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It is literally the least you can do, came a voice inside that sounded suspiciously like the conscience his grandmother had been at such pains to instill in him all his life.
Only when all of these instructions had been fired off left and right and his people were hurrying about with tasks to perform did Lionel finally take a moment to look down at the woman he had held in his arms all the while.
His initial impression of her was that she was, decidedly, what he knew was called afrump. Dowdy almost beyond comprehension. He had seen her when she’d come in, thanks to the racket she’d made, and had wondered in passing what dreary organization had set its church mouse free to crash weddings in Italy.
But then she had laughed when no one else in the chapel had dared.
When everyone else had been frozen into place, and silent, awaiting his reaction.
And then on top of this she had been, if not openly defiant, markedly and noticeably unimpressed with Lionel himself.
He was...not used to such reactions.
Not unless said reactions were themselves a bit of playacting by those hoping to differentiate themselves from the crowd, but that was not the impression he’d gotten from this woman.
Something had shifted again when she’d stood and proved herself not to be a tiny, frail little thing. She was tall enough, not an unusual circumstance in his circles, but she was not a whittled-down figurine all gaunt bones in the vague shape of a woman. She was not emaciated—fashionably or otherwise—as so many women were these days, as if starving themselves was a bit of sport and they wanted a medal.
He would have said instead that she looked...well. Tired and frumpy, certainly, but there was a smoothness to her shape. A pleasing hint of an actual figure, somewhere beneath that tent-like monstrosity of a dress.
Now she was in his arms, her eyes closed behind the unduly large glasses she wore. Shut, her eyelids covered the unusual green of her gaze and the way she’d stared at him so owlishly, with that intensity of regard that had called him to a kind of attention he did not quite understand.
Lionel did not wish to understand it. He dismissed the notion that he should. Because this close, he was aware of a great many things about the woman he’d just married.
Whether he wanted to be aware of her or not.
Her skin was extraordinary. She seemed toglow, somehow, and not simply because the flush he’d seen all over her earlier had left some marks. Lionel would have said that no woman alive in these greedy and calculated times still blushed, but this one had proved him wrong.
Yet now the deepness of that flush had receded like the tide and all he could see was softness and that impossibleglow.
Her hair was dark and was twisted back in one of those hideous claw devices that looked like nothing so much as the return of the Inquisition to him, and not in a manner he would ever dream of callingartful. Lionel felt certain that she had thrown it back to get it out of her way and had likely thought no more about it.
He could not account for why he could not seem to do the same. It had something to do with the fact that he could smell the shampoo she’d used, a bright pop of coconut and papaya, of all things. She smelled of the fruity, frothy cocktails he would never drink and there was no reason at all he should find that appealing.
Particularly when she was clad from neck to ankles in her entirely shapeless dress that appeared to be covered in some kind of indefinable floral element. The hint of flowers, though their shape gave him no clue what precisely they were supposed to be. The garment made her look like nothing so much as a rather dreadful couch.
Yet the woman in his arms was not shapeless. He could feel it. She was soft and warm and worse by far, he could feel her curves.
Lionel did not wish to feel anything. His father and his grandfather before him had been men of great passion, by their reckoning and according to their excuses. Lionel thought of them as men made of greed, for anything that caught their fancy. Or any passing whim. They had been heedless, reckless in every respect, and had waved it all away by claiming that it was their enormity of feeling that made them act as they did. That they could not be expected to rein themselves in, for they were men of great appetites and needed to feed.
To Lionel, the pair of them had been nothing but vampires. He had vowed that he would never let his feelings dictate his behavior in that way.
Or in any way.
His grandmother had taken a similarly dim view of the man she had married and the one she had raised, and it was her influence that had saved him from following in their footsteps.
He was grateful to hisabuelitaevery day.
And yet this woman in his arms smelled like the tropics while looking like a library.
Lionel knew he had never kissed a mouth as plain as Geraldine’s. He could not account for why the experience still reverberated through him, as if this woman was a fault line, and having tripped over her, everything was now far more precarious.
He was Lionel Asensio. He did notdoprecarious.
But none of that mattered, because the deed was done. She had married him, not that he had allowed him any doubt that she might balk once he had decided that she might as well take the Cartwright heiress’s place. And Lionel was not one to spend too much time looking backward. There was nothing to be done now but to move on.
Into what came next.
He was already steeling himself for it.
