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“There are many men in your position who litter the trail behind them with one-night stands,” Geraldine proclaimed, apparently answering that question herself. “You not only don’t do that, ever, but the women you have these relationships with never take to the press when you’re done with them.”
“Perhaps,” Lionel suggested lazily, “they are the ones who finish with me and therefore see no reason to discuss it with anyone.”
And he could not have said why it pleased him that she laughed at that. “I don’t think so.”
“Dare I ask why we are delving so deeply into my romantic history?” When she didn’t respond at once, he lifted a brow. “Could it be that you wish to fully inhabit your role as my wife? What an unexpected left turn, indeed.”
Her frown deepened, but was undercut entirely by the way that flush betrayed her, yet again.
Something else he liked far more than he should.
“What I am trying to understand is why, if you were so desperate for a wife, you didn’t marry one of your girlfriends,” Geraldine said, sensibly enough. “Perhaps no one told you, given the rarefied circles you inhabit, but that’s actually the typical way of things.”
“Is it indeed?” He leaned back against the car, never shifting his gaze from her upturned face. “And you are conversant on this topic because of the numerous husbands you have married and then discarded, I take it?”
She ignored that, though he saw her stand a little straighter. “I’m sure that you could have called up any one of them, indicated you had the slightest interest in them again, and they would have come running. You could have had a perfectly easy wedding to a woman who would not require threats to do your bidding... But maybe I’m missing something. Maybe all of these relationships were terrible, fraught with insurmountable minefields.”
That hit a little too close to home, Lionel could admit.
The truth was, he was not well-suited to relationships, something he always told the women he dated before they embarked on one. But no matter how many times he explained that he did not believe in love and would not succumb to it, the same tired refrain played itself out in the same way. Each and every one of the women became more and more emotional, which he could not abide. And every time he finished with them because of this, they had professed their love and accused him of all manner of sins, most of which boiled down to the very thing he told them at the start. That he was unfeeling, uncaring. Heartless.
They were correct, he would always remind them. He had told them so himself.
How could anything else be expected from him? His father’s emotions had resulted in trashed hotels from Barcelona to Fiji and back again. It had been operatic, the way the man had made the whole of the world a stage upon which anything and everything could be a fainting couch for his affairs, his schemes, his over-the-topic shamelessness in all things.
Lionel had closed himself off from all such emotional traps before he reached the age of eighteen.
“I do not wish to have discussions about my marriage,” he told Geraldine instead of any of those things, because he could not see that psychoanalyzing himself was at all useful here. “And I do not wish there to be any doubt about who is in control of it.”
She blinked at that, then blinked again, as if he’d told some kind of joke. “It is my understanding that there are many women who would sign up for that today. Happily.”
“Relationships are always tricky.” And Lionel couldn’t seem to help himself. His brow lifted of its own accord. “As, naturally, you are well aware, given your vast breadth and depth of experience. It is very easy to promise things at the beginning, only to feel quite differently about them as time goes on. The beauty of a business arrangement is that feelings become carefully thought-out clauses, and squabbles are settled in advance with the power of a signature.”
“I think that is a fiction that businesspeople like to tell themselves,” Geraldine countered. “But corporations, business deals, and even contracts—these are all the work of human hands. It’s justpeoplewandering around pretending that they can take the human out of it.”
Lionel did not quite smile at this odd hen of a woman lecturing him on business affairs. “I prefer to think of it as managing expectations.”
The Italian sun beat down, warm for a fall afternoon, and he could feel his phone buzzing repeatedly in his pocket. It was alerting him to all the various fires that were no doubt being set right and left across his empire, because there were always fires and he was the only one who ever seemed able to take those blazes and lower them to a more manageable simmer.
The truth was, he enjoyed it.
But still he stood here on this airfield, carrying on this pointless conversation with a green-eyed woman in the ugliest dress he’d ever seen, when he knew—as she must—that all he needed to do was to lift the faintest finger and his security detail would sweep her onto his plane despite any objections she might have. He could do it himself, for that matter. She already knew that he was perfectly capable of lifting her up and toting her about.
Yet, looking at her now, she seemed to be under the impression that she was the one in control of this interaction.
And Lionel had been fascinated by power and authority for the whole of his life. That was what happened with a father like his had been, so decidedly unequal to the task. If not actively engaged in squandering whatever measure of either he had ever had, because he could.
Because he knew no one could stop him. Not his wife. Not his son. Not even his otherwise formidable mother.
Lionel’s father had reveled in the things he could not be told not to do.
Perhaps it was unsurprising that Lionel himself had felt, from a very young age, that he had to earn what power he had. That he had to work hard so that he spoke with true authority and could not simply throw money at the problems he made, like his father and grandfather had always done.
That was wealth. And it was not the same thing as real power, no matter how it might look from the outside. No matter how many people tried to pretend otherwise because it was all they had.
But he found himself fascinated all the same by this woman who did not appear to notice that she possessed no power here, even less authority, and had not even the faintest hint of wealth to make it worth ignoring her lack.
If he was not mistaken, Geraldine Gertrude Casey seemed to think that whatever power she possessed was...innate.
