Page 40 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

“Inappropriate?”

He had expected her to flinch at that, and hated himself that he wanted this to happen, but it couldn’t be helped. Surely the truth was what was important here. It needed to be said at last, and he had never before worried about being the one unafraid to voice even the most unpleasant of truths.

Though it didn’t seem as if she’d truly heard him, because all she did was raise a careless sort of brow.

“I went to a meeting in Spain and it somehow ended up ruining my life,” he continued, darker and harsher. “I don’t know how it happened.”

“Don’t you?” She sounded...bland. Much too bland. “I remember exactly how it happened. And I’m not sure I believe that you can’t.”

“Never in my life have I taken leave of my senses the way I did that night.” He shook his head as if it was a horror, the memories that came at him. When the only horror was that those memories claimed as much of him as they did. Even now, when he should have had his fill of her by now. He should have moved on and he hadn’t. He couldn’t. He didn’t understand why. “All this time later, I still can’t make the slightest bit of sense of it.”

“It’s a terrible mystery,” she said, as if she was agreeing.

But the way she folded her arms above her round belly indicated that she was not agreeing with him at all.

“I have spent my entire life being raised for one thing,” he told her, perhaps too intensely. “My destiny has never been in doubt. There is no argument to be had, no wiggle room. I was brought into this world to carry on my family’s legacy and to uphold to the best of my ability all the duties and responsibilities that are part of that.” When she started to open her mouth, he shook his head to stop her. “Part of what has always been expected of me is an excellent marriage. It was expected—demanded—that I would find an heiress to an exceptional line. A woman of spotless lineage, whose family legacy would complement my own.”

“It sounds a bit like you’re discussing breeding a horse.”

“Because, in a way, I am.” He knew he was not making his case in the cool, considered manner he preferred. But he needed her to understand him, at last. He more than needed it. He thought that if she didn’t, he would have to begin to consider unthinkable options. Like the divorces Villelas did not indulge in.

Because they didn’t have to, he understood now. Because none of his ancestors had made such a terrible choice in a wife.

“You’re comparing this to horse breeding?” she asked, but that laugh of hers raked over him as if she had taken a razor to his skin.

“We do not come from the same place,” he said, severely. “That is simply a statement of fact. It was never my intention to marry for any reason at all save the perpetuation of my family line. From the time I was very young, I knew full well that I was never to allow chemistry or emotion to be my guide. And do you not see why? Do you not see the trouble we are already in?”

“If we’re in trouble,” she said, and he didn’t like the way she was looking at him. Too carefully, to his mind. As if she was trying to figure out how best tomanagehim. As if herequired management. “And I’m not saying that I think we are. But Tiago—if we are, don’t you think that has rather more to do with the fact that you can’t seem to decide who you are?”

She could not have said anything to offend him more. To strike more deeply into the places he held most sacred inside him.

For a moment he felt winded.

But then a kind of storm rushed in, a fury all its own. “I know exactly who I am. There has never been a moment I drew breath where I was not keenly aware of mypreciseposition in this world.”

“In the world, perhaps. But not in this house.” And she pressed her lips together for a moment, though he couldn’t have said if it was to keep words in or simply because her frustration was that great.Herfrustration. “You are one man when the sun goes down, Tiago. Raw. Passionate. A man who smiles and sometimes even laughs. Most of all you’re fully present. And then, every morning, the sun rises and that man disappears. And in his place is a creature of stone and distance, like some kind of gargoyle.”

“You have that backward,” he grated out, too far gone even to take offense at being compared to hideous statues. “This gargoyle you speak of? He is who I really am. It is the other man who is the aberration. And it will stop now. I should never have let this happen in the first place.”

“But you did let it happen.” She took a step toward him, shimmering red and green and her hair curling wildly around her head. “You let it happen, when, as you have been at great pains to tell me, you have been the master of the universe, or at leastyouruniverse, since the day you were born. Surely the fact that you did not stop it the way you said you were going to—that you, in fact, clearly enjoy our nights together as much as I do—suggests that you’ve got this wrong.”

“The only thing I have gotten wrong,” he told her, his voice like steel slicing through wood, “is in imagining that I could take such a lump of clay and fashion it into a proper Villela wife. It is a Herculean task and it turns out, even I am no demigod after all.”

She blinked at that, but once more, she didn’t quail.

Instead, Lillie raised her chin again, and the sheer bravery of that gesture made something in him...howl. Despite his efforts to shut it down, it kept on and on, like too much grief to bear.

“I may not be the perfectly sourced work of art you were expecting to marry,” she said after a moment in a voice he couldn’t read, her gaze darker than before. “But who wants to live out their lives with an actual oil painting? I prefer a real, live, often deeply flawed person.”

“I’m not trying to insult you,” he growled at her, though thatdeeply flawedcut at him. “I am only taking heed of the unchangeable facts of the situation.”

“You mean...that I’m pregnant with your child? Or that you’re the one who insisted on marrying me in the first place?”

He slashed his hand through the air and focused on the facts. Because if anything could save him, it was facts. Facts did not roar and carry on inside him. Facts did not drape lights everywhere and talk ofbeing present. Facts were cold and unemotional, just as he was supposed to be.

“You have no lineage worth mentioning,” he pointed out, as if ticking off items on that list he’d mentioned long ago. “You have no fortune—in fact, I believe you have precious little money at all. Nor were you a properly raised, untouched virgin when we met, raised to give herself over to her husband and his bloodline for all eternity.”

“You, of course, were as pure as the driven snow.” She said that dryly. And again, he couldn’t see any hint of hurt, or awareness, or any of the things he would have expected her to feel. She looked neither wounded nor shamed nor remotely impressed with her own unsuitability.