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And then watched as Lionel stood and began to pace, which made her heart beat much more rapidly inside her.
Because this was Lionel Asensio. Cool, calm, controlled.
And he seemed to be precisely none of those things just now.
“I cannot have this,” he seethed at her, sounding nothing like that stern man of stone she had first met in that Italian chapel. “It was enough that everything was so pleasant. Too pleasant, I grant you. But why couldn’t you have left well enough alone?”
“Because I love you.”
“You don’t.”
But Geraldine only smiled.
He made that growling noise again. “You must leave, of course. I have many properties and I’m sure we can find one that will suit you. There’s a town house in Manhattan. We can tell myabuelitathat you wished most fervently to be back in your country.”
He scowled when all Geraldine did was shake her head. “I wish no such thing. And she will not believe it anyway. She knows how excited I am to dig into her collection.”
“You will stay in Manhattan,” he gritted out at her. “Until whatever sickness this is passes.”
But something about that made her...almost giddy, she found.
“I’m not sick,” she said cheerfully. “In fact, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt better.”
“I should have made this clear.” It was almost as if he was talking to himself then, pacing back and forth before the bank of windows with the cold fall morning stretching before him. “It is my fault that I failed to do so.”
Geraldine sat up straighter then. She let the covers fall from her, since the fire warmed the room nicely. And then considered herself something close enough to virtuous that she did not smirk at all when his jaw tightened and his dark eyes glittered at the sight of her breasts.
“A long time ago, I had to make a choice,” he rasped at her, gravelly and grim. “As we have discussed, my father and his father were wastes of human space. If they were here they would argue with that and say that they simplyfollowed their feelingswherever those feelings took them. No matter how dark, how depraved. I made certain that I could never do the same.”
“How did you make certain of it?” she asked, careful to keep her voice mild.
Inside, there was that giddiness, but there was something else—and she knew it, now.
It was the way she wanted to be near him, always.
It was the fact that she trusted him, implicitly.
He was the person she most wanted to see when she opened her eyes and the last person she liked to see before she went to sleep. She liked knowing that he was beside her in that enormous bed, wrapped all around her.
She liked his heat. His passion. His intensity in all its forms.
She loved his heart, even though he didn’t think he had one.
She loved him.
It was that simple. It was the whole universe. It was her heart, and she was his.
“I am not capable of feeling the kinds of things you want me to feel,” he threw at her.
And Geraldine felt too many things at once. A deep sadness for him that he believed this about himself. A kind of wonder that he did not understand that he was already turned inside out, or he would not have thundered at her the way he did.
And beneath all of that, tangled into it, that same wild, wondrous love that had made these weeks glow.
Even if she had wanted to take it back, she wouldn’t. She couldn’t.
“I don’t recall asking you to feel anything for me,” she said softly.
And strangely enough, she thought of her cousin. She thought of the ways Seanna had told her again and again that she had tried so hard to love the various men she become entangled with.I always thought it wouldn’t matter if they loved me back, she had told Geraldine long ago.That I could love them enough until they did.
