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The very idea was absurd.
And Geraldine clearly agreed, as she only rolled her eyes at him.
Lionel felt his mouth curve. “Many women in your position throw themselves into charity work. That is always an avenue that you could choose.”
“It’s not that I’m opposed to charity,” she said after considering it a moment, worrying a stick she’d picked up with her fingers. “That seems so removed, doesn’t it? I feel certain that if you or anyone else wants to hand out their money, they will. I’m not sure that I could even discuss such impossibly large sums without laughing.”
“Not an ideal tactic in fundraising,” Lionel agreed.
But later, when they had a dinner with his grandmother in the private dining salon she used only for family, theilustrísimaseñora waved two bejeweled hands. “I have been looking for someone I can trust to catalog the Asensio collection,” she pronounced as if she had called Geraldine here to the estate for this purpose. “I was beginning to think it would never happen in my lifetime.”
“You have a collection?” Geraldine asked, a note in her voice that he had never heard before. When he had heard it before, it had been in the voices of certain men when they discussed race cars. And in the voices of some women when they looked at jewelry. “As in, an actualcollection, not simply an attic full of sentiment?”
“I am not sentimental,” the old woman told her with a sniff. “I am disarmingly shrewd. Ask anyone.”
“This is true,” Lionel said when his grandmother lifted a brow in his direction. “It has been repeatedly confirmed throughout all the halls of Europe.”
And so after dinner, Doña Eugenia herself led them to the grand library that claimed an entire wing of the old, rambling house.
“These are merely all the books that are considered readable,” his grandmother said, turning in a circle as she looked up at the floor-to-ceiling shelves, all packed tight. Beside her, Geraldine actually quivered with delight. Lionel knew it when he saw it. “We do not have attics, but we do have any number of outbuildings filled with documents, a great many objects of historical interest, and, of course, any number of books. In all kinds of different languages, last I checked.”
And Lionel watched as his wife tried her best not to twirl around herself, possibly letting out a squeal or two.
“It’s like Christmas,” Geraldine told him later. “My second favorite holiday, but the best one as far as gifts are concerned.”
She had a look on her lovely face that he had taken as a challenge, then. And he spent several hours showing her that he, too, could give her the kind of joy she had gotten from the very existence of piles of books. That he could provide whatever she craved.
But he was beginning to wonder if he was the one whose cravings were undoing him.
He had been gone for several days on his latest business trip—about which he remembered only that he’d caught the scent of her, coconut and papaya, on a crowded city street on the other side of the planet—when he walked into his house to find that it smelled like a feast.
“There you are,” she said brightly when he found her in the semiformal dining room. She clapped her hands together, a lot like Jules did. Then she held them out over the table, which it took him long moments to realize held any number of dishes. “I have been in collusion with the kitchen and they prepared a proper Thanksgiving dinner for us.” When he only stared at her, she tilted her head to one side. “You went to school in the States. I know you must have an idea of what Thanksgiving is.”
“Of course I do,” Lionel said gruffly. But he did not tell her that his memories of that North American holiday were some of his favorites. That he had loved the convivial notion of the holiday that was simply about gathering together and sharing a meal, something he dearly missed when he was not in Spain.
“Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday,” Geraldine told him, as if she was sharing a secret.
Lionel sat with her, and the baby, who both laughed too much. That was the trouble. There was all thesmiling. Even the baby gurgled happily when he looked at her, as if she knew him.
As if you really are her father, something in him suggested.
And he already knew, didn’t he, that the notion didn’t horrify him as it should have. As he wanted it to.
As he told himself it would have if it weren’t for Geraldine, who had gone to the trouble of making it clear she thought about him too much when he was gone. Who indicated, again and again, that she not only listened to the things he told her, she took them into account. Sheconsideredhim.
Over and over again, she made it clear that he mattered to her.
Him.Lionel, the man.
Not the businessman, the billionaire, the heir to the Asensio wealth and power.
He told himself he was tired, that was all, or too full after their American feast, but he knew that it was more than that. Because he was getting too comfortable here. This was all entirely too comfortable. It would be easier if he could convince himself that she had set this whole thing up from the start. That this was all a game she was playing. That she was only pretending...
But he knew better.
He knew innocence when he tasted it. And Geraldine was the worst actress he’d ever encountered. There were some women who could pull off a fake like that, but she wasn’t one of them. She never would be one of them.
That was the trouble with her in a nutshell.
