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But something she would not call a smile moved over his hard face then. The kind of curve that only made it clear that he was far more dangerous and significantly less indolent than she might have imagined so far.
And if she was perfectly honest with herself, she’d imagined a lot.
“I do not require your affection, Geraldine,” he told her, quietly. Very, very quietly—which was in no way the same thing assoft. “In fact, I would prefer there be nothing of the kind between us. What I need is a wife. If that wife comes with a child in tow, all the better. I am perfectly prepared to make your life, and the child’s life, remarkably easy.”
That intensity was back in his gaze then, and it seemed to pierce straight through her, so that she really was holding her breath.
“I don’t think—” she began, feeling as if things wanted to start spinning once again.
But Lionel Asensio only let that curve in his mouth deepen. “Nothing comes without a price, Geraldine. I have certain requirements.” Again, that shrug that was not a shrug at all. “And I will insist that they are met before I subject myself to any test, much less contribute to the raising of any child, no matter whose she is.”
CHAPTER FOUR
LIONELCOULDTELLat once that Geraldine had not expected him to bargain with her.
This suggested to him that her research into him had not been as comprehensive as she claimed. For whatever else he was, he was known far and wide for his cold-blooded negotiations and his nonchalance in moments where other men crumbled.
Lionel did not crumble. He doubted he was capable of such a thing, and this should have been no different. He certainly shouldn’t have found himself reaching for an uncharacteristic explanation, simply because...her green eyes widened in dismay.
He did not offer one, of course. But he was shocked that he even possessed the urge.
Since when had he tolerated the intrusion of someone else’s feelings into the way he handled his business or himself?
But, of course, he knew the answer to that. The only person whose feelings he considered in any sort of ongoing fashion was hisabuelita, because she had earned that consideration by making herself the only steadying influence in the whole of his life.
He had buried his interest in other people’s inner workings and outer emotional performances with his father. And he had never looked back.
Green eyesshould not have registered with him one way or the other.
He waited as the car pulled into the small, private airfield where his jet stood ready for takeoff. His man came to the door and opened it wide once the car rolled to a stop. Lionel thought that Geraldine would refuse to get out, but she didn’t. Instead, she turned toward the door, looking more confused than anything else, and let the man help her climb from the vehicle.
But that confusion seemed to have fled her entirely when Lionel exited from the other side of the car and rounded it to stand by her side once more.
“Why are we at an airport?” she asked him, in what was not the friendliest of tones.
Lionel did not think she was in any particular mood to discuss the differences between proper airports in private airfield, so all he did was beckon toward the sleek little jet that waited there for them.
“We will return to Spain,” he told her. “Tomorrow is myabuelita’s eightieth birthday, and you are her present.”
Geraldine’s mouth dropped open and he found himself unaccountably transfixed by it. The memory of that kiss upon the altar seemed to flash through him, though he could not have said why. It had hardly been a kiss at all. It should not have registered. It had been a simple press of his mouth to hers and yet here he was, consumed with a hunger he was certain he had never felt before.
He would remember something like this, cluttering up his head and making him begin to wonder if he might start living his life according to the dictates of his sex, like his father had done to such an extent that it was rumored his mother had deliberately infected herself with that virus to escape the shame of having married such a base philanderer.
Lionel had never believed that it had been deliberate, because he’d known his mother all too well. If from a distance, as he had been all of twelve when she died and she had been nothing if not careless with herself as well as with everything else. His father had lived some ten years longer, but that had only given him more time and space to wreck everything he touched.
All of these things he had lived through, these histrionic lives and deaths, and he was standing here in an Italian afternoon, obsessing over a plain woman’s mediocre kiss.
He told himself it was because of the novelty, nothing more. She was not like the sort of women he had dallied with in the past. He hadmarriedher, for the love of God. He had never kissed awifebefore. And certainly nothis wife.
Perhaps a second thought—or five—was only to be expected.
“I can’t have heard you correctly,” she said, when he was certain she had heard him with perfect clarity. “You cannot mean to suggest... Why on earth would your grandmother wantmeas a present?”
“I have already told you this.” He commended himself for his patience. “What my grandmother wishes is for me to be married and en route to producing the grandchild of her dreams. This has now been accomplished. Tomorrow I shall present you to her and all you will need to do is follow the appropriate script when that happens. Nothing could be easier.”
And somehow, when that chin of hers rose, he was not surprised that she wished to defy him in this. “I’m not an actor. I’m not much forscripts.”
He should have wanted to crush her, here and now, so that he might know he could depend on her tomorrow. He wanted to bend her to his will, as he did everyone and everything, many times without even having to try.
