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In a secret garden filled with candlelight and the scent of night-blooming flowers on the breeze.
“I assume I’m to stay here,” she said, dismayed that her voice seemed to get higher and higher with every syllable. She cleared her throat. “I’m sure someone mentioned that this was the guest cottage. I assume you stay, awash in your magnificence, somewhere significantly more spectacular.”
Lionel studied her in the candlelight, and it made everything inside her feel...fragile.
Except it was far too raw for that.
And somehow she knew exactly what he was going to say. Before he uttered a word.
“This is my home, Geraldine.” She heard the words he said, but the way he looked at her made themfeellike something else. “I am devastated that you do not find it up to your standards.”
“I’m sure it will be fine.” And she sounded more frigid than she might have wished, because her head was spinning. She didn’t want to stay in the same place as this man. She didn’t want to be anywhere near him—and she didn’t particularly want to explore her reasons for that. Or how they might have changed since she’d walked into that chapel what felt like a lifetime ago. “A hotel or guest room, it’s all the same to me.”
And she knew, somehow, that just then they were both standing on the edge of that same precipice. They were both being rocked by the same wind, making their footing unsteady.
Just as she knew that left to his own devices, Lionel would jump.
Geraldine had no idea what part of her it was that rather thought she would like to do the same.
The night seemed closer. The candles danced. He had called her beautiful, and more, she thought he meant it.
She had never wanted to be beautiful before. She wasn’t sure she liked how much she wanted it now.
Particularly here. With this man, of all men.
But every single buttery-hot sensation that moved through her then, she told herself harshly, was a betrayal. The way her breath caught. The sweet weight of her breasts, the way they moved against the soft fabric of her dress each time she breathed. That sparkling, melting part of her, deep in her belly and high between her legs.
She was betraying Seanna. And she hated herself for it.
Or she should.
Geraldine took one step back, then another. And she did her best to arrange her features into something scornful.
“I trust you will not make this difficult,” she said, as sharply as she could.
And then, as she watched, his stern, stone face changed.
Because Lionel Asensio smiled.
In a way that made everything inside of her begin to burn, that humming nearly breaking out through her skin.
“Run along, my little innocent,” he told her, every inch of him a wolf. Every beautiful, decidedly male inch. “And sleep well. There will be time enough for difficulties in the days to come. This I promise you, Geraldine.”
And later, she would be ashamed that she did not turn and saunter away, effortless and unbothered.
But just then, with that particular gleam in his dark gaze making her body feel something like feverish, Geraldine did the only thing she could.
She kicked off her pointless shoes and ran.
CHAPTER SIX
LIONELHADSPENTthe day immersed in the usual concerns of his various business enterprises, but he was uncomfortably aware that his attention kept wandering. When his attention was normally fixed and unshakable.
Worse, he found his mind returning again and again to last night.
To that moment when he had first seen Geraldine no longer hiding her beauty but honoring it. Making it clear that she was pure diamond, straight through.
Or later, when he had found himself more nearly undone by a single conversation with her than he had been in whole relationships with others.
