Page 39 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

Did he want to go to her? Sprawl there beside her? Get his hands on that lush body of hers and put his mouth where he wanted it most?

Or did he think that it was far better to indulge only the reality of this, which was that he knew how their marriage ought to be run. He knew exactly what needed to be done to make certain that his family legacy was preserved.

He could not understand—and had not been able to understand, at all, since the moment he had laid eyes on this woman—why it was that she seemed to muddy waters he’d long believed were crystal clear, all the way down.

When he knew where that mud took him. Back to grieving in the dirt and cut off for his trouble.

Tiago had vowed he would never let him drown like that again.

“I think there are some things that need to be clarified between us,” he said, aware that his voice was harsh.

But even as his words hung there in the air, his staff began to flood in, bearing platter after platter and piling them high onto the table that waited on one side of the red and green and snowy seating area. The table, too, was gleaming with gold and silvers, bright glossy reds and exuberant greens.

Lillie rose to her feet for the food, clapping her hands together before her like a child. Except she was no child, he recognized. She was unbearably earnest, and she had never been taught to hide her enthusiasm for any reason, and there was nothing in the whole of him, his entire personality and experience, that had the slightest idea what to do with that.

Or with her.

As he had demonstrated since she’d walked into his office in London.

Though he found he liked the idea that she was even less guarded than she’d been then. That she’d been honest, but wary. And he wasn’t sure he knew exactly when she’d decided to be this open, this gloriously transparent.

Only that it had happened here, with him.

And that he had come to hunger for it.

“I worked with the kitchens on the menu,” Lillie told him, clearly delighted with all of this. “It’s a proper Scottish Christmas dinner. Roast turkey and all the trimmings. Cranachan, clootie dumpling, Dundee cake, and proper mince pies for sweets. We have Christmas carols playing, fake snow on the ground, and finally, a little Christmas cheer round here.”

She smiled at the servants as they passed her on their way out of the little evergreen cave she’d made them, then turned that meltingly bright smile on him, so vivid that it outdid all the lights she’d strung up.

And she made him ache, that was the thing. She pierced him straight through the heart, when he had gone out of his way to make sure that organ held no sway over him. Ever.

Because the only purpose of the heart, as far as he could tell, was to hurt.

Tiago had no time for such things.

He let the heel of his palm press against the offending spot on his chest, hard, and then he glowered at the woman who had caused this in the first place. With all that infernalbrightness. Those blue eyes that would be the undoing of any man. And that laughter that he worried would haunt him through the rest of his days.

“I don’t want any of this,” he said, his voice so dark that there was a part of him that was shocked it didn’t put out all her twinkling lights.

Her smile dimmed as she straightened where she stood. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“If I wanted a British Christmas, I would go back to London. I don’t need it foisted upon me here.”

He thought she looked at him too long, then. And he was afraid she saw too much.

As she had from the beginning.

“But you see, I will need my child not only to be fluent in your languages and able to eat with the proper utensils when called, but to be familiar with the things that are important to me, too,” she said. “I think that’s what making a family is all about, isn’t it?”

And there was something about how calm she sounded that only pricked at him more. Because why should she be calm? Howdaredshe? Tiago was known for his glacial composure and unshakeable calm with everyone on the planet, save her.

Why should he be the one to feel as if the earth was shaking beneath him when she looked as if she could stand just as she was, forever?

That ungainly thing inside him seemed to grow with every breath, crowding out everything else. Making him wonder if he had never really known the true contours of who he was at all.

And that, too, he had to lay squarely at her feet.

“If I am permitted a moment of honesty, Lillie,” he growled out then, as dark and as harsh as he liked. “The unvarnished truth is that you are entirely inappropriate.”