard commanded her flesh to respond.
Worse, it seemed primed to do his bidding.
Geraldine had always taken pride in her height, inherited from any number of her possibly Viking ancestresses, because she enjoyed that she stood taller than many women in her bare feet.
But the way this man looked down at her, she felt tiny. Somehowdelightfullyfragile. As if he could snap her in two with no effort whatsoever and more alarming, that she might like that. Or better still, tuck her away in one of his pockets.
She had the stray, treacherous thought that he could not possibly be the man she thought he was because there was something deep in her own bones that told her otherwise, thatknewbetter—
But it didn’t matter whather bonessaid, she told herself sharply. What mattered was what her poor, lost cousin Seanna had told her before she died—that there had been only one name she had ever uttered. And that Geraldine had come all the way to Italy to make certain that there would be justice for her cousin and her cousin’s daughter, one way or another.
Even if it meant going toe-to-toe with a man who made herwantto quiver.
Toquiver, of all things.
He rattled off some sort of dark demand in what she thought was Italian, given where they were, though it may well have been Spanish for all she understood either language. And she meant to reply, she really did, but Geraldine’s body did not seem to be interested in obeying her commands.
It was him.
It was the way helookedat her. He was dressed in his fine and elegant clothes that should have made him look fussy, but did not. Instead, it was as if they couldn’t quite contain him. As if this chapel itself was too small.
As if he carried a brooding force within him, rough and sensual, that her body recognized instinctively.
Whatever the reason, she couldn’t say a word.
“Let me guess, you speak only English,” he said in the face of her ongoing silence, in a voice that seemed to cut straight into her, sounding both faintly British and undoubtedly Spanish at once.
And also dripping with disdain.
“I have conversational French and can read German,” Geraldine retorted, stung by the disdain and the inference that she was one ofthose people, forever barging around the world, expecting everyone to speak her language. She’d read all about them.Shewould never be so conceited. “I’m also working on my Japanese. Since you asked.”
“Perhaps you will share, then—in any of those languages—what it is you find so amusing.”
