Page 10 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas
And once he vanquished thispullshe exerted on him, he would be himself again. Perfectly capable of what was necessary.
That was what he wanted. Not those haunting memories that kept him up in the night, dreaming of things that could never be.
He did not touch her, but he turned so that he could face her, there in the back of the car. “It must have been difficult to get used to this notion that you are to become a mother, I imagine.”
“There was a bit of denial at first,” she agreed, with that astonishing frankness that he hadn’t the slightest idea what to do with. “But I’ve come round.”
He was not sure that he had ever seen anything quite as remarkable as this woman who he thought he’d lost forever smiling at him the way she did then, her hands folded gently over the mound of the child she carried.
His child.
His child.
But that, too, was neither here nor there.
“All I ask is that you allow me the chance tocome roundto it as well.”
She inclined her head then, as if she was royalty. He should have found her gauche and presumptuous, he who had squired princesses on his arm. But he did not.
He really did not.
“You have a fair few more months,” she said, her eyes gleaming. “I expect you’ll catch up.”
He wanted to laugh, but he was not that sort of man, so he frowned instead. The very soul of the exacting Villela code of conduct that his parents had modeled for him from the start. He was just as happy neither one of them was here now to see how he’d fallen short.
“I will need this time to get to know you as well, Lillie,” he told her. Reprovingly. “As something more than a bit of pleasure.” And he knew, when he saw the flash of emotion in her gaze, that she didn’t like to call what had happened between them something so dismissive. And more, that he had called it that for precisely this reason. “For you are now the mother of the Villela heir, like it or not. And both of us will have to come to terms with that.”
CHAPTER THREE
LILLIEHADNEVERbeen to Portugal before.
But then, Lillie had never really beenanywherebefore, not really, aside from London that one time. She’d otherwise remained in Scotland for the most part, with only the occasional trip down to Whitby with her parents to spend a few cold summer beach days in that holiday caravan park they liked so well.
Her trip to Spain had been the start of a glorious new internationaljet-setkind of a life. That was what she’d told herself all the way home, still sunburnt and buzzing and half-wild from her night with Tiago. Spain was thebeginning, she’d told herself as the plane landed in drizzly, bleak Aberdeen. The future was going to feel just as magic as that long, lush night had done.
She’d meant it. She really had. But thus far her glorious jet-setting had been confined to daydreams and bright, happy travel documentaries. Then she’d discovered she was pregnant and such things seemed even more out of reach than they’d been before. Because all it took was one positive pregnancy test to start thinking a lot more seriously about the reality of...well, everything. Such as the things she’d put off thinking about for ages, like why she was still living in a house better suited to new university graduates. Or what she really and truly wanted to do with her life, which she was pretty sure wasn’t making PowerPoint presentations.
The trouble was, all of that felt like a fight and Lillie had never been much for fighting. That seemed part and parcel of the sort of passion her parents enjoyed, but had missedherlittle life entirely.
Sometimes she even told herself that a small, comfortable life was a virtue.
But nothing about this day was small or comfortable.
And Lillie was not at all prepared to be swept out of Tiago’s car on a rainy, blustery tarmac somewhere outside of London, then ushered up the steps to the private jet that waited there like it was the most ordinary thing in the world when it certainly was no such thing.
It was all she could do not to gape about her like the overset, overawed country lass she most assuredly was.
And it had not been a long flight, but it had certainly been eye-opening.
Just like his office, the plane was a pageant of gleaming marble mixed in with the liberal application of rich, dark woods and lashings of plush, inviting leather besides. There werecoucheslittered about the place like it was a high-class lounge in the sort of desperately posh and unaffordable flats Lillie only looked at in magazines. And in case anyone was feeling peckish there was a full cream tea service with plate after plate of clever little sandwiches cutjust so, airy crumpets with pots of butter and jam, and scones drowning in clotted cream that tasted of dreams come true.
Lillie had three, just to be certain.
It was all a far cry indeed from the tiny packet of overly dry pretzels she’d had to pay for on her desperately uncomfortable flights to and from Spain and down from Aberdeen this morning. Bargain airfare, after all, was about efficiency, not comfort.
Tiago’s jet was nicer than any home Lillie had lived in.
It was nicer than any home she’d everbeen in, for that matter.