Page 3 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

“You’re not really the sort, are you?” she’d asked pityingly, as if Lillie was making up stories. “It’s horrible to think of it.”

“Then perhaps don’t strain yourself thinking about it,” Lillie had replied, half laughing at theaffrontof it all from this girl whose hair she’d held back while she was sick after too many Saturday nights out to count. “If it’s sohorrible. Heaven forfend.”

But she alone knew that her desire to be a mother had nothing to do with the spinsterhood that seemed top of mind to all and sundry. It was that it washisbaby.

That they had made the child together on the most magical night of Lillie’s life.

And once she understood that there would be no locating him, as if he been some kind of phantom she’d made up as the last, best part of her Spanish daydream, the baby she carried became that much more precious to her.

Because it was all she had left of him. All she would ever have.

She hoarded the truth to her like the treasure it was.

What did it matter to her if everyone thought she’d gone and got paralytic one night abroad to end up this way? Or that she’d forgone the notion of finding a man entirely and had visited a doctor’s office to get herself pregnant, something her younger housemates clearly thought was shameful. She knew better.

Oh, how she knew better.

And when she was alone, she liked to go over the facts of that night. One moment after the next, committing each and every one of them to memory. Because every single second she’d spent with that man was like spun gold, each moment its own bright coin, and all of it was hers now to do with what she liked.

Mine,she thought, with a protective hand over her swollen belly.

“Mine and yours,” she said out loud to the bairn within, because this was where she could be honest about Spain. Here in the safety of her room, though, she’d be giving even that up soon for the false smiles and forced laughter about her supposed behavior at her parents’ or her cousin’s.

Though she knew she was lucky to have choices, and hated neither one of them, she still wanted to hold on tothesemoments as long as she could. When it was just her and her memories and the baby they’d made tucked up safe and sound inside her. Healthy as could be, according to the doctor.

The truth was, Lillie had never made it to the bar that night because the moment she’d laid eyes onhim, alcohol would have been superfluous at best.

He had been far more intoxicating, even at a glance.

And this was the truth that she could never tell a soul. Because no one would believe her. They would think her a sad cow, at best. They would imagine she was telling tales to preserve her pride, or some such thing. She could see it in her mind’s eye, the way they would pity her. And it wasn’t that she would have minded that too much, really, because she wasn’t so dim that she didn’t realize that far too many people in her life already pitied her.

It was more that what had happened that night felt sacred.

Because it was as simple and as complicated as this: she had looked up, and he had been there before her. There had been one split second before he saw her, when she had very nearly formed the dazed sort of thought that he wasastonishing—

That rumpled, too-long dark hair. Those eyes, not green and yet not blue, like a sea too pretty to name. Thatfaceof his, an angel gone dark, with the fierce blade of a nose like some kind of ancient gladiator, God help her—

But then he had clapped his startled gaze to hers and it was as if everything that followed had been inevitable.

More than that,magical.

Lillie could no more have stopped it than she could flown over the moon with her own two arms as wings, and anyway, she didn’t regret a bit of it.

She’d almost rather that everyone she knew dismissed the whole thing as a drunken shag with some stranger, as tawdry and shameful and uncharacteristic as they could imagine. Better that than attempt to explain to them the unvarnished truth.

The weight of what had flared there between them had been almost too much to bear.

It still felt like that now.

Too much.

Too big.

Too intense.

It had exploded in that single glance, so suddenly, that she knew without a shred of doubt that both of their lives had changed forever in that moment. And more, that both of them had known that, right then, in the same flashing instant.

As if the world was divided intobeforeandafter.