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Particularly because, she couldn’t help but think, she didn’t have to tear herself apart for harboring all these strangely overwhelmingfeelingsfor a man who’d abandoned her cousin.
“I suppose I’d better go tell my mother she’s about to have her very own Spanish vacation,” Geraldine said instead of leaning into all thatand. Even though she was sure that the glint she saw in Lionel’s gaze as she backed away from him was laughter. Possibly even mockery.And, and, and—She shoved her glasses into place. “With a new best friend to boot.”
Then she turned and bolted for her rooms.
But Lorna declined the offer to stay in Spain for all that time. “What would I do?” she asked, shaking her head as she looked out the window at all the rolling hills and vineyards. It was all a far cry from the view out back of Geraldine’s childhood home. “Besides, your father needs seeing to.”
Geraldine imagined that somewhere in Minnetonka, Patrick Casey sat up straight at that, understanding he was being maligned from all the way across the planet. As he had never been the sort of man who needed his wife to do things for him that he could himself.
And Geraldine did not ask her mother to take Jules. Not only because she knew that her mother wouldn’t do it. But because Jules washers, and there was something in that acknowledgment that felt different, now. Because she had spent all this time thinking that finding the man who’d gotten Seanna pregnant meant that maybe, somewhere out there, there was a man who would be interested in stepping up to his responsibilities. Or paying for his disinterest. But it turned out that she still didn’t know who that was. And in the meantime, a baby girl needed a parent.
Geraldine had been her mother all along.
Maybe it was time that she accepted that, then, as her own mother stepped away.
“And you married him?” Lorna asked, still not quite looking Geraldine in the eye. As if she feared the answer when she already knew it. “On purpose?”
There were so many things that Geraldine could have said to that, but she didn’t. She held Jules. She pressed her lips to the baby’s soft, warm head.
“I suppose I did,” was all she said.
Her mother let out a sigh that was much too close to a sob.
“Then I will leave you to it,” she murmured, as if she was keeping her voice low to hide the crack in it.
But somehow, the pain in that gave Geraldine the strength she hadn’t quite understood she needed.I couldn’t lose you the way we lost Seanna, Geraldine, her mother had said earlier.I couldn’t cope.
So she left Lorna to fuss with her bag, as if it needed repacking when it plainly did not. Geraldine didn’t argue with her. She made her way back out into the hall and down the stairs until she was in the main part of the house. Instead of walking out through the atrium again to find the garden, or out the front door to the grand foyer, she turned in the other direction and started down a different hall.
And she knew at once that she had entered Lionel’s domain.
There was a subtle shift in the art on the wall, though it was not until she walked some ways down the hall that she realized the difference. The walls boasted canvases with bold lines and arresting colors while in the main part of the house, the art tended more toward Old Masters and pieces that became a part of the decor as a whole rather than making her want to stop and look more closely.
She didn’t stop now, either. But she was aware that she wanted to. And she wasn’t surprised that this hall did not lead to a warren of little rooms leading off it like the part of the house she was staying in, but instead opened up into a grand open space that felt both out of place in a house like this and entirely of it.
She understood at once that Lionel had fashioned himself a kind of loft space, here in this ancient place, when she would have expected something far more traditional. She let her gaze move over the exposed beams beneath the glass ceiling, the grand fireplace in one corner, the spare yet comfortable furnishings.
And then, at last, turned to find the man himself sitting on one of the low leather sofas with stacks of documents piled to one side of him, his computer on his lap, and more documents before him on a low, wide coffee table.
“I would have thought you’d have an office for that,” Geraldine said without thinking.
As if his office arrangements were the point of any of this. And as if that was what she’d come here to discuss with him.
One of his eyebrows rose, but he did not otherwise react. “I’ve a great many offices, Geraldine. And when I wish to go to one of them, I do. Other times I prefer to work at home. I know my grandmother thinks otherwise, but the Asensio empire does not exist simply because she thinks it should. It takes work, I am afraid.”
His gaze moved from her to the baby she held, and she wasn’t sure that she could quite define the look on his face then.
Or maybe it was that she wasn’t sure she wanted to.
“My mother would prefer to go home,” Geraldine told him. “And to be honest, I think it would be best she did.”
“My grandmother is not used to her plans being upended.” But Lionel did not sound as if he minded it happening, even so. “Perhaps it will be good for her to remember that the entire world does not revolve around her, despite all indications to the contrary.”
Jules began to kick and wave her arms in the air, so Geraldine set her down in the center of the plush, richly colored rug that took over the middle of the big room. She watched the baby for a moment, knowing that it wouldn’t be long now before Jules would turn that rocking into crawling, and then, shortly after that, toddling around on her feet.
You should be here for this, she thought, sending a message to her cousin the way she often did, inside.
Geraldine straightened to find that Lionel had stood, too. She moved toward him, telling herself that there was no reason for her heart to be beating like that in her chest. He was onlylookingat her. The baby wasright here. Surely there was a limit to...whatever might come of this heat she wished she didn’t feel.
