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But then the man beside her was turning her to face him, his hands on her shoulders.
Her breath vacated the premises entirely.
Because 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.
His lips were warm, and stern.
They pressed against hers in unmistakable command.
And everything that Geraldine was or ever had been disappeared, melting away in the face of a roaring fire unlike any she had ever known.
It was too bright.
It was toohot.
It was all too—
Everything spun around and around, and not just in her peripheral vision.
A strange sort of languor melded with the heat, invading her limbs, making her hotter by the second.
And she was so tired and it must have been the jet lag and there was too much incense everywhere and surely she hadn’t married this preposterously dark creature, so demanding and daring and—
But then everything went mercifully blank.
CHAPTER TWO
LIONELASENSIOWASwell used to causing a commotion in the female population, whenever and however he encountered them. His staff liked to whisper, where they imagined he could not hear them, that he could barely walk down a street without women clinging to his every limb.
That was an exaggeration.
But not much of an exaggeration.
And yet despite all that, he was quite certain that he had never made a womanfaintbefore.
Then again, he had never married one, either.
It was hard not to conclude that the two were somehow related.
He caught her, of course. Like it or not, the tryingly namedGeraldine Gertrude Caseywas his wife now, and Lionel hoped he was not the kind of man who let a woman under his protection crash to the ground no matter the circumstances.
Today was not the day to change the whole of his character, despite the fact he had gone ahead and changed his life over the course of a short ceremony. No matter that he intended there to be precious few ramifications from that decision, there would besome, and yet he had still done it.
He caught her long before she hit the floor. He swept her up into his arms, lifting his chin at his assistant in the first pew as he turned. The man leaped to his feet and headed for the door at once, and Lionel knew that meant that his car would be brought around so that, hopefully, he could leave this place without the ever-lurking paparazzi any the wiser that he been here in the first place. Much less that he had gone ahead and gotten married to a literal nonentity, as far as he could tell at a glance. Not to mention that said nonentity had been so overset with sheer joy at the sudden dramatic shift in her circumstances that she had literally swooned in his arms.
Something in him chose to remind him that it had not beenjoyhe had seen all over the woman’s face, but he pushed that aside. Because it should have been joy. She should have been prostrate with gratitude.
Perhaps this was her version of precisely that.
His second assistant approached. “I will need to know who this woman is, obviously,” Lionel said, keeping his voice low in case anyone not in his employ was lurking about in the shadows. “I will need to know everything she has eaten for breakfast over the past ten years, at a minimum, and anything else you can turn up. She said her name wasGeraldine Gertrude Casey, of all things, and I cannot think why an American tourist should turn up in the middle of a private ceremony the way she did, then laugh with so little attempt to conceal it when the wedding ended so precipitously. Find out why, please.”
His second assistant nodded, then stepped back, typing away on her device.
He ordered his third and fourth assistants to assemble his legal team, for there would need to be contracts drawn up, replacing the name of the Cartwright heiress with Geraldine’s. There might also have to be some creativity involved in the documents for today’s events, but he had discovered that there was precious little in the world that could not be altered to suit him. All it took was money. And as he considered the woman he had almost married, he beckoned yet another assistant close.
“We will need to ascertain what has become of the previous bride, please. And whether she requires assistance.” He felt a slight pang at that, but Hope Cartwright had known exactly what he was about. And that he had needed a bride today, come hell or high water. As theirs had been an entirely cold-blooded business venture that had never trafficked in or near any emotional terrain, Lionel assumed that his near-wife would understand that he could not do anything but what he had done here, not that he intended to consult her about it. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t put his men on the case to determine what had actually happened to her today.
