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“Seanna was a magical child,” Geraldine told him fiercely, though she was mindful that men dismissed any hint of emotion should they hear it—so she forced herself to keep that fierceness at as even a keel as possible. “I was nine when she was born. And though my family has never been particularly close, it was as if she had been created for me alone. I treated her like a living, breathing doll at first. Then as a miniature version of me. We only became closer as she grew. She told me things she would never dare to tell her parents. She told me of all the dreams she had that didn’t seem to fit. All the fantasies she had of a life that was bright and happy and far less cold than her parents’ house, which, it has to be said, makes the whole of Minnesota seem like a sunny beach by comparison.”
She expected a man of such intense self-importance to betray his impatience as she told this tale. To hurry her along, or snap at her, or bite her head off in some other way as she laid out Seanna’s story in the way she’d been practicing for weeks now, but Lionel did none of those things. He remained where he was, in that same confusing position in the seat beside her. His long, hard body in its finery exhibited some level of indolence, surely, yet everything about the way he looked at her was taut. Intense.
As if he listened the way it was rumored he did everything else.
With every part of himself.
Geraldine had the stray thought that no one in her entire life had ever paid such close attention to her. Not ever.
And she was not entirely sure she knew what todoin the face of it. She had the unworthy urge to laugh. Or simply close her eyes and tip herself toward him, as if that mightdo something—
It was obvious that the jet lag was messing with her once again.
She forced herself to carry on anyway, hoping that this time,faintingwasn’t on the table and if it was, that he would leave her to it in her perfectly comfortable seat. “Seanna was a remarkably pretty girl. And I don’t mean that she was simply cute, as so many little girls are. Most if not all little girls, in my opinion. But Seanna was so pretty that strangers would stop her in the streets to marvel at her looks.” Geraldine smiled slightly, remembering the commotion her cousin had caused wherever she went. At five. Seven. Nine. To her mother’s enduring horror, as if the attention Seanna drew to her so effortlessly was something she wasdoing, deliberately, to spite her. “She was so pretty that my aunt would often see people taking pictures of her on the sly, and not in a creepy way, but as if she was a piece of art. By the time she was a teenager, it was quite clear that she wasn’t simplyprettyany longer. Most of us hit those years and devolve into trolls of one variety or another, but not my cousin. She was already pretty, and then she became astonishingly beautiful, seemingly overnight. And it was more than the simple sum of her features. She had...something else. A kind of magnetism. I don’t know how else to explain it. There was something about her that made whoever looked at her want to keep looking.”
It amazed Geraldine how much it hurt to talk about her cousin, even when she’d truly thought that she’d put so much of this to rest. Because she had tried and tried. She’d read every book on grief and mourning she could get her hands on. Then she’d tried out the advice in each and every one of them.
Even before Seanna had died, Geraldine had been trying to come to terms with what had happened to her shooting star of a cousin.
Sometimes she wondered if watching the price of all that prettiness had left more of a mark on her than she liked to think.
Because now, face-to-face with the man she’d considered the bogeyman for so long, she felt that same old hitch inside of her. That same urge to collapse into the tears that threatened yet again, when she’d thought she’d left the sobs behind her.
It was talking about those early days, she thought. It was remembering what it had been like when Seanna was still such an innocent and had shined so brightly that the whole world had always seemed to hold its breath around her.
She really had been magic.
But Geraldine refused to give this man the satisfaction of seeing her cry about the things he’d helped do to her cousin.
Sherefused.
“When she was fourteen, she caught the attention of a talent scout on the streets of Minneapolis,” she said instead, forcing herself to keep telling this story. Because she already knew no one else would, and that could not stand. She would not let it stand. “My aunt and uncle had no interest in letting their daughter get sucked into that sort of world. They have a very particular, very rigid sort of morality and certainly no imagination to speak of. They didn’t think their daughter needed pictures taken of her, much less by strange people in far-off cities. The talent scout who found Seanna on the street gave her a card and my aunt not only ripped into pieces, she threw it into the fire.” She sighed a little. “So maybe she has more imagination than I’m giving her credit for.”
Geraldine studied Lionel’s face for a moment then, as the car bumped along. She wondered why it was that neither sunlight nor shadows seemed to affect him. He didn’t change at all. Worse, neither state was more or less revealing.
It was as if he was as enduring as stone.
There was no reason that idea should have made her shudder a little bit, but it did.
“But Seanna quite liked the idea of modeling.” Geraldine smiled. “Or, if I know my cousin, she liked the idea of the attention. Because she was used to it, you see. That was the sort of beautiful she was. She wasused toturning heads. She was used to fusses being made over her, wherever she went and whatever she did. Some people would shy away from that kind of thing, because it isn’t about who a person is, is it? It’s about what other people imagine a person might be. But Seanna wanted more. So she went ahead and tracked down the scout on her own, flew to New York when her parents thought she was on a school trip to Chicago, and the next time she spoke to her parents about modeling she did it with a lucrative contract in hand.”
Geraldine blew out a breath then. She hated this part. Because it felt too much like selling out her family to a man who didn’t deserve to know a single thing about them. And more, to a man who could not possibly understand the sorts of trials regular people faced. But there was nothing for it. This was the story, and she was telling it.
Besides. She had long since decided that simply being blood related to people did not mean that she was required to pretend they weren’t problematic when they were. “My aunt and uncle weren’t on board with their daughter getting swept up in something as squalid and showy asmodeling, but there was a lot of money on the table. And they lived very modestly after my uncle was laid off. You might not understand this, but the sort of money that men like you might scoff at could change everything for regular people. And it did.”
Geraldine laced her fingers together in her lap. Across the back seat that they shared, Lionel remained still. But there was still that intensity in the way he looked at her. She should have found that a barrier. She should have felt self-conscious, surely, but instead the seriousness of his expression made it easier to carry on.
“There was no warm-up, no testing of the waters,” Geraldine told him. “Seanna became an instant sensation. She flew all over the world. She appeared in the pages of every magazine you can think of and a great many more I had certainly never heard of before. There were catwalks by the dozens. By the time she was eighteen she had worked with top designers and legendary photographers in Paris, Milan, New York, and anywhere else you can imagine. She was a stalwart at the fashion shows. In terms of a modeling career, she was an enormous success by any measure—if already worried about getting old. But her personal life was a disaster.”
The man beside her said nothing. He certainly didn’t issue any accusations, and yet Geraldine still felt her own guilt crash over her in some kind of heavy wave. There was an undertow there that she knew might sweep her under if she let it—
But she hadn’t let it in some time. Today was no time to backtrack.
“It was very obvious that she wasn’t well,” Geraldine managed to say quietly. “It wasn’t only that her appearance deteriorated so alarmingly—in person, I mean. Never in photographs. It was more concerning that she just...wasn’t herself. She stopped her weekly calls home. She even stopped her daily calls tome. If we wanted to keep up with her we had to track her in the tabloids, where it became very clear that she’d learned how to party and was spending most of her time doing so in the company of very rich, very famous men who never seemed to care much for her. I used to ask her about the men she was linked with and every time it seemed to hurt her a little more. So I stopped asking. I regret that.”
Lionel caught her gaze and held it one beat, then another.
Until Geraldine almost felt the need to rub that sensation away, as if he had actually reached out and made her heart pump with his own hand. A ridiculous notion by any measure and one she should have found alarming.
