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“But how do I know that I can believe what you’re telling me?” she made herself ask. “I’m certain that all those doctors that you managed to get to turn up here would happily say anything you want them to say.”
“I had the very same thought,” Lionel’s grandmother said then, with a thump of her cane against the floor. And when Lionel raised a brow in her direction, she only smiled. “I love my grandson, dear. But it has not escaped my notice that he, regrettably, is a man. And even the best of them can act a fool. I had my personal doctor run the test again. But I am afraid it came back with same answer. And that is a pity. Because I quite fancy myself as a doting grandparent.”
“Doting?”Lionel queried. “Are you certain that is within your capabilities,Abuelita?”
She said something in Spanish that made Lionel smile, then looked back at Geraldine. “Lionel tells me that you both agreed to take a honeymoon sometime in the future, but I must insist that you reconsider. It is my belief that the true beating heart of a marriage can only be heard at first during the honeymoon. I have always said so.”
“You have never said such a thing in all your days,” Lionel said darkly.
His grandmother waved her hand languidly. “And yet I know I am right.”
“Thatyou have said a great many times.”
As if she had only needed confirmation from herself, and ignoring her grandson, the old woman angled herself up from the chair where she sat—with an agility that Geraldine found questionable. It was as if the cane was for show.
“It is settled. I shall find the finest nannies and nurses in the whole of Spain to make certain the child wants for nothing. And you and this grandson of mine will do what all newlyweds must do in the perfect privacy you deserve.” Doña Eugenia shifted her gaze to Lionel, an obvious challenge even from where Geraldine stood. “The entire Asensio empire will not crumble without you over the course of a single little month,nene. Believe me.”
“A month is entirely too long,” Lionel said, certain tightness in his voice then. “The world is not as slow as you might recall it.”
“Said no besotted new groom ever,” replied his grandmother. And then matched his lifted brow with her own.
The family resemblance was astonishing, Geraldine thought. But she was glad they were too busy glaring at each other to pay any attention to what she was or wasn’t doing. Currently, she was still trying not toshake. With that same relief coursing through her like its own kind of heat.
Lionel wasn’t the father.He wasn’t the father.
It took her a moment to realize it when they stopped staring each other down and turned to her instead.
“This is such a kind offer,” she made herself say, somehow keeping her voice even. “But my mother is here.”
She shrugged, as if her mother required a chaperone when Lorna Casey was nothing if not a great fan of her own company. Anywhere and everywhere.
“Nonsense,” said Doña Eugenia grandly. “I feel certain that I can entertain your mother, my girl. My company has enchanted no less than kings and presidents in my day. I flatter myself that I can make anyone at all feel at home, should I wish it.”
And then, as if she was considering being affronted, she swept from the room. Leaving Geraldine face-to-face with Lionel at last. This time, feeling dizzy for more than one reason.
Geraldine thought he might gloat, then. But all he did was slide the papers toward the edge of the table where he stood, then tap them again, his gaze an intensity that made her want to shake all the more.
“What I need you to know,” he said, very intently, “is that what I have told you is true. Your cousin was too young for me. She was not well. But even if, somehow, those things had escaped me, I do not walk away from my responsibilities. I never have and I never will. Do we understand each other now, you and I?”
And Geraldine had the strangest urge to give in to the sob that seemed to be gathering there, right behind her ribs. Not because he had been telling her the truth. Not even because she needed to start the search for Jules’s paternity all over again.
But because he wasn’t looking at her the way he had been last night, with all of that longing and desire, and that molten gleam in his dark gaze.
The loss of it felt like more grief than she could bear.
“Lionel...” she began, but something bright and hot seemed to arc between them, there in the library with only the books as witness.
“I like hearing my name in your mouth,” he told her, dark as sin. “I intend to hear it often over the next month.”
She swallowed, hard. “Because, naturally, you will not be telling your grandmotherno.”
His eyes were so dark and rich that it was as if she could feel them inside her. “I will not.”
She felt that bright heat between them again, and wanted nothing more than to reach out and touch it. To close the distance between them, and—
And.
That was the trouble. There was so much on the other side of the wordand.
