Page 24 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

Then they must not have much of a sense of their families,she had said.But that will never be your fate,meu filho.

Tonight, he questioned—not for the first time since he had brought Lillie home with him—what precisely he was thinking. He had spent the day in London, as he did often. It would have been easy enough to stay there, but then, it was not precisely a hardship to fly back to Portugal in the evening. He told himself that he was getting used to this routine, because he intended to be a presence in his child’s life. He already knew how important that was.

But every time he thought about all the things he needed to put into place to raise a son or daughter the way he had been raised, he seemed to forget that Lillie was always a wildcard.

She wasn’t even in her cups, as anyone else he knew would have had to be to carry on in such an indelicate manner, asking such impolitic questions.

By now he understood that this was simply Lillie.

“I beg your pardon,” he said coolly. “I don’t know what makes you think that I, Tiago Villela, would ever be so indiscriminate.”

“Yes, what could possibly make me think that?” And in case he missed that she was being facetious, she let out that laugh of hers again. Speaking of indelicate things that he should probably attempt to curb, her laugh was a marvel of a thing. Husky and filled with light and merriment. There was something almost bawdy about it, and he told himself that it was more evidence that she was completely inappropriate in every possible way.

And yet, inappropriate or not, she was his wife.

“Is this your way of telling me that you have had many such nights yourself?” he asked, and was then appalled at himself. Men of gentility and breeding did not ask such questions. And he, personally, did not wish to know the answer. And more, did not wish to examine why he wished to protect himself from that knowledge.

“Certainly not.” She wasn’t looking at him. She was tucking into the local delicacies before her, with her usual deep and obvious relish for every bite. The spicyfranga da guia, andjavali, the wild boar that his people hunted on his own lands. And his favorite,conquilhas à algarvia, a mess of clams and garlic and coriander, cooked with savory Portuguese sausage and fried onions. He had not realized until Lillie how many meals he’d sat through with women who did not like food. Or feared it. Women who had elaborate rituals and a great many rules.

Lillie simply ate her fill, and it was one of the most sensual things he had ever beheld.

“No?” he asked, perhaps too intently as he studied her. As if that might show him the fingerprints of her history all over her skin, little as he wished to see it.

She smiled at him in that guileless way she had that he could not understand. She was as free with a laugh as she was with a smile, and he couldn’t make any sense of it. Tiago told himself he resented it, but that did not explain the hunger he felt for her, for her very presence, for the delight he took in what she would do or say next—

No, he corrected himself.Delightwas not the right word.Dismaywas much better. He wasdismayedby her, obviously, because she was completely different from the sort of polished wife his parents had wanted for him.

The sort he had wanted for himself—someday far in the future.

Now he had to do his best to makeherappropriate, because it was that or fight off this terribledelightthat made him imagine he could be a different man. The kind of man he had been taught so clearly he could never, ever become.

Villelas were called to be better than that.

He had beaten back everything in him that was different to make sure he not only heeded that call, but exemplified it.

It did not matter if he liked it. This was who he was.

But she was talking in that artless, appealing way of hers. “It might shock you to learn that I did not, in fact, indulge myself with a stable of European love interests to sustain me through the long Scottish winters.”

“That resort has a reputation,” he found himself saying, without meaning to. As if, in her presence, he was no longer the careful and considered man he was everywhere else. He could not account for it. “It is well known for fostering romantic interactions amongst the clientele.”

“That would explain why my supervisor has always loved it so much,” Lillie said. “She’s told me many a time that she quite likes a drink and a shag of an evening.” Her smile only deepened when she saw the frozen, appalled expression he could feel like a mask on his face. “I like to tell folks that I’m a bit of an acquired taste. By which I mean, I’ve always been cursed with standards.”

“Standards are not a curse.”

“Many of my housemates would disagree.” Lillie picked up her glass and swirled the sparkling water she preferred at dinner around in it, her smile dimming—but only slightly. “I had a boyfriend my first two years of uni. He betrayed me, I’m afraid, and quite shockingly. There were scenes. It was ugly.”

Once again, Tiago felt frozen, but for a much different reason. “What does that mean?”

“I caught him in the act,” Lillie said simply, and while she wasn’t smiling as she had before, she did not look devastated by the story she was telling. Was it time, he wondered? Had it dulled the sting? Or was it that it had been less devastating than dramatic even then? He couldn’t know, but he could feel himself...thaw, slightly. “It was quite a palaver. I will admit that I was torn up at howpublicit all was for ages. Even though I knew thatof courseI was better off without the sort of person who would do such a thing, it took a long while for that to really sink in. And when it did, I found I was much less interested in being chatted up, or really having anything to do with a bloke on the pull. And then, somehow, years passed, and I didn’t mind, but then I met a mysterious man who was not a pool boy in a Spanish resort.”

She reached out and plucked up a plump shrimp from the platter that sat between them. With her fingers, which should have appalled him. He told himself that it did. That everything about her appalled him because it should have but instead, he found he was watching the way she popped the shrimp in her mouth, her lips closing over her own fingers—

He needed to stop.

“I’m sure your dating history is much more sophisticated and elegant,” Lillie said. “Princesses and debutantes and endless galas, one can only assume.”

“I have dated,” he said, carefully. Even thoughshelooked perfectly cheerful, as if unaware that this was a minefield. Becausehecertainly had not wished to hear about the uni boyfriend. The one he now felt the distinct urge to seek out, so he might mete out some overdue justice on Lillie’s behalf. “But there is a very specific set of qualifications and attributes my future wife was meant to have, and I saw no need to get serious with anyone until I was ready to find the woman who exemplified that list.”