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Instead of answering her, Lionel led her outside to the waiting Range Rover. Because it was a short walk over the fields to the main house, but tonight he had decided it made sense to take the drive that looped around the long way. Not so much to make certain that they would make an entrance, though he knew all eyes would be on them nonetheless, but also so that his brand-new wife could walk more easily in those shoes that made her legs look as if they would wrap around a man’s back all too easily.
“You walk well in those heels,” he said as they settled into the back of the vehicle.
Geraldine sighed. “I was a teenage girl once upon a time. I learned how to walk in all kinds of ridiculous shoes. The fact that Icanwalk in them doesn’t mean Iwantto walk in them, but I was told in no uncertain terms that I was never going to seemyshoes again.”
“You are welcome,” Lionel said, trying to sound more severe than he actually was. “They were an offense against all that is stylish.”
And then he consulted the usual flood of messages on his mobile rather than chase up the things he heard her mutter, not quite beneath her breath. But he did not read a word. He was much too busy questioning why it was this woman who should have been overawed by him, yet was not, amused him.
He was not easily amused.
And was less amused by the moment as he wondered why Geraldine, of all women, should bring this out in him.
Moreover, he had not expected to get caught in traffic with half of Spain on the drive to the main house. Inching along meant he was stuck in this confined space with Geraldine, who he knew he could not touch.
Not now. Notyet. Not when she had been carefully crafted tonight to appeal to his grandmother as well as wow the crowd.
Lionel found to his surprise that he appeared to be ill-suited to this notion ofwaitingfor the things he wanted. He assured himself that this was only because he had been planning to present a wife at this party since his grandmother had decreed she would be throwing it, some eighteen months ago.
It was this situation, he told himself. It wasn’tthis woman.
But he was happier than he thought he ought to be to get out of the Range Rover, all the same.
“There are so many people here,” Geraldine said as they walked inside with the gathering crowd. She seemed to have left her scowls and glares back at his house, and Lionel knew he should have been grateful for that. Yet, oddly enough, he was not. As if he liked her unpredictable. “I suppose that makes sense. Your grandmother must have met a great many in all her years.”
“People have been invited to come and pay their respects whether they have met her or not,” Lionel told her as they made it through the entryway and were caught up almost at once in the music and the chatter as the flood of guests were directed into the great ballroom. This house had been a part of the court of some-or-other duke who had once claimed these lands, but had then lost them.
Geraldine did not drop his arm as they wound their way through the throngs of well-wishers, and Lionel decided that was a victory of its own. She held on to him, but her eyes could not seem to stay in one place—and made him wonder exactly how blind she really was, hiding behind her glasses. Because tonight her gaze moved from well-known cinema stars to recognizably famous pieces of art on the walls, then seemed to widen at the quiet, understated magnificence of this place that had been the seat of his family for generations.
Despite himself and all the many ways he knew he really needed to treat this like the business venture it was, Lionel found that Geraldine made him...protective. Of her. Because she wasn’t the Cartwright heiress—even now happy off in the desert with the man who had claimed her yesterday, according to all reports, and more power to her—who had cut her teeth on parties like this one.Shehad moved in the sorts of circles that would have prepared her for nights like this, like it or not.
Not so Geraldine.
But his many assistants had done their jobs well, and Lionel had been presented with files stuffed full of all the details anyone could ever want about his new wife the night before. Long after she’d run from him, he had sipped at his brandy from Jerez there in his library where he often spent his evenings, and read everything there was to know about Geraldine Gertrude Casey.
GeraldineAsensiohe corrected himself.
The files his people had compiled proved that she was exactly who she seemed to be, and there was something about that. It seemed to tug at him. It made his throat need clearing.
For the wife of the heir to the Asensio empire had been raised by two schoolteachers outside Minneapolis, which Lionel knew vaguely from his time at Harvard was somewhere in the American Midwest. He’d had to look it up on a map. Geraldine was an only child. She had done exceedingly well at school and had gone to Chicago for college, but had returned home to get her degree in library science, and then, later, her job.
She was enormously well-suited to that life, he thought.
Tonight, he felt very much as if was leading a lamb to the slaughter.
Though he supposed that the saving grace was how little Geraldine seemed to notice or care that she was the object of so much speculation that Lionel could actuallyfeelthe weight of so many stares as they walked through the ballroom.
Because it was known far and wide that even when Lionel was indulging in one of his relationships, he never brought a woman here. Not to this house.
Not when his grandmother was in residence.
He could see members of the Spanish nobility, who he would never quite callfriends, gossiping behind their hands as he walked Geraldine through the crowd. He saw the same assessment on the faces of politicians and celebrities. Yet he did not stop. He did not want to let anyone get their hooks into her.
Even though he knew that if anyone could handle herself, even in a place like this that better resembled a lion’s den tonight, it was Geraldine.
Lionel did not stop no matter who caught his eye or waved him over. He kept going until he achieved his target.
“Behold,” he intoned, with all due deference, inclining his head. “May I presentlailustrísimaseñora Doña Eugenia Lourdes Rosario Asensio.” Geraldine inclined her head the way everyone else did when they approached his grandmother. “Grandmother, this is my Geraldine.”
