Page 41 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas
He hated himself for laying it all out so baldly, so rudely, but this was reality, wasn’t it? And he was tired deep into his bones of being the only one who seemed to be even remotely aware of it.
“The sad truth is that the only thing we have in common is a troubling physical connection that in and of itself should have excluded you from consideration in the first place,” he said, forcing himself to finish this when he should have had this very conversation that day in London. Before he’d found that memories of her were pale imitations of the real thing. “It is nothing but the wildest, most unhinged folly to imagine that we will ever find common ground. This Christmas scene you have created only underscores these facts.”
“I don’t know what makes you think that just because you have all the money in the world you get to control your heart, Tiago,” Lillie said softly. “No one else can.”
“I can,” he threw back at her. He felt something raw surge inside of him, sharp-edged and engulfing, like desperation. But he was a Villela. And Villelas did not dorawordesperate. They did not. “I have to, Lillie. This is not a negotiation.”
“Fair enough,” she said. “That’s quite a list. It’s no wonder you don’t have a queue wrapping round the place.”
And then, far from bursting into tears, running off, or any of the responses he might have expected from her, she only shrugged.
As if...she didn’t care?
Why did that make all those raw places in him...worse?
But in the next moment she made it even more precarious by smiling. And not that bright, earnest, Christmas light of a smile she’d aimed at him already tonight.
This smile he recognized.
Because he usually saw it when they were in bed, and she was astride him, rocking herself against him, hard, for the express purpose of tearing him into pieces.
It was that wicked. It was that knowing.
Keeping her eyes fastened to his, she reached down and took the edge of her dress in her fingers, then began to tug it up.
Tiago meant to tell her to stop. He meant to insist that she cease and desist right this very moment. But he couldn’t seem to get the words out of his mouth.
And so, as he stood there as if frozen into place by forces outside his control—which was exactly how everything had felt with this woman from the start—she pulled her dress over her head and tossed it aside.
Leaving him dry-mouthed and too taut, everywhere, at the discovery that she wore nothing at all beneath it.
Lillie was standing there wearing nothing at all but those bright red boots, that riot of curly dark blond hair, and their baby.
She looked ripe and perfect.
And he might not have cared much for Christmas, but there was no denying that the way the lights danced over her skin was a kind of blessing. She looked rosy, bright.
Lit from within.
Tiago couldn’t seem to do anything but stand there, as incapable of movement as if someone had come and struck him on the head, and then she made it worse by smiling at him all over again because she was wicked to the core.
Because she had been a sorceress from the start.
“I meant what I said,” he managed to get out.
“And I heard you.” But that smile only deepened, and there was pure fire in the blue of her siren’s eyes. “Pity you can’t resist me, isn’t it?”
CHAPTER TEN
LILLIEHADNEVERseen a man...break apart while standing still.
And she never would have imagined that Tiago could—that he would allow that loss of control.
But as she stood there, wearing nothing but her boots and the conviction she carried deep in her bones that she knew what was happening here even if he didn’t, she watched him...crumble.
A look very much like anguish made his face twist. And for a moment she thought she’d miscalculated and made a terrible mistake. That this was something else entirely from what she’d assumed it was—
But even as that thought formed in her head, he was moving toward her. He was reaching out with those clever hands of his and that anguished look in his blue-green eyes turned instead to a storm she knew well.