Page 15 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

And she kept right on lying to herself as she set off,absolutely notlooking for him at all.

CHAPTER FOUR

TIAGODIDNOTcome to the house in Portugal as much as he had as a child, when he had spent a great many school holidays here with his grandmother. And then, after both she and his mother were gone, his father had switched off and on between this estate and the Villela land in Spain so he would be familiar with them both.

Yet these days he spent more time in London than anywhere else, so he could be closer to the office.

But he still knew every single sound that the old house could possibly make. The rattle of the breeze against the windows. The rustle of the trees outside. The way the wind moved in the courtyard that a fanciful person might imagine was an old woman, still murmuring to the flowers she’d loved to tend.

Not that Tiago allowed himself any such flights of fancy.

On this late November night, Tiago had repaired to the office that had once belonged to his grandfather and still smelled faintly of cigars and port. He sat in the old leather armchair where the old man had napped away his later years and found himself brooding in the general direction of his grandfather’s bookcase. It was packed tight with well-worn volumes of books that Tiago had been fascinated with when he was young. He’d thought the world of his grandfather. And he’d imagined that all he needed to do was read this particular selection of books and he would somehow find himself the same sort of man.

It was as close as he allowed himself to get to the memories of his grandparents he’d buried long ago, then packed down tight beneath the cool practicality that he’d been expected to embody. The composure that they had prized far above any leftover sentimentality that, these days, lived on only in the flowers out there in the courtyard.

Flowers he told himself he barely noticed some years.

But he had read all the books in this study, years ago now, and still the manhewas had ignored every single lesson he’d ever been taught.

In so doing, he had failed to adequately protect both Lillie—and he still couldn’t get enough of thinking that name, heractual namewhen she had been nameless in his head for far too long—and his own family legacy. The very thing he had sworn to protect, always.

Now she was pregnant with his child, his heir. The future of his family was hanging in the balance. There were things he needed to do, and soon, in the wake of the knowledge she’d dropped on him today. There was no time forbrooding.

But all he could think about was the night they’d shared in Spain. About the things that they could do stretched out across a bed, with nothing but their bodies moving together in the dark.

The things their bodies called out in each other, God help him.

He knew better than this. Those flowers remained not as a love letter to a grandmother long gone, but to remind him of what it had been like to give himself over to his jangling, discordant grief. He had sobbed, out in that courtyard in the rain, and his parents had left him there.

They had decamped to Spain for the rest of that season, leaving him to sort himself out—or, Leonor had told him with her usual serene demeanor despite the unusual gleam in her gaze, they would wash their hands of him.

And he had been just a boy. He had barely been able to process the loss of his favorite person, how could he lose his parents, too?

He had taught himself how to...put those things away.

To hide them as if they did not, could not, exist.

Until sometimes he believed they never had.

And thus tonight all he could do—all he would allow himself to do—was stay where he was, frowning across the room at a bookcase that had been carefully filled by a far better man, listening to the sounds of the old house as the hour grew late around him.

He could hear the wind outside, coming in from the sea. There were the usual sounds of the old house settling into another night, the groundskeeper doing his rounds in his rattly old jeep, the staff opening and closing doors in the distance.

And yet when he heard footfalls in the hall outside the study, he told himself he was imagining it. At first.

Or he wanted to be imagining it, because no staff member moved like that. He knew that without question. They all moved swiftly and almost entirely silently. Not those meandering, hesitating steps down the length of the hall that led to this office, where everyone here knew he did not like to be disturbed.

Everyone except his guest, that was.

His guest. His Lillie.

Tiago still could not understand how this was happening. Not the mechanics. He remembered those all too well, and happily.

But he had never felt such things before. Even before today, she had consumed his thoughts and he hadfelt things. It was an outrage.

He had told himself for months now that was all a function of the fact that he could not have her. That if she’d been there in front of him, he would have been as disinterested as he normally was after enjoying a woman. He would have politely disengaged and never thought of her again.

At the moment, Tiago could barely imagine maintaining a polite veneer in front of Lillie, much lessdisengagingwith her. Hell, he’d brought her here, to the one place on earth he considered some kind of sanctuary, where no one who was family or someone hired by the family had set foot in ages.