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“Tell me,mi querida esposa,” he whispered, there the barest millimeter away from those lips of hers that haunted him already. “My Geraldine, only tell me what it is you want and I will make it yours.”
Her eyes fluttered closed. She swayed on those impossible heels of hers.
And Lionel could not recall ever wanting anything the way he wanted this. The way he wantedher, so much that he was shoving aside the alarms that rang inside him, warning him that he was much too close to breaking each and every one of his own rules—
“I only want one thing, Lionel,” she whispered, and for a moment, she pressed her cheek into his hand. He felt it like fire, but then she straightened. And Geraldine’s green eyes were distressingly clear when she caught his gaze again. “A paternity test for Jules. Tonight.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
GERALDINEWOULDNEVERknow how she managed to get those words out, when they weren’t at all what she wanted to say. They were what sheshouldsay, and so she had, but then she’d wished that somehow she could claw them back from where they hung in the air between them—
It was the look on Lionel’s face, she thought. It was that expression of his, as close to shock and betrayal as she imagined a man like him ever got.
There was only an instant of it. Just that one little instant—but then he stepped away, his dark gaze shuttering.
And when he looked at her again, it was as if he had never touched her at all.
She told herself that was a good thing.
Especially when she woke up, late again, to find her mother being ushered into her bedroom with the baby in her arms.
The baby.Herbaby. Her Jules. Geraldine was up before she knew it, crossing the floor of the bedchamber so she could take the laughing, cooing child into her arms. Then cover her sweet, beloved, damp little face with kisses.
“Geraldine Gertrude,” her mother said in a voice so low and so appalled that it made Geraldine flinch. “What have youdone?”
“What I must,” Geraldine replied over the baby’s head, seriously enough.
But it was only when she saw her mother’s gaze widen, then focus on the rumpled bed behind her that she understood what her mother thought was going on here.
“I didn’t sleep with the man we think is Jules’sfather,” she said, with perhaps more righteous indignation than was strictly called for. Given she had kissed the man. And danced with him. And run from him two nights in a row, in one way or another. Still, she stood straighter and stared her mother straight in the eyes. “What do you take me for?”
“I don’t like any of this,” her mother said, which wasn’t really an answer. “These aren’t how regular people behave. All this gallivanting about fromItalytoSpainon a lark. I don’t like it.”
“You used to tell me that life wasn’t worth living without a few adventures thrown in to spice it up,” Geraldine reminded her. “When did that change?”
Her mother blinked, and then, just for a moment, looked a little more like the woman who had always told her only daughter that the only limits she should ever set were the ones she chose, not ones that anyone else tried to press upon her.
“That was before,” Lorna Casey said quietly. Her mother held her gaze, a bit hard. “I couldn’t lose you the way we lost Seanna, Geraldine. I couldn’t cope.”
And hours later, Geraldine was still replaying that in her head.
It was long after the fleet of doctors came in, made the baby laugh, and ran their little tests. Her summons had come a mere quarter of an hour earlier in the form of her phalanx of stylists. They had all come whirling into the room, ignoring her mother and insisting that Geraldine get dressed according to their specifications.
Something she couldn’t begin to explain to her mother, who had been wearing the same pair of jeans for the past thirty years, and so didn’t try.
Geraldine went out of her way to avoid her mother’s eyes when she left at last, dressed in what she suspected was supposed to pass for a casual outfit in this place. The sort of high-waisted, wide-leg trousers that she had only seen in magazines, though she had to admit that they felt like a caress against her legs as she walked. With a tight-fitting, high-necked sleeveless blouse that her favorite stylist, the man called Angel, had told her was forthat little kick of cleverto go along withthe classically chic.
She wasn’t thinking about clever or chic when she walked into the library to find Lionel waiting for her. His grandmother was there too, wearing an outfit not dissimilar to the one Geraldine was sporting, though Doña Eugenia was bedecked in far more gems and fine jewels.
What she couldn’t decide was when or why, over the past two nights, she had become the sort of person who noticed such things.
“Your cousin’s baby is a lovely little thing,” Lionel said, every word measured. He tapped a set of papers sitting before him, and Geraldine was unreasonably pleased that she’d managed to keep her glasses for this. Because it felt like a bit of armor as she waited, her stomach heavy with what she refused to calldread. “But she is not mine. As I told you.”
And Geraldine would never know what kept her from reacting to that news the way she wanted. Once his words arranged themselves into some kind of sense inside her. Once she fully understood what they meant.
Once she realized that what she felt was a kind of bone-deep, systemic relief that she had no intention of acknowledging, much less analyzing.
Just as she had no intention of collapsing into the nearest chair, either. Because it was no one’s business but hers what the state of her knees were, so shivery beneath her just then.
