Page 1 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas
CHAPTER ONE
LILLIEMERTONALMOSTmissed the fateful newscast entirely.
She’d been faffing about in the kitchen of the shared house she’d lived in since university, washing the usual mess of dishes left in the sink no matter how many times she asked her housemates to tidy up after themselves, cleaning the surfaces because no one else could manage it—apparently—and fixing herself a bit of beans on toast as if that might take away the deep chill of a November in Aberdeen, Scotland. And once her meal was ready, she hadn’t intended to go and eat it in the shared lounge, because the reality was that she hadn’t been the least bit comfortable with her housemates since her pregnancy had started to show.
There had been house meetings without her and then house meetings with her, but in the end, everyone had agreed. Regretfully, or so they claimed, but the house was comprised of merry singletons. They were all much younger than Lillie, who had moved in here with her best mates from uni and had watched each and every one of them move out again as the years passed. To better jobs elsewhere, partners, marriages, madcap adventures abroad, and so on. Only Lillie remained, the decrepit thirty-year-old spinster who the newer housemates increasingly viewed as the de facto house mother.
Or had done until it was clear she wasactuallygoing to be a mother.
It was decided that the house was for young professionals who worked hard by day and liked a bit of a laugh by night. It was certainly no place for a baby. That was the verdict that had been delivered to her at the last house meeting with great solemnity, as if Lillie hadn’t personally accepted each and every one of them into the house in the first place since hers was the name that had been on the lease the longest.
It wasn’t as if she’d imagined she’d stay here in a house share with a wee bairn, thank you very much. She had as little desire to bung a cot and a changing table into her tiny bedroom as they did for her to parade an infant about through one of their Friday night drinking sessions before they went out to the city center bars and clubs. The same drinking sessions she always ended up cleaning up after even thoughshehadn’t drunk herself legless in ages.
But no one liked to betoldto leave, did they? Much less given an eviction date, and not very subtle threats that she would be chucked out if she didn’t vacate on time—mostly because the ringleader of the younger set was dead set on havingherbest mate move in at the new year.
Needless to say, relationships had cooled all around.
Lillie was no longer cooking family-style meals for the lot of them or providing endless cups of tea and a sympathetic ear as needed. She rather thought they all regretted it. She’d seen more than one of the housemates mooning about, making big eyes in her direction while she—by far the best cook in the house, not that it was a distinction to be unduly proud of with this lot—made herself food for one and left them to their ready meals and boil-in-the-bag curries.
True, she was lonelier than she cared to admit, but at least she knew it was only going to be that way for a few more months. Then she would have a child to care for. She liked to tell herself living in this house with all these grown children was excellent preparation.
But that didn’t make sitting in her bedroom and worrying over her fast-approaching future feel any better.
She didn’t know why she stopped in the door of the lounge with her plate in hand, all that being the case. Shemeantto go straight on back to her room while it was still hers and settle in to watch videos on her mobile, while having a bit of the usual fret about her options.
Because she had options. It was just that Lillie wasn’t sure she could face moving home with her parents in their quiet village. Lovely as they were, it had always been hard to live in the shadow of their grand, life-long love story—and she expected it would be doubly hard now that she’d gone and made it clearshewould not be enjoying the same great passion as a single mum. She knew there was an extra room with her name on it in her cousin’s place down in Glasgow, but she was trying to get her head around what it might be like not only to live with her very particular cousin Catriona, but what her child’s life would be like under such a regime. In Glasgow, which was, according to everyone, including Lillie, far more metropolitan than home. Catriona called weekly to remind her the room was on offer, with babysitting on tap, and Lillie had always adored her persnickety cousin. That wasn’t the issue. The issue was that this wasn’t quite how Lillie had seen her life going.
Shouldn’t have gone and gotten yourself upthe duff then, auld lassie, she told herself stoutly.
And by that point she’d accidentally roamed far enough into the lounge that she could see the news program playing on the telly. Her housemate Martin fancied himself a man of the world when he was all of two and twenty, and his primary way of showing this was watching a bit of news every evening when no one else bothered.
Maybe later she would think about the series of tiny events and happenstance that led her to be standing there—beans and toast in hand, a little bit flushed of cheek from both the heat of the kitchen and her own enduring indignation at her ungrateful housemates—at the precise right moment to see the next segment as it began. A little bit of chatter from the anchor, and then there he was.
And even though he was on the screen of the communal telly in the same old house in Aberdeen where Lillie had lived for some eight years now, not even in person, it was the same as it had been five months ago in Spain.
She felt...transfixed. Rooted straight to the spot, but not by concrete or the like. It was as if electricity coursed through her, connecting her to the ground below, the sky above, and yet centering like one ongoing lightning strike inside her.
Lillie forgot to breathe. She forgot to do anything at all but stare—though at least this time he wasn’t watching her do it.
There was only fresh-faced Martin as witness, turning around from his place on the sofa to frown at her.
“Why are you lurking about?” he asked crossly, because he had always been fond of Lillie and was covering his embarrassment at her visible pregnancy with bluster. It didn’t help that she knewwhy. It was still a lot of blustering. “You know it does my head in to have people stood about behind me.”
As if the path from the front hall to the kitchen wasn’t directly behind the sofa he liked to sit in.
“Wouldn’t want to do your head in, Martin,” Lillie had the presence of mind to reply, dryly enough so that she felt slightly less despairing of herself when she turned and left the room with no explanation.
She had no memory of moving through the house, hefting her pregnant bulk up the narrow stairs to her room and then locking herself in. So that she could stand there, back to the door, for far too long. Panting less from the exertion than her emotional response toseeing himafter all this time.
When she had given up on the notion that she might ever see him again.
And then, plunking her little plate down on her desk and then forgetting all about it, she snatched up her mobile to look up the name she’d seen flashed across the screen.
Tiago Villela.
She might have stopped to think. She might have paused tobreathe, even, but she didn’t have that option because typing his name auto-populated her screen without her even having to hit the search button.
It was like herbonesshifted inside her. And everything else along with them.