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She only glared. Again. He had never known a woman to glare much at all in his presence, unless she was related to him. Even then it had never been so often.
“I will need you to say it, please,” she told him.
As if she did not find what he had said already sufficient because she found him untrustworthy in some way. As if she, a nobody from nowhere—and that was being generous—needed more. From him.
Fromhim.
And that was the moment, Lionel realized. The moment that everything shifted, little as he might have wished it to.
He knew too many things then that he wished he did not.
Too many things he would have taken back, if he could.
“I understand completely, Geraldine,” he said, from between his teeth.
And he watched as she inclined her head, like royalty, and then actually beckoned for him to precede her to his own damn plane so she could trail along after him, as if this entire situation was hers to command.
She was wrong about that, of course.
But it was that moment that Lionel kept returning to. As the plane took off, and Geraldine stopped scowling at him only long enough to fall asleep before the plane completed its climb into the sky.
It was that moment he thought about over and over as he studied the circles beneath her eyes that suggested she really was tired, and not simply narcoleptic. Or simply trying out a new form of defiance as best she could.
He kept studying her, noting that in sleep her glasses slid down even farther, so that they nearly reached the tip of her nose and then, when she shifted in her seat, fell to her chin. Where they hung from her ears and should have made her look ridiculous. Perhaps she did. But Lionel found himself cataloging, instead, what appeared to be mounting evidence that he had somehow stumbled upon a diamond in the rough.
He already knew that she was not as shapeless as she seemed to wish she was. He had discovered that firsthand. But now he could see that she had the potential to be quite beautiful, in her own way. Now that she was not glaring and scowling, rolling her eyes, or making those disapproving faces of hers.
She did not look as if she had ever cared very much for her hair, save that shampoo she used that smelled like beachside holidays. But it was a more interesting shade of brown than some and if he wasn’t mistaken, had a bit of a natural wave to it as well. There were stylists who could do wonders with such a canvas. Especially when her skin was smooth and her nose was straight. Her lips, as he had discovered, were firm and not overly thin. Her teeth had looked straight enough. She might even have a nice smile, not that he would know, as she had not aimed one in his direction.
Lionel could work with this. He could make her over into a woman resembling the sort his grandmother would expect him to have married—because convincing her was what mattered. There was no way that his sharp-eyedabuelitawould believe, for even one moment, that he had accidentally become besotted with a woman who wore sofas as dresses and went aboutscowlingat people through dark-framed glasses that made her face look misshapen.
Geraldine possessed the one thing he knew his grandmother wanted for him above all else. Lionel was so certain that he would bet the Asensio name and the whole of his fortune on the fact that she was completely innocent. His grandmother would approve of that, he knew.
But she would not believe for one moment that it was a real marriage—the kind she had lectured him extensively that she wanted for him—if he brought Geraldine to her looking like this.
My marriage to your grandfather was arranged, she had told him on her last three birthdays.As was your mother’s to your father. I would call neither a success. You must do better,mi nieto.I want something real for you.
What you want,Abuelita, is less scandal attached to the family name, Lionel had replied each time.
The older woman had eyed him, amused.I am not opposed to your happiness, child. I simply cannot trust you to find it yourself.
Lionel shot off the necessary messages to his assistants, so they might have the appropriate people in place when the plane landed in the Asensio estate in the hills of Andalusia. Tucked between the olive orchards and the vineyards, gorges in one direction and white hilltop villages in the other, the estate had stood for far longer than the reputation of two late and largely unlamented men who had done their best to dismantle what their ancestors had built.
The selfishness. The waste. The complete inability to think of anything beyond self-gratification, no matter the cost—
But he ordered himself to shut that off. It was the past.
And he would not do the same as they had done. He would use this strange woman he had married as the weapon she needed to be to achieve his aims.
It started with the transformation he wished Geraldine to undergo before tomorrow, so that his grandmother could live out the rest of her life in ease and comfort—insofar as she allowed herself such weaknesses—and pay far less attention to her only grandson’s personal affairs.
But when that was done, he returned again to that same moment, there beside a car in Italy.
Because that was when he’d known.
That despite his best intentions—and whether she took to her transformation or did not—this marriage was not going to be any kind of business arrangement, after all.
Because Lionel intended to have Geraldine beneath him, in every way a man could, and soon.
