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CHAPTER EIGHT
LIONELLEARNEDAGREATmany things about himself in the weeks that followed.
First, that he was not accustomed to delayed gratification. He found this a bit of a surprise, for he considered not being able to wait a deep flaw that he had witnessed entirely too many times from his father and grandfather. He had long considered himself made of sterner stuff.
And yet the fact remained that he was not used to wanting something he could not simply have. Certainly not when it came to women.
Second, and related, was that he found he had never truly experimented with the limits of his self-control before, and certainly not while enjoying such close proximity to the object of his desire.
The truth was, he had never imagined any of this to be a factor. It would not have occurred to him that it could be.
He was Lionel Asensio. He had never known a woman to spend much time in his presence before offering herself to him on the nearest silver platter. Some women did not require an introduction. Most women were drawn to him without him having to do more than...exist.
But Geraldine was like no other woman he had ever encountered.
It was almost as if she did it on purpose—but he knew too well that she did not. That what he saw was who she was, always. For a man who had always considered himself the soul of directness and forthrightness, despite his upbringing, Lionel found it nothing short of confronting that this woman had him beat in both of those areas.
If she didn’t also tempt him beyond reason, he wasn’t at all sure what he would make of her.
He had insisted that they eat their meals together. He had done so as a counterpoint to her demands when she had agreed to stay here with him for the honeymoon period his grandmother had demanded. All the things Geraldine had insisted upon involved the child. She refused to hand the baby off to nannies entirely. She refused to spend a month—or even a day—apart from little Jules.
A lesser man might have been displeased that he took second place to an infant.
But Lionel found the way she cared for a child that was not even of her own flesh made her seem to glow all the more for him.
And so it was that they sat there every morning in the part of his great room that was set aside for eating, and watched the way the new day moved over the fields beyond.
“I begin to understand the entire purpose of honeymoons,” she told him one morning.
“I do not believe you do understand their purpose at all,” he replied darkly, because his body understood. Only too well. His body wanted all kinds of things that he would have thought were the whole purpose of a honeymoon, of any description or length.
The kind of things he thought about late into the night, staring up at his ceiling and imagining she was with him...
Yet he was only too aware that this was not at all what Geraldine was talking about.
As she quickly made clear.
“It works no matter what type of marriage you’ve embarked upon,” she said brightly, buttering her toast. “If it’s some kind of arranged situation, like the one you had planned to have, well, then. You have a honeymoon to get to know the stranger you married. If it’s a love match, you get to deepen your feelings. But really, I do think it’s a bit ingenious that once upon a time, someone assumed that what couples needed most of all was to be locked away together if anything was to come of it.”
“What was to come of it was a child,” Lionel pointed out. “That would be the entire purpose. The phase of the moon to get a new wife pregnant, because that is, of course, the only purpose of a marriage in some eyes.”
Geraldine, he had come to realize, was remarkably good at ignoring anything she did not wish to discuss. She only glanced at him today, a simple touch of that maddeningly cool green gaze. “Lucky for you, then, that there is already a child.”
As if she didn’t understand what he meant when he knew very well that she did.
But she had negotiated more time with Jules than Lionel had expected she would want. He could not recall his own mother insisting that she see to his bedtime. Or that she see him much at all. She had been a shadowy figure in Lionel’s life. He had been raised by nannies, nurses, and tutors when his grandmother was unavailable, and had been presented to his father and grandfather infrequently.
Geraldine insisted on actually spending time with the baby. She had the child brought to her in the mornings after she’d been fed and clothed and was usually in a happy, sunny sort of mood.
If all babies were as delightful as this one, Lionel found himself thinking with no small amount of surprise, he might be predisposed to go ahead and have one before the five years he’d imagined he would wait were up.
“Is she always like this?” he asked on one such morning. They had finished their breakfast and the staff of nannies had brought Jules in. Geraldine didn’t seem to care that her cadre of stylists dressed her exquisitely every morning for his pleasure, not hers, and he knew this because she had no qualms whatsoever throwing herself down on the floor with the child.
She looked up at him now, her lips curving. “She gets tired and cranky like anyone else, but she really is happy little girl. Just like her mother was.”
Sometimes she spoke of her cousin lightly, but other times it was like this. With that weight.
“I never met her when she was happy,” he found himself saying, though he could not have said why. “I only knew her when she was impaired.”
