Page 4 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

Here in her bedroom, she replayed it in her mind the way she always did, as if it were new. As if it were happening all over again.

“Who are you?” he’d demanded, coming to her side and looking at her with an impassioned sort ofvividnessthat had shaken her. She could feel it inside her now, as much a part of her as her own blood. Even then, when it was new, it had feltright. That he should frown down at her as if she was an apparition. As if he had found something he hadn’t known he had been searching for. And as he came to stand before her, his closeness had felt like a gift.

Because he was there at last and though she had only seen him for the first time a moment ago, she felt as if he was still not close enough when she had waitedforeverfor him.

“Who areyou?” she had asked in return.

But neither one of them had answered that question.

They’d stood there, frozen in place, while people moved all around them. They stood there, rapt and amazed, breathing the same air that smelled of flowers and sweet salt.

Together at last,Lillie had thought, though that made no sense.

Lillie had known even then that she would never be able to explain the thing that bloomed between them, that feeling that her whole life had led her to this moment where they finally clapped eyes on each other. As if it had all been preordained. As if they’d been born for this, to find each other and hold on tight.

If she’d been swept up by the breeze itself and lost high above in the Spanish skies, forever, she would not have been at all surprised.

And in a way, that was precisely what had happened.

They didn’t speak. They didn’t laugh and get to know each other, flirt and dance and take part in the usual rituals of such evenings, according to every book she’d ever read and television show she’d ever watched. All of that would have made sense.

But nothing about that man made any sense.

It had been as if they had both been struck by the same lightning and had to stand there at the side of the pool in that resort, staring at each other in wonder, fascination, and a kind of panic, as they each tried to make sense of the way they burned.

Lillie could have stood there for lifetimes on end. It was possible she did, but didn’t notice, because all she could see was him.

Until finally he had reached over, as if he did not quite trust his own hand, and had fit it gently to her cheek.

And then they’d both made the same sort of sound, a kind of sharp inhalation, and yet another bolt of that same electricity had shot through them both.

“I think,” he said quietly, that voice of his dark and deep and tinged with flavors she could not identify, “we should take this somewhere private,benzinho. Yes?”

“Yes,” Lillie had breathed.

And she had said that again and again and again that night.Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

And now, lying on her bed, she felt a great sob work its way through her, though it wasn’t quite grief. Or a darker sort of joy. It wasn’t even sorrow. It was all of those things and none of them, because she knew his name now.

She knew his name.

The next day at work, she put together the latest presentation so that Patricia could take charge of her noon meeting with her usual ferocious competence that made the men she managed call herthe dragon lady, not quite behind her back.

And while Patricia held court in the boardroom, Lillie did a bit of a deep dive on Tiago Villela.

Last night it had been enough to look at pictures of him, confirm that she had not been drunk on sangria, and get a general sense of the man. That he was no pool boy. He was powerful. He was enormously, almost absurdly wealthy. She had believed those things on the night, but as time passed and he had been unidentifiable, she’d tried to convince herself that she’d made it all up.

If anything, she had underestimated exactly how wealthy and powerful he really was.

But she wasn’t interested in his net worth. She was far more interested in his location.

Because, she told herself piously, he deserved to know that he had a child on the way.

It had nothing at all to do with the fact that she wanted—desperately—to see him again.

Or so she tried to convince herself as she sat at her desk, pretending to be thinking only of her unborn child.