The Spaniard's Last-Minute Wife by Caitlin Crews

Author:Caitlin Crews
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2023-06-16T14:53:38+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

GERALDINE WOULD NEVER know how she managed to get those words out, when they weren’t at all what she wanted to say. They were what she should say, and so she had, but then she’d wished that somehow she could claw them back from where they hung in the air between them—

It was the look on Lionel’s face, she thought. It was that expression of his, as close to shock and betrayal as she imagined a man like him ever got.

There was only an instant of it. Just that one little instant—but then he stepped away, his dark gaze shuttering.

And when he looked at her again, it was as if he had never touched her at all.

She told herself that was a good thing.

Especially when she woke up, late again, to find her mother being ushered into her bedroom with the baby in her arms.

The baby. Her baby. Her Jules. Geraldine was up before she knew it, crossing the floor of the bedchamber so she could take the laughing, cooing child into her arms. Then cover her sweet, beloved, damp little face with kisses.

“Geraldine Gertrude,” her mother said in a voice so low and so appalled that it made Geraldine flinch. “What have you done?”

“What I must,” Geraldine replied over the baby’s head, seriously enough.

But it was only when she saw her mother’s gaze widen, then focus on the rumpled bed behind her that she understood what her mother thought was going on here.

“I didn’t sleep with the man we think is Jules’s father,” she said, with perhaps more righteous indignation than was strictly called for. Given she had kissed the man. And danced with him. And run from him two nights in a row, in one way or another. Still, she stood straighter and stared her mother straight in the eyes. “What do you take me for?”

“I don’t like any of this,” her mother said, which wasn’t really an answer. “These aren’t how regular people behave. All this gallivanting about from Italy to Spain on a lark. I don’t like it.”

“You used to tell me that life wasn’t worth living without a few adventures thrown in to spice it up,” Geraldine reminded her. “When did that change?”

Her mother blinked, and then, just for a moment, looked a little more like the woman who had always told her only daughter that the only limits she should ever set were the ones she chose, not ones that anyone else tried to press upon her.

“That was before,” Lorna Casey said quietly. Her mother held her gaze, a bit hard. “I couldn’t lose you the way we lost Seanna, Geraldine. I couldn’t cope.”

And hours later, Geraldine was still replaying that in her head.

It was long after the fleet of doctors came in, made the baby laugh, and ran their little tests. Her summons had come a mere quarter of an hour earlier in the form of her phalanx of stylists. They had all come whirling into the room, ignoring her mother and insisting that Geraldine get dressed according to their specifications.

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