Page 12 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas
“Thank you.” Lillie smiled wider, that soaring feeling getting even more intense when she did. “That’s vindicating.”
The steep walls gave way, opening up over views of tidy vineyards and whitewashed buildings with red-tiled roofs. At first she thought they’d come to some kind of village. Then she realized that no, all the buildings had the same crest on their walls. The crest she’d seen behind Tiago in the news program, and all over his offices. This must all be his.
She felt something inside her shift, hard, as she stared out at the sun and the vineyards and the trees in the distance. How far did it go, this land of his? Was it possible he truly owned...everything?
Lillie couldn’t quite get her head around it.
They were back to the narrow lane with high walls again, rounding a tight curve that had her closing her eyes for fear they’d crash head-on into oncoming traffic—but when there was no screeching of brakes or the like, she opened up her eyes again.
The SUV shot out of the shadows into another dazzling bit of light, and that was when the house came into view.
Once again, she had no idea how she managed to keep her jaw from dropping.
Because it wasn’t a properhouseat all. It wasn’t a tidy semidetached in a quiet village like the one she’d grown up in. It wasn’t Catriona’s flat on the top floor of a converted row of terraces. It wasn’t even one of those tarted-up houses out in Bielside, where all the flash oil and gas men lived and various royal personages were said to have once visited.
The place went on and on, terraces and balconies, pools and gardens, all arranged around a magnificent multileveled home that commanded the hillside it stood upon and looked out at the surrounding area like a conquering hero. It was like a private palace, and Tiago wasn’t even looking at it. He wasn’t sat there, poised for her reaction—that was how commonplace it all was to him, she realized.
This was when it began to really hit home how wealthy the man really was.
“How did you find this place?” she asked, because it was that or succumb to the wild buzzing in her ears. And because it sounded like the right sort of thing to ask.
Appropriately neutral, she thought.
He looked at her, too much blue and green. “Portugal?”
Lillie could hear from that carefully blank undercurrent in his voice that it was a stupid question after all. But all she did was gaze back at him, as if daring him to say so.
And she thought she saw the hint of a smile move over his face, after a moment or two, when there’d been very little of that since she’d tracked him down. But it was only a flash, so quick she wasn’t sure that it was real. It was far more likely that shewantedto see him smile and that she’d made it up because it made her feel better to think he might.
That he might be as captivated with her now as he’d been that night.
Don’t be foolish,she lectured herself.This is about the baby, not you.
And if she was a decent person and had the faintest hope of being a good mother, she wouldn’t need it to be about anything more than that, would she?
“My mother’s family are Portuguese,” he was saying, once again in that careful, deliberate way of his. As if words were a precious resource and he intended to cultivate each and every one of them. “This land has been in her family some generations. The Villelas, as perhaps you know, maintain our ancestral presence in Spain.”
“Fascinating,” Lillie said, wrinkling up her nose. “The Mertons have maintained our ancestral presence in Scotland as well, though the thatched huts of us peasants don’t stand up to the test of time nearly as well as ye olde family pile.”
And once again, he looked startled. As if she’d surprised him.
But not, she thought after a moment, in abadway. Necessarily.
Because once again, she thought she saw the hint of a smile on that marvelously rock-hard jaw of his. And it was clear to her that she was becoming a little too enamored of that. By this notion that she could actually burrow down beneath his skin in some way.Disrupthim, even.
Hadn’t that been what had happened that night? She wouldn’t have put it into those words. She hadn’t. But that was what he had said himself in that hotel room in Spain. Again and again.What have you done to me? What sort of sorceress are you?
She’d thought it no more than a bit of flowery language—or anyway, she’d told herself it was, in retrospect. While ordering herself to forget about him.
But now she had to wonder if this man really went about living out his life with no one to tease him a bit. She thought that was sad. Lillie was fully aware that she’d let her own life get a bit sad, these last few years. It was just that she hadn’t felt that overarching need to change things the way all her friends had, one after the next. She hadn’t felt pulled to anything the way they had.
That was what happened when a person was raised in the shadow of a great love story. It made all else pale in comparison. Lillie had been conditioned to seek out her passions—but she hadn’t exactly tripped over loads of passions lying about in the course of her life, had she?
While they’d all lived in the house, everything had been a grand old laugh, and that had seemed quite grand enough, for a time. Even now, though the lot of them were rarely able to get together as a group any longer, any time she visited one or the other of them it was always the same. The old jokes, the endless laughter, the sheer delight in poking at each other. It was one of the things that made life worth living, as far she could tell, whether there were passions aplenty or not.
Yet unless she was mistaken, it was all new to Tiago.
Because apparently the personal palace and endless vineyards andprivate jetsweren’t quite the laugh they seemed from afar.