Page 45 of A Billion-Dollar Heir For Christmas

She could see it in him, in the way his hair was disheveled for the first time since she’d met him, his eyes so dark, and his chest like a bellows.

Lillie didn’t think she was in any better state.

He stared back at her, once again looking as if she’d delivered him a mortal wound. He took a step back. And another, and stopped only when it looked as if he might crash straight into a Christmas tree.

“Tiago...” she whispered.

“No,benzinho,” he said, a gruff sound of anguish this time.“No.”

Then he turned and pushed his way through the trees, setting off in the direction of the vineyards. Out into that rolling, lovely land that stretched out from this house and reached to the sea. All of it his.

All of it a prison.

And Lillie wanted to run after him. She wanted tofight. She wanted todo something, whatever she could and however she could.

But she couldn’t make him love her if he didn’t.

Maybe, she thought, just maybe—she’d been horribly wrong about all of this from the start.

Lillie pulled her dress on over her head then. It fell into place and she pushed her curls back out of her face.

And there, surrounded by the bright glare of the Christmas lights while choirs sang softly of days merry and bright, she wrapped her arms around herself, and cried.

Because for the first time since she’d found out that she was pregnant with Tiago’s baby, Lillie felt truly alone.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

TIAGOSTAGGEREDFROMthe patio, down the stairs, and didn’t realize he had neglected to put his shoes on until his bare feet hit the earth.

He couldn’t remember the last time he had allowed himself to go barefoot, and certainly not here in the dirt. Not here on this land of his, of his family, that had defined him for the whole of his life—both here and in Spain, where the Villela stronghold was far less pastoral.

A true steward of the land would indulge in it more, he thought. And he had the sudden memory of his grandmother kneeling in her garden, looking at him with her wise green eyes.

Dirt is medicine and water is magic, and a wise man knows how to use them both in their time,meu dengo, she had told him.

He hadn’t permitted himself such memories since he was small. And tonight, he felt neither medicine nor magic. What he felt instead was the coldness of the earth beneath his feet. Not frozen, for this was still the south of Portugal. Not frigid or too hard.

But certainly it felt dark and cold here, so far away from the woman who smiled at him, pointed fingers at him, and wrecked him by asking him to do the one thing could not.

He could not. He would not.

Tiago started forward, his usually cool and rational brain whirling around in a haze.

It wasn’t only that he felt like a stranger to himself, loud and unruly and unsteady on his own feet, but now the world seemed to feel strange around him. When whatever else he had felt, he had always been certain that he belonged right where he was.

He accepted that it was possible, as only Lillie had ever dared say, that his parents might have been miserable people. But that hadn’t mattered, not when what they had in common was this.

The family. The legacy.

These lands and what they meant, throughout time.

He didn’t know how he was meant to lose that, too—that connection to history and the future that had sustained him all his life—and his first reaction was a bright-hot fury at Lillie for holding up a mirror he never wanted to look into.

Tiago, who had always prized his own steadiness, staggered on a while longer, but then stopped again. Because suddenly the cold dirt beneath his feet, the careless stars overhead—it all seemed futile.

Because where could he go?

If there was a place on this earth where Lillie would not haunt him, wouldn’t he have found it by now?