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But she...didn’t.
She felt a bit more severe as she pushed on. “Then, finally, she came home. Quite obviously unwell. Her mother and father, I regret to say, disowned her entirely within a day because of the substances she had become dependent on. All while claiming a certain moral high ground they certainly had not dithered over while taking her money. I took care of her myself.”
“As you had when she was young,” Lionel said in a low voice.
And it was shocking, somehow, to hear his voice just then. Much less to hear him tie such a neat bow around feelings that were still so raw. Geraldine felt shaken.
“I nursed her as best I could through her pregnancy, but she was very ill.” She looked down at her fingers clenched in her lap, and swallowed. Hard. “There were concerns for the baby. Seanna did not get better. To be honest, I don’t think she wanted to get better. And in the end, despite the doctors’ best efforts, her poor heart gave out while she was giving birth. Her daughter was mercifully unharmed, though she did have some more issues in the first few months of her life than a baby should.” She blew out a breath. “I took care of her, too.”
“And did your cousin appreciate your martyrdom while she lived?”
It was a soft, almost silken question, and Geraldine took offense to it immediately.
“I think you mean to be unkind,” she said, staring him down while her cheeks warmed with the force of what she told herself was temper. Not the embarrassment of hearing him say that word that her aunt and uncle had used to bludgeon her with. And that even her mother had been known to suggest might apply, more than once. “But I did not martyr myself to my cousin. I loved her. I was able to take a leave of absence from my job to care for her, because I wanted to. Because she had no one else. And because she trusted me. Unlike the rest of our family, I did not judge her. I still don’t.”
Lionel still did not seem to move a single muscle. He reminded her of a statue—somehow capturing a great predator in a stillness that made the viewer think only of the coming attack. “And how is it you have remained so free of the judgment that so many others seem immersed in, I wonder?”
“Because I read widely,” she shot back at him. “It is impossible to read as many books as I have and remain narrow-minded. It’s the very purpose of reading, I would even say.” And when he only gazed back at her, almost as if he pitied her in some way, she felt strongly that he was not understanding the situation at all. “I’m a research librarian. It is literally my job to gather information without emotion or agenda, collate it, and present it. All facts, no feelings.”
“But in this case, it would seem that feelings were at the forefront. Not facts.” He lifted a distractingly well-shaped shoulder in that way of his that she had already grown to dislike. “I am familiar with a number of beautiful women, some of them models. This I have never denied, nor would I. But that does not make me father to the child of a teenage junkie, Geraldine.”
She felt something inside her then, different from before. It was much colder. Much darker. And beneath it, something else too—the faintest hint of a kind of...disappointment?
But that made no sense. She had come here expecting this man to be the villain he was. To be far more appalling than he seemed, in fact. She had been absolutely certain that she could dress him down as he deserved. Shame him if necessary. She was very good at both, and more, was never afraid to charge heedlessly toward the right thing no matter what.
She would get Jules the justice both she and her mother deserved, no matter what. Geraldine was resolved.
Yet Lionel was not acting in accordance with the script in her head. How was it possible to be disappointed that he was...exactly who she’d expected him to be?
The wordsteenage junkieswam about in her head, oddly specific.
“So,” she said softly. “You do know her.”
“Not in the way you imagine,” Lionel replied, and for the first time, sounded slightly less than entirely calm. “One of my investments involves a rather famous couture house in Milan. I met your cousin. I can assure you, I’m not in the habit of sleeping with children. Or addicts, for that matter. It was...abundantly clear that she was unwell.”
“And yet, of all the names she could have dropped, it was only yours she ever spoke to me.” Geraldine scowled at him. “Why would that be? Why, even when she knew that her life was slipping away, would you be the only person she mentioned? Make that make sense.”
“I cannot,” he said.
But she didn’t believe him.
It was something about the way his gaze shifted. That intensity diluted itself as she watched.
Lionel turned his attention to the streets around them, and away from her.
She didn’t believe him, and a hard little knot seemed to form inside her, tying itself tight around that hint of disappointment, making it lead to something else entirely.
“I suppose the science will prove it one way or the other, then,” she said, perhaps too forcefully. Funny, but she no longer cared. “I’m assuming you will have no objection to taking the necessary tests. To prove that what you say is true. A man like you should have no trouble having an answer to illuminate us all by the end of the day.”
But when Lionel looked back at her, his expression had changed once again.
There was nothing there but stone and steel, and something implacable that was far more unyielding than either.
She had the strangest urge to hold her breath.
“I have no objection to a paternity test, Geraldine,” he told her quietly enough, but there was nothing soft in it. And nothing soft in him, either, as far she could see. “But before we do any of that, you and I will have to come to an agreement about this marriage.”
“I didn’t agree to this marriage in the first place. Why would you think that I would do anything at all but divorce you at the first opportunity?” Geraldine sniffed. “In case I haven’t made this clear, I don’t think highly of you. I doubt very much that will change. Whether you are proved to be Jules’s father or not.”
