Page 38 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

“It’s a Christmas grotto,” came Lillie’s voice, full of that deep amusement that still drove him mad. Maybe even more so today. “Isn’t it magical?”

“A ‘Christmas grotto’?” he repeated, as if she’d cast aspersions on his family name with that term. In truth, it felt as if she had done more than that.

“More properly, it would be Santa’s grotto.” She said that as if she hadn’t heard his tone. As if she couldn’t see—with her very own eyes that were as blue as the sky and never before the slightest bit blind—how he stood here before her, clearly in no way transported by these shenanigans.

He ordered himself to keep that steadily growing sense of unease at bay. That growing unwieldiness that seemed to make the very ground beneath his feet buckle and shift when he knew full well that everything on these lands had been built to withstand the march of generations.

But he also took the opportunity to take a good, hard look at his wife.

The wife of Tiago Villela, mother of the future Villela heir, was dressed in bright red and green as if she imagined herself a holiday elf. Instead of what she actually was—one of the wealthiest women in the world.

He made a mental note to restrict both colors from her wardrobe in future.

The dress she wore looked like velvet and was therefore completely inappropriate for the Portuguese climate, even on a night like tonight when the weather was relatively cool. As if that was not enough, she wore a pair of knee-high boots in an overbright red leather. He supposed the heels on those boots added length to her already well-formed legs, and no doubt to her height as well. He estimated that would put her red-slicked mouth in a fascinating place before his, but he could only imagine it because she was not standing before him.

She waslounging. On what looked like one of those ghastly peppermint candy canes that were festooned about everywhere Christmas was not contained, when the rational part of his mind understood that she had simply transformed a settee with red and white fabric.

Tiago was opposed to holidays of any sort and liked Christmas least of all, because it had once been his grandmother’s favorite. He didn’t like to think about how much she had loved it, and how he had, too, while she’d been alive. It was far better to simply hate it, ignore it, and move on. But it was hard not to think that he might as well rethink his historic dislike of the season if the packaging was like this. Making his ripe, lovely wife look like a Christmas sweet herself.

She had made the whole of this part of the long, wide patio into a Christmas scene, lifted from a climate far north of here. All those evergreens festooned with lights. Some kind of cottony fluff strewn about to replicate snow. Tiago had never personally experienced such a Christmas, but he had seen it. Like everyone else alive, he had been subjected to cold-weather Christmas images the whole of his life.

But tonight it was simply one step too far.

“This is unacceptable,” he told her grimly.

Lillie shifted position on her candy-striped settee, but only slightly. As she did, the dress moved and he found himself distracted by the way the hemline rose, showing him the creamy expanse of one thigh.

He gritted his teeth.

“Merry Christmas Eve to you, too,” she said, sounding lazy and merry at once.

“First of all,” he said, not sure why he felt half-drunk when he hadn’t touched alcohol. Not tonight. Though he thought a shot or two of the hard stuff would not go amiss as he faced down this outrageous temptation. “You are in Portugal. Everything you’ve done to this house seems to suggest that you are confused. Geographically.”

“What I am,” Lillie replied, a quiet note in her voice that was at odds with all the surrounding commotion, “is married to a man who does not communicate with me. If you are opposed to Christmas, you should have said so.”

He did not like the way she said that.Opposed to Christmas.As ifhewas the issue here. “I’m not opposed to Christmas. What I am opposed to is my family’s ancestral home being turned upside down with all these tawdry and tasteless decorations.”

“Why don’t you like Christmas?” she asked, calmly, as if he hadn’t just questioned her taste, the infernal woman.

“I don’t like Christmas or dislike Christmas,” he told her impatiently, though he was aware this was not as true as it could have been. Still, it was what he wished to believe. What he’d long assured himself he believed. “I never believed in fat men in red suits tallying up my misdeeds to see whether or not I might receive a gift. My parents held the typicalconsoadaon Christmas Eve, as is tradition. We went to church because that’s what one does. On Christmas we ate turkey, lamb, and goat when I was small. But after my grandmother died, the rest of us merely ignored the holiday entirely. She was the one who insisted on a proper Christmas meal. We were just as happy to forgo that once she was gone.”

He wasn’t sure what he expected after that simple statement of fact, but it wasn’t the way Lillie looked at him then, her blue eyes suddenly too bright for his liking. “Tiago. That’s terribly sad. You do know that, don’t you?”

That massivethinginside him shifted again, making him doubt he could trust himself to stand and he could not allow that. He would not.

“I understand that you have an emotional connection to the holiday,” he said stiffly. “But that does not mean everyone must. Perhaps I should have foreseen that you would react in this way, as you are so far away from your home and no doubt experiencing a great many physical and—”

But he stopped when Lillie laughed. In that airy, entertaining manner that he wished he hated. That would make it easier. He ought to find her embarrassing, surely, but he didn’t. That was the trouble. She was like clear, sweet air and he wanted to inhale her and—

Focus,he ordered himself.

“If you’re about to comment on my hormones, there’s no need. I’ve always loved Christmas. I’ve always decorated for it, too.” She shifted on the settee, somehow drawing that hem up even higher, yet stillbarelypreserving any shred of modesty, and he felt himself come perilously close to breaking out in a sweat. He rather thought she knew it. “And for all the lessons you seem determined that I should take on board, here’s one for you. It’s only a few decorations. Perhaps on a grand scale to match the house we’re in. But Tiago. I promise you that it’s not going to hurt you any to ignore them, if you must.”

And she stayed where she was,loungingat him and too delectable by half, and how was he supposed to handle her when she was so outside the boundaries of everything he knew, everything he’d been taught?

Tiago didn’t know what to do with her. That was the trouble.

He gazed down at her, and as ever, there were too many warring impulses fighting for purchase inside him.